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…

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…

In this classroom study, the authors examine the use of popular psychology myths as a frame for literary analysis in high school English. The study reflects a cultural studies approach to teaching that attends to students' cultural awareness in interpreting what they read. Previous research has demonstrated that students' cultural awareness, in…

This essay illustrates the application of reception study, the subfield of literary history that emphasises the historical experiences of readers, to pedagogical contexts by investigating the teaching of F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby" (1925) in American high schools during the 1980s. Focusing on the episode in which Jay Gatsby…

Many Critics believe that Henry James has set the definitive standards of modern fiction writing. Undoubtedly his groundbreaking article "The Art of Fiction," which published for the first time in 1884, has a major contribution in developing the theories of fiction writing. The term Organic Unity has derived from a major Formalist…

"The Call of the Wild" and "White Fang" both are masterpieces of Jack London. The protagonists Buck and White Fang are the incarnation of Jack himself to some extent for the two novels reveal a great deal of the writer. This essay aims at psychoanalyzing Jack London's creative process, the Oedipus complex and the confliction…

Although most of the writing in high school English Language Arts (ELA) classrooms is about literature and although there have been incessant calls for changing the practices of teaching and learning literature, only meager amounts of research have been conducted in these interrelated domains of the field. Accordingly, this dissertation seeks to…

As young people today are flooded with information from a multitude of sources, they must be prepared to perceive the potentially oppressive and nefarious nature of many texts. Critical literacy is a theory and strategy that allows young people, along with people of all ages, to achieve just this; however, teachers often experience difficulties…

The aim of this article is twofold. Against the traditional interpretation of "the conscience of Huckleberry Finn" (for which Jonathan Bennett's article with this title is the locus classicus) as a conflict between conscience and sympathy, I propose a new interpretation of Huck's inner conflict, in terms of Huck's mastery of (the) moral language…

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…

The location of tension in the text of "A Streetcar Named Desire" is accomplished by close readings of traditional sources, particularly notes on Kazan's "Production"; Williams' thoughts on his script and Kazan's "Production"; and Williams' personal relationships. By logical twists the analysis supports, in this case,…

Focuses on the imagery, the inserted anecdotes, and the bildungsroman" nature of the novel in discussing its dark dimension." (RD)

Cane...represents the apotheosis of one man's attempt to bear witness to the reality and the power of an idea . . . that the Negro is not an apprentice to equality but a journeyman in suffering." (Author)

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)