Seeking to expand program offerings and cultivate repeat visitation at a mostly volunteer-run historic site, the Harriet Beecher Stowe House has partnered with retired Xavier University professor John Getz to lead a monthly literary discussion series, "Visiting 'Uncle Tom's Cabin'." This article presents how the series has created space…

Despite ongoing and prolific critical scholarship arguing for the widening of the secondary language arts curriculum, many practicing teachers are required or encouraged to teach a curriculum dominated by canonical texts. This is often the case at schools with highly diverse students whose varied cultural and linguistic backgrounds have…

How seven college teachers and their students discussed Hawthorne's "The Scarlet Letter" is described in order to discover basic information about how different teachers approach the teaching of the same work. All of the classes were surveys of American literature taught by experienced teachers. The 24 class hours were tape-recorded and…

The versions of academic life portrayed in two recently published novels, "Small World" and "Coming from Behind," are compared and other aspects of the works' literary merit are discussed. (MSE)

When social critiques of a book outweigh its own social critiques, should professors still require students to read it? In this article, the author shares how he responds to a student's critiques of Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness," a text in a course he was teaching on obsession. The author has been teaching "Heart of Darkness" for nearly 30…