This article considers ideological, pedagogical and constitutive functions of children's picture books, with particular emphasis on the ways in which texts construct children and childhood in economic terms. Through an analysis of Lauren Childs' "Hubert Horatio Bartle Bobton-Trent" and Anthony Browne's "Voices in the Park", the article…

Offering a poetics for myth in 20th century fiction, this book argues that the nature of myth is to inspire interpretation, that every myth carries with it an intertextual body of theories regarding its meaning and yet remains capable of evoking new meaning. The book further argues that myth, when used in fiction, functions like a language, with…

Black feminist novelists continue to take issue with males who try to theorize about their artistic creations. Male attitudes toward black women's novels have been characterized as either apathetic, chauvinistic, or paternalistic. Black feminist writers should heed the call for collective racial progress and collective theoretical progress. The…

The impulse toward comedy in the poetry of Canadian author Margaret Atwood occurs as a by-product of an interaction between scripted text and performing reader. Reading, then, may be profitably viewed as a rehearsal for both. In the classroom, this stylistic approach to Atwood's poetry can be emphasized over thematic analysis. In her poetry,…

David Bartholomae and Anthony Petrovsky's book "Ways of Reading" creates a paradox for readers, for a primary thesis of the book is that there should be no standard or traditional readings to which a new reader must conform. A successful reader will interrogate and dispute the text at every turn. The book's organization mirrors the…

The reading of a literary work can give rise to five different kinds of literary knowing: (1) knowing about self; (2) knowing about others; (3) knowing about texts; (4) knowing about contexts; and (5) knowing about processes of making meaning. A literary work can prompt a reader to reflect upon aspects of his or her own life. Concentrating upon…

A study examined whether the presence of certain news values, particularly those identified by Western journalists as important, affect reader interest in a news story. Timeliness, prominence, cultural proximity, and conflict, separate and in combination, were the four news values (independent variables) under study. The dependent variable, reader…

A three-stage lesson sequence that used story grammars to teach plot development has been proved successful with a group of eight above average third grade students reading Deborah and James Howe's "Bunnicula." The first stage was a training unit designed to familiarize children with a typical story grammar's parts: a theme and plot…

Media content analysts seldom observe the principle that editorial omissions are as telling as what is published or broadcast; hence, the purpose of this paper is to explore, and thus stimulate debate about, editorial omissions or "strategic silence." It is observed that as a concept, strategic silence embraces both tact and…

Although the concept of coherence is elusive, explorations of the historical, theoretical, and empirical discussions of coherence can illuminate, though not eliminate, the concept's elusiveness. There are three inter-related and overlapping ways that readers make coherence. Intratextuality, the notion that readers perceive a text as coherent if it…

This paper is based on a transactional viewpoint (involving writer, reader, and text) in which the text is no longer external but is constructed and reconstructed by the reader during reading. Using a database developed for a previous study (Goodman and Goodman, 1978), this research examined pronoun usage in three basal texts by evaluating the…

Literature is an artistic expression which teaches human beings valuable lessons about life. Literature invites the reader to share decisions with the decisions of others--the characters seen in literature. Unlike science or philosophy or ethics, which make people say "I understand" and then "I see," literature, as an art,…

Reviews notions of visual simplicity found within the literature of the analytical framework provided by Charles Morris' communication model. Examines Morris' syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic communication levels. (AEW)

Introduces four essays on psychoanalysis and the teaching of literature that appear in this issue of "College English" and discusses in general how the psychoanalytic phenomenon of resistance applies to the teaching and comprehension of a piece of literature. (JC)

Discusses some concrete examples of the kinds of conflicts that can surface when reader-response theory is actually practiced in the classroom, and considers some of the implications. Urges instructors to make room for contesting views and to facilitate serious, committed, personal interchanges. (MS)