This is discussion of one of Leo Tolstoy's fictional dramatisations of aggressive but dull-witted pedagogy. In "Anna Karenina," two adults badger a lively, deep-souled, active-minded boy, Anna's son Seryozha, to learn his rote-lessons.

This article draws on my experiences of teaching "Stone Cold" to respond to a blog post suggesting that the novel holds little educational value. I argue that the novel's narrative style helps to foster criticality while its subject matter can help students see the relevance of literature to the world around them. Relating this to…

Why do educators teach literature? The author thinks they can hear the answer in the voice of Huckleberry Finn and David Copperfield and Holden Caulfield and the omniscient narrator in "Beloved." It's the wonderful sound of those words, the gorgeous flow of those well-crafted sentences, and the marvelous way Twain and Dickens and Morrison and…

"The Road" has been an important part of the author's English IV Honors course for several years now. Undeniably bleak, it details a father and son's journey through a seared, post-apocalyptic wasteland. As they travel through the burnt remains of America, they are threatened by starvation, dehydration, and scattered, hostile humans. Although his…

In 2004, the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) concluded that "literature reading is fading as a meaningful activity, especially among younger people." How can educators continue to teach students about the power of literary response when the priority is for them to achieve proficiency on standardized tests, whose scores can only be narrowly…

Re-reading James Moffett's work in the light of more recent scholarship in the humanities and social sciences, this paper presents a "deconstructive" account of Moffett's key texts. Understanding them as instances in themselves of rhetoric and textuality, and reading them at once "with" and "against" the grain, the…

James Moffett's "Storm in the Mountains: A Case Study of Censorship, Conflict, and Consciousness" remains as relevant today as it was when it was published in 1988 for those who want to understand the nature and sources of contemporary conflicts in American language and literacy education. Censors continue to try to restrict student…

Street fiction is a popular new genre of novels that focus on contemporary urban life. Marc Lamont Hill, Biany Perez, and Decoteau J. Irby introduce this genre, describing what it is, who writes it, and who reads it. They also offer critiques of the genre and strategies for linking street fiction to the English classroom. (Contains 1 note.)

Poetics rather than poems would form the curriculum for an ideal poetry course. (JH)

Argues that students need to be shown the value of the study of literary style. (AA)

The purpose of this paper is to describe some general relationships between the concepts of literary genre and writing style. The discussion concentrates on the following topics: (1) possible classification schemes for genres, including stylistic aspects associated with each scheme; (2) concepts from literary criticsm that are related to both…

Illustrates how a linguistic analysis of Hemingway's prose style can be appealing to a student by being precise instead of vague and being a procedure. (MM)

Argues that Holden Caulfield was the comedian Lenny Bruce in this satire of life and literature. (RB)