The stasis, stock, kinetic, spectator, and dialectic responses to literature all serve to deny the popular misconception that literary analysis invariably deals a death blow to the vitally engaged, spontaneous, and thus authentic response. Stasis is a response in which an intuited imaginative identity between subject and object develops in an…

A rebellion against a work of literature in a course on women's literature and feminist criticism appeared to be censorship. Questions are raised about several topics. They are the following: (1) censorship and the selection of literature; (2) the literary versus the stock response; and (3) humanistic assumptions underlying the educational value…

Advocates a balance between engagement and disengagement, between overintellectualizing and oversentimentalizing in literary criticism. Recommends literature education as dialectic and gaining the best of both worlds--engagement and detachment. (JDH)

Discusses the role of literature in the secondary school English curriculum, then examines the current state of literary criticism and analysis in the classroom. (FL)

Ruminates on and analyzes the author's experiences in teaching the first course in women's literature and feminist criticism at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education. Asserts that the course brought to consciousness the author's femininity, feminism, and a new understanding of feminist criticism. (MM)

Noting that for some time, the theory of literature has been supplanted by other disciplines as the major influences on the teaching of English in the secondary schools, this paper challenges the assumptions underlying two major principles for selecting and teaching literature: the social relevance of its subject matter and its immediate impact on…

Examines a high school literature censorship case, and challenges the assumption that values can be "absorbed" through emotional engagement with a "transparent" text. Concludes with guidelines for avoiding indoctrination by viewing literature as the construction of fictional worlds whose values are decoded by calculated acts of…

A literary communication model cannot adjudicate the conflicting claims of transformation and enculturation: that literature is intrinsically educational, that it conduces to psychic growth as a process, irrespective of subject matter and free from the dangers of indoctrination, but that the imperative to make it instrumental to political ends…