In this article, the author focuses on the possibilities--and the limits--of undergraduate courses on the literature of poverty. He describes an undergraduate course he has taught on U.S. literature about poverty, but he also expresses doubt that such courses can help produce major social change. He argues that something about the literature of…

2009 is the bicentennial of Abraham Lincoln's birth. Naturally, historians are thrilled. But what about their discipline? Why and how might Lincoln matter to English studies? In this article, the authors reflect on Lincoln and his influence on English studies. They argue that Lincoln has played or can play an important role in the college English…

In her audio essay for the the National Public Radio's series "This I Believe," Iranian-American author and professor Azar Nafisi celebrates the affective power of empathy. In the essay, Nafisi refers to actual people in Darfur, Afghanistan, Iraq, Algeria, Rwanda, and North Korea, but she turns to classic nineteenth-century American novel to…

Author Sue Monk Kidd, who is white, employs stereotypes of African Americans and problematically appropriates features of black writing in her novel "The Secret Life of Bees." Nevertheless, this book is worth teaching, not only because it has acquired much cultural capital but also because it offers students a way to examine relationships between…

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…

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)

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)

Contends that arguments against New Criticism should place the movement in historical context. Suggests that historians of American criticism rethink the institutionalization of New Criticism as the work of both liberal intellectuals and pragmatic neoconservatives for whom both traditional liberalism and right-wing ideology were part of the…

Argues that American literature courses need stories about surviving within American civilization. Asserts that critical analyses should identify American themes and characters who survive the "civilizing" experience in ways that grow out of a female tradition, but are symbolic enough to embody American traditions. (RAE)

A paper presented at Workshop on Literary Sexual Stereotypes at annual convention of Modern Language Association of America (New York, December 27, 1970). (Editor)

Claims that Tom is a character eminently suited to the multiplicity and subjectivity arguments of reader response criticism (RRC), that meaning is a relation between an author, a text, and a reader, not an object, as New Criticism held, and not a procedure, as RRC assumes. (RAE)

A critical analysis of Joseph Heller's "Catch-22" and of the doctrine of Absurdism. (DD)

An essay which grew out of a paper presented at Forum on the Status of Women in the Profession at annual convention of Modern Language Association of America (New York, December 27, 1970). (Editor)

Analyzes the "deconstructive" literary criticism of J. Hillis Miller and the opposition between it and other schools of criticism. (DD)