Three factors in the reader have a generalized effect on all perception, including reading: competence, purpose, and set. Competence involves applying past learning to new learning through transference, understanding the conventions of different types of texts, and transforming the text through the perceptual process into a new entity. Competent…

Although no set of principles can apply uniformly to all existentialists, certain basic characteristics of existentialism are central to both the nonreligious writers like Sartre and Camus and the theistic existentialists like Kierkegaard, Maritain, Marcel, Tillich, Berdyaev, and Buber. These characteristics are (1) an insistence that human life…

Senator Robert LaFollette's speech to the United States Senate on "Free Speech and the Right of Congress to Declare the Objects of War," given October 6, 1917, epitomized his opposition to the war and the Wilson administration's largely successful moves to suppress public criticism of the war. In the speech he asserted his position on…

Although Frederic Hudson's "Journalism History in the United States from 1690 to 1872," the first major survey of American journalism, has been a major reference since its publication in 1873, an examination of book reviews that appeared in the New York press following the book's publication reveals surprisingly sharp criticisms of the…

This annotated bibliography lists works of criticism that analyze women writers in the United States as a group. The categories under which over 400 titles are listed include biography, special groups, special topics, literary history, contemporary assessments, feminine sensibility (whether men and women write differently, and why), the problems…

Popular literature consists of novels, stories, and essays--and by extension, plays, movies, and teledramas--that attract a significant audience. Having students study popular fiction in English classes can help to "hook" the non-reader because popular fiction is more accessible and simpler in structure and language than the literary classics.…

This paper shows how the analysis of works by women writers can be used to help students explore their own values and feelings concerning sexism. It first presents a teacher-written dialogue in which a woman accuses a man of making a sexist remark and describes the lively class discussion engendered by the reading of the dialogue. It then recounts…

This study analyzed racial-attitude change that eleventh-grade students underwent after reading black literature contained in a Black Literature Package (BLP). Three intact classes of 65 students taught by one female English teacher in a nearly all-white school located in central Pennsylvania were involved in this experiment. Findings suggested…

This book is intended for teachers, prospective teachers, language arts supervisors, designers of curriculum, and others interested in the teaching of English in the elementary school. Subjects covered include reasons why literature should be part of a child's education, what it means to "teach" and "study" literature, the foundation necessary for…

This book on television and radio criticism is intended to encourage viewers to listen and view the broadcast media more critically. The first part of the book is concerned with the process of criticizing broadcast programs. This part of the book considers criticism as a way of knowing, the varieties of criticism, two critical approaches--the…

The selections cited in this bibliography provide resources on black theater for the teacher and researcher, for those first entering the professions, and for students in search of research topics. Section one lists other relevant bibliographies, among them, an annotated guide to reference books on the black American experience, a selection of…

The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of a hierarchically-ordered questioning technique employed by beginning English teachers on their students' written responses to short stories. The subjects were 84 tenth grade students in three teachers' classes at two Lincoln (Nebraska) high schools. It was concluded that when presented with a…

The Protocol Materials in English (PME) project was set up to study literature and the teaching of literature in an effort to determine whether it is possible to discover hierarchies of concepts and to create materials to illustrate those concepts. In the film series "Responding to Literature," the category system presented has as its…

The Protocol Materials in English (PME) project was set up to study literature and the teaching of literature in an effort to determine whether it is possible to discover hierarchies of concepts and to create materials to illustrate those concepts. This guide--second in a series--focuses on the acts that the reader performs in responding to a…

At the fourth annual Cal-State Hayward Conference in Rhetorical Criticism, 25 upper division and graduate students from 17 western colleges and universities presented papers on rhetorical theory, history, and criticism. Panels of faculty members from the same colleges and universities, acting as editor-critics, rated five of these papers as…