Using Comparative Literature in the ELT Classroom: Underlining the Post-modern Sister Carrie in Some Girls: My Life in a Harem

Using comparative literature in the ELT classroom is a powerful tool to teach both the history of different cultures and to foster creative abilities. An example of such a comparative analysis is Theodore Dreiser's masterpiece Sister Carrie(1900) and Jillian Lauren's novel Some Girls: My Life in a Harem(2010). Through a comparative analysis, it can be ascertained that Dreiser's protagonist Caroline Meeber, Sister Carrie, symbolically intersects with Lauren's narrator. Like a post-modern Sister Carrie, Lauren's narrator underlines the historical, social, cultural and psychological forces behind becoming a woman through focusing on the binary opposition between ‘the real and the unreal.