Views on ‘World Literature': Cultural transfer and translation in the context of an Online International Exchange (OIE) project – A case study of China, the Netherlands and Sweden

This chapter discusses an international collaborative learning project as a vehicle
for exploring matters important for the future of the philological disciplines, matters where it is important that learned societies should be able to recognize and support the scholarly collaborations required. In this respect, it is work that illustrates FILLM’s role in enabling communication and cooperation between learned societies, in the very applied terms of a specific learning and teaching intervention.
Digital tools and methods are becoming more widely used for scholarly
research and education in the arts, humanities and social sciences. Digital tools
facilitate communication between people all over the world. It is impossible to
imagine contemporary life without the computer. Video conferences, Skype conversations, e-mail and e-learning platforms, to name a few, are also widely used in the education practices of today. To what extent, however, are we taking into consideration the different cultures in the intercultural classroom? Can we learn from each other, even if we do not live in the same culture? When we are discussing academic topics such as world literature, do we speak the same language even when we use English, the late-modern lingua franca?
As an example, we present here the outcomes of an Online International
Exchange (OIE) project about world literature, genres, cultural transfer and
(non)translations. The project could serve as an example of how learned societies can benefit from new social media and the internet in intercultural education and
communication. The project included Chinese, Dutch and Swedish teachers and
students.