This anthology collects essays by current and former lecturers at the Warren Wilson College (North Carolina) MFA Program for Writers. Some of the poets whose essays are included are: Joan Aleshire, Marianne Boruch, Carl Dennis, Stephen Dobyns, Reginald Gibbons, Louise Gluck, Allen Grossman, Robert Hass, Tony Hoagland, Heather McHugh, Gregory Orr,…

Studies support the hypothesis that images aroused by discreet verbal stimuli can be integrated into complex images with the result that: (a) storage capacity requirements are reduced, and (b) recall of one component of the image leads to effective redintegration of the rest. (JB)

Discusses the teaching of imagery as vocabulary enrichment to provide a basis for furthering creative thinking and literary appreciation in upper elementary and junior high school students. (Author/GB)

Emphasizes the necessity of teaching disadvantaged students to organize and classify material and to attend to detail. It presents methods of alerting students to these things and to constructions found in literary language. Intelligent, creative reading, not speed, is the ultimate goal. Bibliography. (RW)

Context-dependent metaphoric sentences of literally equivalent paraphrases were used as concluding statements for short didactic passages to investigate whether metaphors help or hinder prose comprehension. Adult participants' recall protocols indicated increased memorability for passages with metaphoric conclusions. (Author/LC)

The question of what constitutes a minimal appropriate context for understanding a metaphor is examined through the relative effectiveness of three types of contextual priming for metaphor comprehension. All three produced immediate and automatic metaphor comprehension. The use of context to disambiguate both literal and nonliteral speech messages…

Discusses the public's lack of appreciation for poetry. Gives examples of poems expressing irony and emotions. Argues that poetry's philosophy, mode, and tone of communication make it difficult. Considers poetry's subversive, exploratory, and entertaining aspects. Presents detailed analyses of four poems. (DMM)

Seventy-one university students completed the Fullerton Language Test for Adolescents--Subtest on Idioms. Of the 18-21-year-old group, 51 percent fell within the "Competence Range," while 84 percent of the 22-29-year-old group and 91 percent of the 30-year-old or over group fell within this range. (Author/JDD)

Proposes a theoretical model of organizing texts that uses four "master" tropes (metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony) as a conceptual framework to represent the processes of selecting, ordering, and placing words, ideas, and images into a text. Discusses possible practical application of tropical operations to nonfictional…

Four nine year olds with mild mental retardation received training on the meaning of idiomatic phrases. All children demonstrated learning and an ability to understand the learned idioms when presented in unfamiliar contexts. Children were able to generalize their receptive learning to an expressive task with varying levels of success. (Author/JDD)

Results of three experiments indicate that the developmental increase in memory span cannot be explained by differences in identification time or by the hypothesis that articulation time is the sole or major cause for the increase. It is argued that the development of memory span with age depends on a combination of factors. (BC)