Salvadoran writer Horacio Castellanos Moya offers a provocative example of postwar cynicism in his 1997 novel "El asco: Thomas Bernhard en San Salvador." By telling the story of Edgardo Vega, an emigrant who returns to El Salvador in the mid-1990s after living in Canada for eighteen years, "El asco" represents the mass exodus…

The authors drew on empirical data from a blogging project that brought English teachers from the United States and Lithuania together online to discuss the young adult novel "Between Shades of Gray" by Ruta Sepetys. The novel tells the story of a 15-year-old girl, Lina, and her family, who are forcibly separated and deported to a…

This paper explores a creative interpretation of D. H. Lawrence's novel "St. Mawr." Throughout the centuries, and across cultures, the presence of a distinctive horse (or horses) in a literary text--and more recently in films -- results in what appears to be an unvarying outcome: the restoration of equilibrium and wholeness in situations…

The Bush Administration's quiet resumption of, or initiation of new, nuclear weapons programs aimed militarizing space, and erecting a missile defense shield that would have the effect of rolling back 19 years of solid detente, has gone largely unnoticed over the last eight years. Weapons makers, government officials and politicians have expressed…

This article offers teachers a critical framework for use and adaptation in organizing class discussions focused on notions of freedom in young adult literature. The authors open by discussing the notion of freedom, including concepts related to negative and positive freedom and to arguments advocating critical discussion of common assumptions…

Reviews new novels on the aftermath of nuclear war, children as guerilla fighters, and young lovers in Nazi Germany. (CRH)

Based on Stephen Crane's poems about war and his novel "The Red Badge of Courage," this lesson plan presents activities designed to help students understand that Crane examined war-related themes in prose and poetry; that close study of a poem for oral presentation helps readers see meaning or techniques not noted earlier; and that not all readers…