This article discusses the relevance and construction of the concept of 'literariness' within pedagogy for an effective engagement with works of literature and literary theory. By juxtaposing Mikhail Bakhtin's dialogic mode of understanding, with Bhartrhari's doctrine of the "dhvani" and the "sphota," this article attempts to…

This essay proposes a series of "threshold concepts" for literary studies: "text", "meaning", "context", "form", and "reading". Each term carries both commonsense understandings and disciplinary understandings, which differ from each other drastically. The disciplinary understandings…

Although both literary study and discourse analysis examine texts and oral discourses, literary study tends to emphasize the totality of the text while discourse analysis seeks to isolate manageable elements and structures to validate hypotheses about mental processes. Interaction has recently occurred between the two disciplines in…

This paper describes an approach to teaching students to become more sensitive to voice, audience, and meaning in fiction. Examined are several passages of monologue, including a passage spoken by a character named Mr. Tyler in the opening of E.M. Forster's "The Story of a Panic." The rhetorical triangle made up of speaker, audience, and subject…

In this study of high school and college students' responses to structural principles and clues to order in poetry, four groups of students were tested: Groups I and II were high school sophomores and seniors enrolled in an English class for "average" learners; Group III were college sophomore English majors in a course in intrinsic literary…

Looks at what is entailed when education and experience are regarded as equivalent. Identifies faulty inferences resulting from learning by experience. Considers how experience can close avenues to conceptual and social change. Argues that ideas based on secondhand information are more likely than firsthand experience to manifest both the real and…

Topics include: (1) Culture and deep structure of literature curriculum; (2) Literary criticism and educational measurement: towards an evaluation framework; (3) Measuring: knowledge and its application to literary texts, understanding of a literary work, interests, and attitudes; and (4) Evaluating expressed responses to literary works. (RL)