Have we been teaching reading well? Close reading has been the signature practice in literary studies. More recently, however, postcritique has polemically revised this traditional mode of teaching reading. This essay proposes the initial framework for a novel arts-based pedagogy based on Spoken-Word Song, bridging critical literary interpretation…

Using the framework of Rita Felski in her 2015 book "The Limits of Critique," this essay offers a postcritical analysis of William Carlos Williams' 1915 poem "The Young Housewife." Its intention is to show how Williams' poem or any poem can be approached through a variety of critical lenses, but that these may get in the way of…

Purpose: Preservice English teachers are expected to use literary theories and criticism to read and respond to literary texts. Over the past century, two of the most common approaches to literary encounters in secondary schools have been New Criticism -- particularly the practice of close reading -- and Rosenblatt's transactional theory, both of…

Ethnopoetics involves in the conducting of translation experiments on oral poems of native ethnic groups, converting its relevant oral texts into written forms. The theory of ethnographic poetry begins in the 1970s and was translated and introduced to China in the early 21st century. However, most ethnic minorities in China do not have textual…

Today, teaching literature has an established place within the school and university curricula in Western and East Asian countries. This seems so natural that we take the educational role of literature for granted. However, history teaches us that elevating literature to an academic subject required a defense of literature against the critical…

Taking Carroll's "Jabberwocky" as emblematic of a text historically enjoyed by both children and adults, this article seeks to place the text in what Kristeva defines as the borderline between language and subjectivity to theorize a realm in which ambivalent texts emerge as such. The fact that children's literature remains largely…

Deconstruction, as a critical theory, maintains that language is a system of signs and, more precisely, a system of oppositions, differences and contradictions. Accordingly, the theory is operative in the sense that meanings are ultimately, unstable, and that a text, any text, contradicts, dismantles and even destroys itself. Hence, literary texts…

"What is Literature? A Critical Anthology" explores the most fundamental question in literary studies. 'What is literature?' is the name of a problem that emerges with the idea of literature in European modernity. This volume offers a cross-section of modern literary theory and reflects on the history of thinking about literature as a…

Shamlu belongs to the few poets of the modern Persian poetry, who can be called neoclassical, namely, those whose work has a distinctive character and who are influential in the history of modern Persian literature. These special characteristics of Shamlu's poetic features together with his socio-cultural and political vision as manifested in his…

A grief-stricken daughter calls out to her deceased mother asking if she can see her--"Si me puedes mirar"--and thus recognize her pain. This title appears in Olga Orozco's "Los juegos peligrosos" (1962), an elegy in which a poetic voice (in this case a daughter) laments the loss of her mother, the woman who recognized and…

In the spirit of reformulating notions of critique, this response builds on the creative research experimentation that the authors enacted to consider air differently. The authors continue to be lured by generosity, curiosity, surprise, and wonder and suggest two feminist responses that relate to and generate knowledge in alternative ways. Two…

This article considers alternatives to the established constructivist approaches to children's literature, exploring instead the potential of two relatively recent areas of inquiry, cognitive poetics and evolutionary literary criticism. The article questions the assumption, implied if not directly expressed by Peter Hollindale in "Signs of…

This paper is a re-examination of Louise Rosenblatt's seminal work of reader-response theory, The Reader, The Text, The Poem. I argue that poems are essentially social in nature and that they open up a space in which conversation and interpretation can take place. With Rosenblatt I argue that until a reader engages with a poem, bringing to it a…

In evaluating some of Heaney's prose writings about the art of poetry -- what I have called his 'Poetics' -- the paper explores how those ideas could enhance the teaching of poetry in the upper post-primary schools. The paper is divided into four closely interconnected sections. The first section evaluates Heaney's thoughts about the potential…

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…