The proposition advanced by media critics John Fiske and John Hartley, that television provides the experience of "defamiliarization" (the demand that viewers "negotiate" a response to the ideological frameworks that television presents), is considered by the Russian Formalist critics and the structuralists who elaborated and…

The purpose of this paper is to describe some general relationships between the concepts of literary genre and writing style. The discussion concentrates on the following topics: (1) possible classification schemes for genres, including stylistic aspects associated with each scheme; (2) concepts from literary criticsm that are related to both…

The successful oral reading of poetry requires that oral interpreters conduct phenomenological investigations of the first lines of the poems, not merely to make these lines happen properly but to suggest what has preceded the first line. Individual word meanings in the opening lines of a poem establish "structures of intentionality"--the…

The Bible contains a variety of literary genres including drama, tragedy, and epic poetry, and it is an excellent basis for character study. It also contains a certain amount of humor, which should not be overlooked by students of biblical literature. Examples of intentional humor include the second version of the creation, found in the second…

The adult characterizations in seven novels written for teen-age girls--four published in 1950 and three published in the late 1960s--were evaluated on the basis of four criteria: consistency, evident motivation, plausibility, and scope of activity. The evaluations were then compared to determine if a change could be detected from the earlier to…

This paper examines the use of science fiction to predict the future. First, science fiction is compared to other fiction literature forms; then the changes in science fiction over the last 20 years are discussed. The influence of recent scientific advances on science fiction is also presented. The generation of alternative scenarios of the future…

General Systems Theoy is a contemporary discipline that profitably lends itself as a new approach to literature. Pioneered by Ludwig von Bertalanffy in Germany in the 1930s, the theory has had successful applications in the United States in philosophy, business, and urban planning. Applications of certain principles of systems theory to A.…

Arguing that scientific facts and insights can be used analogically to clarify literary analysis at specific moments, this paper presents a number of such facts and their analogical relationship to several literary passages. The examples cited relate the first and second laws of thermodynamics to scenes from "King Lear," rigid bodies in motion to…

Sectarian interpretation of presumption is a major problem facing the teacher of the Bible as literature. Students should be made aware of the pitfalls of interpreting the text from a theological point of view, including "over interpretation" or adding details to scripture, a reliance on poetic license, and an unfamiliaritY with basic Biblical…

President Jimmy Carter's televised address on energy, July 15, 1979, illustrates the principle that rhetoric serves as a transformer, taking issues involving incompatible and insatiable demands and converting them to forms amenable to solutions. The address depicted three distinct yet related scenes: (1) the immediate scene of the energy crisis;…

The seven articles in this journal issue survey and assess the art of rhetorical criticism based on evidence derived from critical practice. The first five articles analyze the literature subsumed with certain approaches to rhetorical criticism and are arranged in the chronological order of the emergence of the approach: neo-classical criticism,…

Twenty-six women and 26 men enrolled in a humanities course at Michigan Technological University wrote their initial impressions to short stories by James Joyce, James Baldwin, Doris Lessing, and Virginia Woolf. The names were removed and the journal entries were analyzed in light of these four questions: (1) Do women refer to their personal…

A study was conducted for the purposes of demonstrating the presence of literary innovation in contemporary juvenile fiction and of assessing the way in which influential reviewing media and professional textbooks on children's literature responded to such a presence. To accomplish the first purpose, a survey of literary criticism was performed,…