In the fifteen years since the 9/11 terrorist attacks in America, countless literary and artistic works have responded to the incident. This paper examines Amiri Baraka's literary response to this violent event through his most famous poem entitled "Somebody blew up America," which defies American orthodox responses to the attacks. The…

This article reviews Margaret Meek Spencer's body of work in relation to the various policies that she critiqued from the Bullock Report in 1974 to the National Literacy Strategy in 2004. She analysed increasingly conservative moves to promote a dominant, elitist version of school literacy. A Critical Realist perspective aligns with Margaret Meek…

This study focuses on the political chaos in Kurt Vonnegut's "Cat's Cradle" (1963). While the main scholarly studies focus on the postcolonial peculiarities of the novel, this study will focus on the post-nuclear characteristics and will render the novel's position distinctive within the discourse on political and social affairs. The…

Undergraduate literature courses tend to neglect American fiction of the 1930s, especially the proletarian novel. Disregard of this particular genre is often based on the assumption that it emphasized a crude Marxist realism opposed to aesthetic modernism. Various examples of the genre are, in fact, worth teaching, especially because they do not…

Reprinted by permission from the Partisan Review," v37 n1 W 1970 p41-58. (DS)

"A Crisis of Legitimacy" is a unique comparative examination of the question of legitimate rule, as observed through Shakespeare's "Richard II" and the contemporary presidencies of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. Largely pedagogical, this article is the result of an active learning exercise, whereby students in a "Politics and Literature" course…

This essay explores a reading of "Robinson Crusoe" that suggests the novel has taken on new gravity after the first "preemptive" war in U.S. history, a war justified by the attempt to "spread freedom" to Iraq. It examines how Crusoe comes to understand the relationship between the state and the individual. Robinson…

Reviews Elie Wiesel's "Night," an account of his Holocaust experiences. Concludes that what is important is not that students' questions be answered, but that people continue to ask them. (EL)