Narrative in a United States survey course is hard to avoid. The question that the author has confronted in his classes is simple: do narratives still work in the surveys now that students understand their subjectivity, in many cases, as much as their teachers? Students, like most humans, tend to like stories. As the humanities at large and…

The early reception of D.B.C. Pierre's "Vernon God Little" (2003) has been characterized by comparisons with two canonical literary antecedents: J.D. Salinger's "The Catcher in the Rye" (1991/1951) and, at a greater remove, Mark Twain's "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" (1884). The three novels capitalize on the…

This article examines Julio Cortázar's short story "Las babas del diablo" from a visual perspective and at the intersection of Roland Barthes's ideas on photography and Severo Sarduy's theory on the Neobaroque. I propose that in "Las babas del diablo" photography and the Neobaroque--two seemingly unrelated concepts--interact…

How an author communicates with a reader is a central consideration in the critical examination of any text. When considering the communication of ideas from young people whose voices are seldom heard, the journey from author to audience has particular significance. The construction of children and young people as 'authors' is important,…

The present study aims at presenting a thorough account of the field termed literary pragmatics which emerges in a consequence of applying the different pragmatic approaches to the study and analysis of literary genera. Additionally, it also attempts to explore and shed some light on the relationship between the two domains: pragmatics and…

In Morocco, debates over English language instruction have marginalized poetry as a distinct literary genre. The shortage of poetry events arguably makes poetry teaching both daunting and intimidating. Besides fostering trust, memorization, and empathy, helping students develop a penchant for English language, as well as humanity, poetry, and…

The late Ruqaiya Hasan was an enthusiastic but exacting reader of Vygotsky: she reproached him for lacking a theory of language use, for using an asocial model of education without class variation in semantic code, and above all for using an atomistic unit of analysis, namely lexical word meaning. In this paper, I take up these criticisms and…

Authors for young adult literature often present their tales directly through the voice of the story narrators. However, Kashmira Sheth, in her "Boys without Names," seeks to present her tale, specifically the issue of child labor, through the use of frame stories which are recounted by two or more narrators. Through frame stories, the…

This essay argues that Coleridge's "Kubla Khan" is a poem about narrative and specifically focuses on the narrative construction of possible worlds, or even utopian worlds. It notes two pairs of narratives. In pair one the utopian narrative of the monarch's decree which seeks to build a space of pure pleasure is in opposition to the…

William Golding has been identified as a nonconformist whose opinions always go contrary to what is customarily accepted or established. This is shown in all his novels, more specifically "The Inheritors", in which he defies long established opinions held by anthropologists, historians, archaeologists as well as many others about the…

I examine the formation of power as it relates to canonicity through online delivery systems, Amazon and Goodreads, and the academic sector in the contemporary period. The digital age has radically changed literature by providing for a textuality of literature that is multi-channeled, and this project responds by engaging new critical lenses for…

This dissertation aims to understand the apparent failure of speech in post-Mao literature to fulfill its conventional functions of representation and communication. In order to understand this pattern, I begin by looking back on the utility of speech for nation-building in modern China. In addition to literary analysis of key authors and works,…

Historians typically tell stories about the past, but how are we to understand the epistemic status of those narratives? This problem is particularly pressing for history education, which seeks guidance not only on the question of which narrative to teach but also more fundamentally on the question of the goals of instruction in history. This…

Case illustrations of a six-year-old boy's adventures with a missing tooth are used in this paper to re-define a broader notion of authorship. Drawing on theories of social semiotics, New Literacy Studies (NLS), and critical positioning, this notion of authorship not only interweaves the boy's preferred modes of meaning-making and communication,…

The work presented here is an empirical study of how advanced learners of English as a foreign language in Argentina access and understand the culture-specific dimensions of literary narrative texts. It has three purposes. First, to extend research into reading in a foreign language to take account of the culture-specific content of texts. Second,…