Abstract
In 1972, to complement the international education requirement at Goshen College, the English Department added International Literature to its course offerings. The course was deliberately titled to distinguish it from traditional courses in comparative or even literature, which seldom move beyond the classic masterpieces of the European tradition. Embracing a world wide literary terrain, however, immediately raised the crucial question of how best to bring both comprehensiveness and coherence to such an exotic, amorphous study. Should the course focus on a single writer? a national literature? a regional literature? a genre? an archetypal theme? past, recent, or even future Nobel Prize winners? Because the students preferred to study works from many parts of the world (thus ruling out the geographically limited alternatives), and because we wanted to attract students majoring in