Research has called for nuanced scholarly investigations that synergise, complicate, and advance social theories of literacy. Accordingly, this study melds critical literacy, critical race theory, and multiliteracies to distil students' involvement with the canonical "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn," investigating: What are…

This paper attempts to provide a new understanding of the gutter and how it is used to significant effect in Gene Luen Yang's, Boxers & Saints. This research draws upon the work of Scott McCloud to establish a framework for the theoretical applications of the gutter. Most prior research focuses on the gutter within the page. This article…

The effectiveness of distance learning primarily depends on the motivation and engagement of students. The aim of this article is to determine whether the developed online course enhances students' motivation to read and their engagement with contemporary American literature. The methodology is based on an experimental design. A mixed-methods…

Helping students recognize the value of humanistic inquiry can be challenging, especially in required courses. This essay presents a solution: an assignment in which students were asked to pitch one of the required readings to Netflix for adaptation. Through close readings of student responses and an analysis of the "so what" component…

In this article, the authors use the O. Henry story Transients in Arcadia to illustrate how readers can make a text more meaningful by connecting it to themselves, to other texts, and to the world. Transients in Arcadia is a celebrated ironic commentary about the desire of everyday men and women to experience wealth. The authors have leveraged…

Even as environmental scholars agree on the urgency of climate change, the crisis is less often linked to the US education system itself, which continues to operate as if we were not in the midst of a planetary emergency. As more environmental educators advocate for substantive change, little attention has been paid to how the study of literature…

The study and characterization of the literary uses of non-standard American English writing systems was once a topic of research central to the study of American literature. "Speech as Writing: Literary Dialect Orthography in the United States 1790-1930" argues that the emergence of new computational tools and theoretical insights…

Reading is one of the crucial aspects of the learning process. The learning efficiency depends on the motivation and involvement of students. The paper aims to determine whether the developed online course enhances student motivation and engagement in contemporary American literature. For this purpose, questionnaires were used. The sample…

This paper looks at the phenomenon of upward mobility through education from a comparative and historical perspective. Pierre Bourdieu referred to upwardly mobile individuals in France as the miraculous ("les miraculés"), oblates ("oblats"), or, less often, defectors ("transfuges"). A difficulty with applying a theory…

Literature in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) contexts is used for language development and intercultural understanding. However, the role of literature, specifically short stories (SSs), in shaping cultural representations of the U.S. in EFL teacher preparation programs (TPPs) remains unclear. This study examines how U.S. SSs in an English…

The authors of this paper argue that to promote multicultural education, multicultural literature can be a very useful tool. Since the ultimate goal of multicultural education is to achieve a more equal and more inclusive society, the literature of Southeast Asia, regarded as the true "minority" literature, should be seriously taken into…

Given the political and social fragmentation and incivility that currently exists in America, this paper examines existing scholarship on diversifying the American literary canon in order to increase cultural literacy and to encourage reflective and critical conversations about modern-day issues of social justice. A brief overview of pedagogical…

For many secondary-level teachers working with adolescent language learners, one of the motivations for choosing English teaching as a profession is a shared love of reading short stories. At its best, entering a narrative is a sensory experience: engaged readers see, hear, and feel the words of a story and imagine themselves within its pages.…