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…

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…

Born in England, to Bengali parents, and raised in America, Jhumpa Lahiri (1967) has been variously labeled as Indian-American, post-modern, post-colonial, and Indian writer. Naming Lahiri has been a long and intricate process. However, the identity she chooses for herself is something different. She wants herself to be simply recognized as an…

Rooted in examples from their own and others' classrooms, the authors offer discipline-specific practices for implementing antiracist literature instruction in White-dominant schools. Each chapter explores a key dimension of antiracist literature teaching and learning, including designing literature-based units that emphasize racial literacy,…

As a college literature teacher, the goal of the author is to enable students to create their own meaning from their encounter with a text, respecting the text's sources, limits, contexts, and possibilities as well as their own. Fostering this creative response is among the greatest challenges and rewards of the profession. While teaching EN102:…

In Cameroon, popular belief associates American literature with its country's economic and political greatness. Yet, if millions of Cameroonians show a growing enthusiasm for a visit to the US, just a few are interested in learning its literature. Using theories on the reading and teaching of literature, statistical data based on a questionnaire,…

Curious about the connections between the author's students' reading tastes and those of 19th-century readers, the author read Nina Baym's excellent text "Novels, Readers, and Reviewers: Responses to Fiction in Antebellum America" to gain a sense of how readers in the 1800s might have thought about the texts that they read. Nineteenth-century…

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…

In this paper, an application of one aspect of the Internet technology, namely Internet groups, into the teaching of American and British literatures is evaluated by means of a content analysis of the Internet group which was used as the course component. The aim of this paper was to see how students used the Internet group in the learning of…

The Social Science Research Network, an online clearinghouse popular among social scientists, has created a Humanities Research Network (HRN) that is similar. To begin with, the new network will cover three areas--philosophy, classics, and English and American literature--broken down into detailed subcategories. More disciplines will be added in…

Describes the Russian reader's interests in contemporary American literature. (MM)

Argues that enjoyment rather than instruction should be the basis for a critical evaluation of literature and that only a class-structuredsociety perceives a need to rank literature in a hierarchal order from high art to popular art. (RB)

In addition to such writers as William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, Carson McCullers, and Eudora Welty, a good course in modern Southern fiction should include black writers such as Zora Hurston, Nella Larsen, Jean Toomer, Richard Wright, Maya Angelou, and Alice Walker. (MKM)

Considers three areas of recent American criticism of "Native Son." (JM)

This article discusses the author's experience of teaching Edgar Allan Poe as part of the American literature survey at Elmira College in Elmira, New York. While his specialty is Mark Twain, his students would be much happier if they could skip the colonial and national period, and move directly to studying Poe. In this article, the author…