Roland Barthes's "The Death of the Author" is a foundational text for scholars who are addressing questions of authorship and textual ownership in English studies and its neighboring disciplines. Barthes's essay is typically presented without significant attention to the circumstances and context surrounding its initial English…

The magazine of the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP) often relies on problematic rhetorics that privilege youth-centered ideals and create limited representations of older adults' literacy in digital times. These rhetorics rest on a metaphor of repair, which labels aging adults as primarily bodies in need of fixing or protection. In…

Tells how the traditional Anglo-American literary cannon has historically functioned as a paternal edifice, erected on a "plot" that has contained and maintained itself by either keeping women out or keeping them in secondary and dependent positions. Considers revision as a solution. (EL)

A rejoinder to Professor Wimsatt's essay (TE 202 166). (MB)

Discusses cultural birthright and social heritage or fate as metaphors too often taken literally and provides numerous instances, both general and specific, to support the thesis. (TO)

Describes a service learning course for which students participated in a seminar on literacy and an after-school tutoring program for children. Shows how undergraduate representations of literacy share common features with conversations among well-known writers (such as Walter Ong and David Olson) and also implicitly critique them. (TB)

This reprint of the author's essay is used as the focus of a symposium on the relationship between literature and the general culture. (Editor/MB)

The study of literature need not be bound by book or classroom, but may be enhanced by observing community activities first hand. (MM)

Argues for a revision of relativism in literary interpretation that supports, rather than undermines, efforts to explore the possibility of judgments of relative plausibility. Illustrates norms of interpretation and canons of evidence with examples drawn from interpretations of Shakespearean plays. Allays fears that any form of relativism…

Asserts that the problem of college instruction is how to put students in touch with a usable cultural past and how to help students attain an active relationship with their cultural present. Discusses the cultural role of canons and the definition of literary study. Explores the topics of grammar, dialectic, and rhetoric. (PRA)

A recounting of the author's experiences after becoming a gay activist at Kent State University. (JH)

Attempts to find exclusively Elizabethan solutions to the human problems in Shakespeare's plays often lead us to deny our own responses. (JH)

A discussion of the aesthetic of wonder" and its counter-aesthetic" generated in consumer capitalism." (Author/RD)

Discusses the "crisis in representation" experienced in the humanities since the 1960s. Considers the relationship of academic knowledge to political power in terms of an ongoing struggle for representation. Recognizes higher education as a leading agent in redistributing access to representation in the public sphere. (HB)