Forced displacement has often involved the use of rhetoric, both by government institutions and by people who struggle not only to survive displacement, but also to resist it. In this article, the author offers first a theoretical framework that informs her thinking about displacement narratives. She briefly examines two published displacement…

Ayn Rand's novel "The Fountainhead" can be a useful text in an undergraduate English class, helping students think through issues of individualism. Rand's own concept of the self, however, ignores its social dimensions. (Contains 7 notes.)

Teaching postcolonial literature to American college students involves taking them through a dialectical process of thinking about identification. In the first stage, students are encouraged to note similarities between their own lives and those of the work's characters. With the second step, students examine how the work's cultural and historical…

The author explains how principles of cognitive science can help teachers of literature use texts as a means of increasing students' commitment to social justice. Applying these principles to a particular work, Uncle Tom's Cabin, he calls particular attention to the relationship between cognitive science and literary schemes for building reader…

Undergraduate literature courses tend to neglect American fiction of the 1930s, especially the proletarian novel. Disregard of this particular genre is often based on the assumption that it emphasized a crude Marxist realism opposed to aesthetic modernism. Various examples of the genre are, in fact, worth teaching, especially because they do not…

An analysis of novels within novels. (DD)

Contains "The Greatest Americanest Novel," a conglomerate of the first and last lines of a number of great American novels; provides a scorecard on which readers can attempt to identify the quotations. (DD)

Argues that Joseph Conrad's political novels belie the sweeping and vague rhetoric sometimes used to describe them. States that Conrad, disillusioned with materialism in his political novels, imagines that "industrialism and commercialism" may foster wars between democracies. Contends Conrad's interest is at least divided between a…

Analyzes Gertrude Stein's approach to detective fiction through her text, "Subject Cases: The Background of a Detective Story." Argues that Stein's lesbianism raises a fear of homosexuality repressed in detective fiction. Concludes that Stein's readers may prefer her word play and opaque plot lines to any premature resolution. (SG)

Reviews and explains Margaret Atwood's novel "The Handmaid's Tale." Argues that Atwood demonstrates that the right reading of her novel is within the novel itself. (MG)

Explores the ways in which Henry James' narrative use of euphemism in "The Golden Bowl" can offer new interpretive avenues for the novel itself, for literary texts in general, and for the teacher-critic's professional activity in the larger context of the academic institution. (RS)

Explores Toni Morrison's "Beloved," Leslie Marmon Silko's "Ceremony," and Marta Traba's "Mothers and Shadows." Identifies the novels as resistance tales that articulate minority perspectives. Points out that all three are dialogic and contain fundamental moments of captivity and liberation. Observes that, in each…

Discusses Willa Cather's novel "Lucy Gayheart," which provides the only public access to Cather's sense of connection to Virginia Woolf, a writer she admired. Uses Cather's "provocative" placement of Mrs. Ramsay as a way to re-frame thinking about this novel. Considers it as an experimental modernist novel. (PA)

Much of the current North American academic crisis of publishing, tenure, and promotion is both the cause and the effect of this fetishization dominant in the humanities: that of the grand narrative of knowledge-production, respectably bound with a spine. Short works will get one only so far, no matter how many of them one produces, or how well.…