ABSTRACT
Maria Karapetyan builds on critical studies of history education, textbooks, and their influence on the production and reproduction of nationalist and conflict discourses in educational settings in Armenia to examine how literature education is woven into the larger dominant discourses and narratives around Armenian identity and history. The author argues that while history is politicized in educational practices in Armenia, literature is historified and historicized, and together they reinforce the separation of the state-promoted narrative from alternative narratives. The chapter emphasizes that the state's vision for literature education in high school is to focus only on Armenian literature with a perennial and essentialist view of a perpetual and unchanging Armenian nation. The conclusions draw on constructivism and critical discourse analysis, and the author's examination of both several state documents that regulate the teaching and learning of literature in Armenian schools and examining high school textbooks for “Armenian Literature” for the “Humanities Stream.” The author identifies the lack of differentiation between history writing and historiography and the self-referential way the textbook systematically a sense of consensus between the authors that are selected for inclusion.
