Students in the English Language Arts classroom have access to more author commentary than ever. While following authors on social media may deepen students' engagement with their assigned reading, it also threatens to subdue students' own interpretations of the authors' texts. This essay explains how educators can introduce basic aspects of…

"The Teaching Archive" shows us a series of major literary thinkers in a place we seldom remember them inhabiting: the classroom. Rachel Sagner Buurma and Laura Heffernan open up "the teaching archive"--the syllabuses, course descriptions, lecture notes, and class assignments--of critics and scholars including T. S. Eliot,…

This article examines the deeper purposes behind the teaching of creative writing. To extend an analogy created by William Blake in his poem 'The Tyger', its furnaces are examined and its 'deadly terrors' clasped. It re-interprets the different views of teaching English, as drawn up in the United Kingdom's Cox Report. It argues that these views…

This paper is prompted by the author's experience as a researcher of English literary education in three different geographies over the past three years: Canada, the United Kingdom and Australia. Affect theory, as discussed in this paper, concerns atmospheres, surfaces, bodies, emotions, moods, vicinities and capacities. Drawing on affect theory,…

Three English teachers share their ideas on how their work as a writer helped them as a teacher. One teacher has found that the desire for meaningful response to her own writing has led her to evaluate her students similarly. A second teacher discusses how personal experience translates into teaching how to convey rejection in a useful and tactful…

When Don Imus made his infamous comments about the Rutgers University women's basketball team in 2007, he provoked widespread (yet short-lived) attention to the circulation of language practices demeaning to women of color. In an elective autobiographical writing course that the author designed with and for urban high school girls, the students…

Argues for the use of the author's comments on their works as a process for literary interpretation for teachers and students, using Warren as an example. (MM)

During the course of an interview, Terry Eagleton, one of England's foremost Marxist critics, talks about his political and critical position and about related contemporary developments. (HOD)

Suggests putting student writers in touch with publishing nonfiction writers by having them write critiques of an author's article, then sending the critique to the author for his or her response. (HTH)

Discusses specific stories and approaches for introducing the works of West Indies author Michael Anthony in secondary school literature classes. (HTH)

Discusses the poststructural impulse to displace authority over texts and their meanings from the author. Questions whether poststructuralists practice an anti-intentionalist impersonalism regarding their own writings. Describes the reactions of Jacques Derrida to readings of his own work by other critics. (HB)

The articles in this journal issue focus on adolescent literature. In the first article, author Sue Ellen Bridgers explains how she writes books, while the second article offers an analysis of the recent works of Paul Zindel. The third article presents a discussion of the treatment of outsiders, such as the mentally ill, in four Roy Brown…

Improvisation, or creative dramatics, has come to be regarded as a learning tool in English instruction. This study provides a comparative history of informal drama as it developed in England and the United States from 1910 to 1975. Pivotal writers on improvisation were identified, compared, and contrasted, analyzing their goals and practices.…

There are at least four reasons why the stereotype of Henry David Thoreau as an ascetic and a stoic have been perpetuated: (1) Emerson, in his eulogy of Thoreau, emphasized these qualities by saying, "Few lives contain so many renunciations...he ate no flesh, he drank no wine, he never knew the use of tobacco; and, though a naturalist, he…

Teachers can increase students' involvement in literature and improve their skills in research and literary analysis by assigning each student to report on an author born the same day the student was. (DD)