Author and Presenter: Farzaneh Haratyan (Islamic Azad University, Garmsar Branch)

Infiltrating literature with its all different genres has so vigorously and eternally crept ‎into the EFL syllabus that burgeoning intercultural competence as its absolute by-‎product is unquestionably inevitable. The legendary Shakespeare is celebrated ‎worldwide. Literature appeals the diversity to meet the identical interests and ‎awareness. In other words, Literature invites people of every far-flung region to sit ‎around the table of amity and share their mind-sets and feelings to appreciate literature. ‎When this first step of understanding is formed, the second and the rest to roof would ‎be painless. Literature acts as an initiation platform to launch the UFO of unfathomable ‎intercultural competence along with linguistic, social, and psychological and discourse ‎competences. This implication that EFL is related to literature from the cultural ‎dimension dates back to the nineteenth century, and to the teaching of the classics.

Literature teaches you authentic ideas not erroneous preconceptions and stereotype ‎assumptions which are the cognitively organized knowledge about 'others'. Moreover, ‎studying literature as founded ages ago leads to the learning of diversity, cooperation, ‎sympathy, co-responsibility, mutual appreciation, openness, readiness to suspend ‎disbelief about other cultures and belief about one's own, along with the development ‎of the altruistic and idealistic motive and skills of interpreting, discovery and ‎interaction conducting to understanding, tolerance and identity consciousness as ‎prerequisites and values of intercultural competence to create a better world. To bring ‎sufficient verification to substantiate my research, the intercultural analysis of a ‎celebrated literary work to a class of Iranian EFL students will evidently confirm it.‎