Among the casualties of the rush to relativism is a central tenet of classical thought: that great works of literature are great in and of themselves and not because of the needs and values of their time. This "canon-based view," supply taken for granted by Johnson, Arnold, Pope, and Eliot, has long since been shown the door by views…

Beginning in the late 1990s the authors became convinced that their undergraduate psychology students needed classroom experiences that set the conditions for them to become more engaged with beauty. They recognized the intrinsic importance of beauty to human psychological development, beyond any utilitarian concerns. But they also believed that…

This article develops an understanding of Dewey's aesthetics by connecting it to a project that can be extracted from his overall pragmatist approach--orientational meliorism. As I will argue, Dewey emphasizes the effect that one's mental habits or orientations toward experience and activity has on the quality of one's experience. Orientational…

Narrative is said to be an important way that humans come to understand their world as it is and as it can be. If this is true, then literary narrative must possess significant value since it has historically and cross-culturally received much attention and appreciation. This study gives an account of the cognitive value of literature in terms of…

Given the increasing interest in musico-literary studies, I wish to examine some ways in which music can be used for pedagogical purposes in teaching literature. It has been widely recognized that music and poetry sprang from the common origin of chant or incantation. Throughout the ages, the sister arts sometimes went hand in hand and sometimes…

The use of art to inspire people with ideals is discussed. (CK)

The use of art to inspire people to ideals is discussed. (CK)

The author, an English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) teacher, believes that for stories to be a successful tool in classroom instruction, they need to have universal themes, and they must deal with situations that the students could readily identify with regardless of their language, culture, or religion. In this article, she introduces the unknown…

This essay addresses the dilemma faced by literature teachers, whose discipline is based on a subject that itself is widely regarded as lacking any stable identity. The essay proposes that the terms "literature" and "art" can best be understood if we combine an essentialist approach to aesthetic experience with a historicizing approach to the…

Presented is an overview of two types of inquiry which may be used in literature study: inquiry concerning the formal, rhetorical, and semantic features of the text and inquiry generated by the individual's response to the work. The effects of these strategies on students' higher-order cognition are considered. (Author/SJL)

Students are apt to encounter many "plotless" stories--those of Chekhov, Kafka, or Merwin, for example--that the phenomenon of the plotless story must be reckoned with by any teacher. Author attempted to describe how to deal both with the plotted story and the poltless one, to make the transition from one to the other and explain the difference…

Discussed literature, a barometer for the humanities, and the basic drift of aesthetic theory. (Author/RK)