The argument of this paper is that many texts of the Western literary canon rather than being vehicles of establishment values are critical of these values. Teaching these texts allows educators to challenge the interests of those who hold power in society as well as conventional sexual morality and gender stereotypes. Many important works of…

Recent debates among scholars in Literature education have led to polarizing views about the aims of the subject. The debate reignites ancient quarrels about the aesthetic and political values of literary study and relatedly, the different pedagogical approaches to teaching. In the first part of this paper, I explore the aesthetic-political divide…

Shakespeare's "The Tempest" (1610-1611) is one of the controversial plays regarding whether to be placed in the purview of colonialism or anti-colonialism. The bard sketches two antithetical characters in the course of the play, Prospero and Caliban, who form the two extremes of the self against the other dichotomy. This study aims at…

Literary criticism nowadays is essentially crossing the boundaries of disciplinarity and canonicity where literary theory has increasingly been shaped by overlapping concepts and branching out of theories as well as whipping out the limitations imposed by theory itself. The post-conditions of contemporaneity have imposed a view of reading and…

The years of the Second World War (1939-1945), a period known as The Emergency in Ireland, were pivotal for the development of the nation. Immediately after the outburst of the war in the continent, the Fianna Fáil cabinet led by Éamon de Valera declared the state of emergency and adopted a neutrality policy. Brian O'Nolan (1911-1966), better…

Literary criticism of children's literature asserts a one-directional view of power with the adult writer constructing the child reader. Using "aetonormativity"-- adult perceptions of normality -- this paper explores what happens when children co-construct publishable fiction. Our analysis of drama and creative writing workshops shows…

Films of the "perestroika" period (1986-1991) related to school/university theme showed that: - the educational / upbringing process has lost the previous strict storylines and in many respects has lost its communist landmarks;--both school and university have acute problem areas (crisis, disappointment and fatigue, professional…

Baby Suggs's sermon in the clearing to formerly enslaved Black folx offers readers an important anecdote about living in the afterlife of white supremacy (Hartman, 2007; Sharpe, 2016). Baby Suggs seemed to understand that the priority for survival and emancipation was loving one's flesh in a world where "yonder they do not love your…

This paper seeks to investigate the sources of power in the discourse of an Arab-American writer, Etel Adnan's one act play, "Like a Christmas Tree." The play represents a heated argument between two figures who stand for two different ideologies and who fall within the frame of "binary opposition," transcultural…

This paper tries to look at Pomerance's "The Elephant Man," from a new perspective from which no critic has investigated the play, before. Applying postcolonial theory of Homi K. Bhabha to the play, the author scrutinizes how "mimicry strategy", employed by the colonizer and the Other, can be threatening for both and how the…

Mohsin Hamid is an exponent of postcolonial characterization and possesses a specific touch of today's hero in local Asian context. His pen is fluent on social fiction portraying Indo-Pak culture. Few writers could rise to the height of fame right with only a couple of preliminary works. Hamid secured it through his first novel "Moth…

This paper explores a creative interpretation of D. H. Lawrence's novel "St. Mawr." Throughout the centuries, and across cultures, the presence of a distinctive horse (or horses) in a literary text--and more recently in films -- results in what appears to be an unvarying outcome: the restoration of equilibrium and wholeness in situations…

Many have argued that English classrooms have an important role to play in supporting students' development of critical consciousness and civic engagement (Kirkland 406; Lyiscott 48). Recently, Monique Cherry-McDaniel called for English teachers to design "woke" learning opportunities that would support students' critical consciousness…

Despite ongoing and prolific critical scholarship arguing for the widening of the secondary language arts curriculum, many practicing teachers are required or encouraged to teach a curriculum dominated by canonical texts. This is often the case at schools with highly diverse students whose varied cultural and linguistic backgrounds have…

This study will try to read the stories of Sabahattin Ali, who has written various books in Turkish, within the context of Marxist literary aesthetics, assess the types and characters in the stories of Sabahattin Ali within that framework, and observe the social levels and the gaps between them based on the relationships between the two extreme…