Uses examples from mass culture to show the relationship of the continuum theory and the gap theory to the connection between the censorship problem and the educational value of literary reading. (SR)

The stasis, stock, kinetic, spectator, and dialectic responses to literature all serve to deny the popular misconception that literary analysis invariably deals a death blow to the vitally engaged, spontaneous, and thus authentic response. Stasis is a response in which an intuited imaginative identity between subject and object develops in an…

Drawing from personal experiences of catharsis in the reading of literary works, presents a new and broader theory of reader response. Considers the classical distinctions that have been made about the nature of response, arguing that the disturbing trends in contemporary world events must set the context of current readings. (DMM)

The choice between the fusion of literature and life and a pedagogy of engagement, on the one hand, and the separation of literature and life and a pedagogy of detachment, on the other, is a painful one. Philosopher of education James Gribble would rather risk some form of aestheticism than allow that a great work of literature could be viewed in…

A literary communication model cannot adjudicate the conflicting claims of transformation and enculturation: that literature is intrinsically educational, that it conduces to psychic growth as a process, irrespective of subject matter and free from the dangers of indoctrination, but that the imperative to make it instrumental to political ends…

The humanist position for the teaching of values can be turned against English teachers and literature education when it is based primarily on the assumption that literature directly portrays life, a strategy which was used by a religious fundamentalist group, Renaissance Peterborough, in its dispute with officials of Peterborough County, Ontario,…