Acts of sexual violence and rape, as well as the ensuing treatment of survivors and those who perpetuate the crimes, are pervasive in canonical texts that populate mandated reading lists in secondary English classrooms. Given the outsized role the literary canon places in English curriculum, we believe English teachers must develop practices that…

This is a review essay of Joseph North's "Literary Criticism: A Concise Political History." I interrogate many of North's claims, most notably his argument about the way a shift from literary criticism to literary scholarship has blunted the capacity of people working in literary studies to engage in a socially critical praxis. I use his…

This autobiographical essay explores the significance that Marxist literary theory has had for me as an English educator. Marxist literary theorists have produced increasingly refined understandings of the formal complexities of literary works, but the reach of such criticism has been limited because they have failed to conceive it as part of a…

This paper considers the issue of child agency in Mildred D. Taylor's 1976 novel "Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry" using a critical corpus linguistics framework based on Halliday's systemic functional linguistics. The novel has long received praise for its portrayal of child agency in a hostile racist society as well as its depiction of a…

The linguistic study of literature or critical analysis of literary discourse is no different from any other textual description; it is not a new branch or a new level or a new kind of linguistics but the application of existing theories and methods (Halliday, 2002). This study intends to determine how ideology or opinion is expressed in Joseph…

Most students of the joint degree in "English Philology and Tourism," taught at the University of Jaén (Spain), usually complain about the fact that the teaching of literature is sometimes reduced to the theoretical study of literary periods and bio-bibliographical data about authors. This approach overlooks one of the main functions of…

Advocates of narrative research often contend that it is superior to nonnarrative research, both qualitative and quantitative, because they believe it is better able to represent multiple perspectives and foster multiple interpretations. The author of this comment article on Coulter and Smith (2009) draws on literary theory and an analysis of the…

American publishers have published numerous children's books about Barack Obama over the past several years; most take the form of informational biographies. This article reports on a research project aimed at how these books incorporate sociohistorical narratives, particularly those related to the civil rights movement. Though the features of the…

I investigate the spoken dialogue of four Indian novels in English: Mulk Raj Anand's "Untouchable" (1935), Khushwant Singh's "Train to Pakistan" (1956), Rasipuram Krishnaswami Narayan's "The World of Nagaraj" (1990), and Rohinton Mistry's "Family Matters" (2002). Roger Fowler has said that literature, as a form of discourse, articulates ideology;…

William Gibson's 1984 cyberpunk novel "Neuromancer" continues to be a touchstone in cultural representations of the impact of new information and communication technologies on the self. As critics have noted, the posthumanist, capital-driven, urban landscape of "Neuromancer" resembles a Foucaultian vision of a panoptically engineered social space…

In a collaborative effort in teaching literary analysis, two professors aimed to make the usually seamless act of reading visible and ideologically bound by emphasizing the constructed nature of interpretation. A course was pieced together that asked questions about literature, that assumed that both students and teachers are subjects constructed…

Despite Stanley Fish's assertion that the interpretive communities basic to his theory of literary and legal interpretation are "engines of change," it seems clear that in Fish's conception of change, "plus ca change, c'est plus la meme chose." In particular, Fish denies that the legal profession can achieve the more…

As with many science fiction works, the "Star Trek" franchise uses allegory to address contemporary social issues. Taking a liberal humanistic stance, it addresses race and racism using aliens as allegorical stand-ins for humanity. However, the producers of the "Star Trek" franchise were inadvertently perpetuating the racism they were advocating…

This article considers ideological, pedagogical and constitutive functions of children's picture books, with particular emphasis on the ways in which texts construct children and childhood in economic terms. Through an analysis of Lauren Childs' "Hubert Horatio Bartle Bobton-Trent" and Anthony Browne's "Voices in the Park", the article…

Describes the current debate in literary study between the humanist/historicist and the anti-humanist/anti-historicist perspectives. Examines the political dimensions of this debate, including its relationship to Marxist theory and deconstruction. Asserts that literary texts are productions of ideology and that literary study should inquire into…