This paper contends that art can critique a philosophical claim about the world. Artist imagination can envision how an idea can live and whether the idea is attractive to our living. Cormac McCarthy's novel, "Blood Meridian," narratively illustrates a certain idea of divine determinism and shows that, in terms of war and human cruelty, the idea…

Every novelist, even great ones like Fyodor Dostoevsky, struggles against the temptation to be didactic: the poet struggles with the person. Teachers of literature and aesthetics need to be sensitive to this struggle as they assist their students to read novels carefully. This essay traces the struggle in the case of Dostoevsky's great novel,…

Historicism critiques cultural history and cultural materialism as a methodology for literary analysis. Questions the finality of interpretation, how original values change, and whether dramatic history implies actual history. Using Shakespearean plays, analyzes the power and politics of a play in relation to its audience; posits that cultural…

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)

Presented is an overview of two types of inquiry which may be used in literature study: inquiry concerning the formal, rhetorical, and semantic features of the text and inquiry generated by the individual's response to the work. The effects of these strategies on students' higher-order cognition are considered. (Author/SJL)