Critical Thinking Through Teaching World Modern Literature

Abstract

In this article I will attempt to evoke the hidden effect literature has upon students’ thought in educational studies.
Teaching World Literature to college students requires not only analytical reading and critical thinking, but also the faculty of
finding the right clues to this analysis. In teaching World Modern Literature, drama has not still gained its deserved space in
college literature courses in Albania. Thus, I found it very appropriate to pick up two major figures of this genre. The late of the
nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth are marked with a different flourishing of the literature in itself. New
thoughts and ideas made their way through the works of very famous writers, two of which I am intending to analyse in this
article. The founder of the modern drama, the outstanding Norweggian playwright Henrik Ibsen and his Irish successor, the
Noble Prize winner, George Bernard Shaw are the focus of my study in the analysis of two plays: Rosmersholm of Ibsen and
Arms and the Man of Shaw. These two representatives of the late 19th and early 20th century literature period have treated in
their plays the most peculiar social problems and have revolutionarized the human thought away of the drama’s Romantic hero.