This paper suggests how the "weird fiction" of H.P. Lovecraft might be mobilised within secondary English classrooms to examine aspects of visual literacy, literary style, narrative form and intertextuality. The approach that is outlined is characterised, after Lovecraft's famous monster, as a "Cthulhuic literacy" and is…

Coupling Royster's (2000) conceptual framework of "zamani" with Rosenblatt's (1978) reader response theory, the researcher explores the ways African American women's writings supported, nurtured, and "mentored" the writings of adolescent girls. Findings show that the mentor texts helped in generating ideas for writing, thinking…

In this dissertation, I analyze the spiritual autobiographies of Teresa of Avila (1515-1582) and Sarah Edwards (1710-1758) through the methodological lenses of autobiography studies and cognitive linguistics in order to identify key narratives and metaphors for the spiritual life and explore the significance of the interpretation process for lived…

This article examines how narrative strategies of indirection employed in "Los cirineos" and "La argolla" engage the reader's ethical participation in examining and questioning societal norms concerning sex and marriage. In "Los cirineos," the opposition between the moral and the immoral is broken down by the presence of what Shlomith Rimmon Kenan…

This essay examines the theme and trope of "copies" in Kazuo Ishiguro's novel "Never Let Me Go." Whatever one's final reading of the novel, the theme and thread of copy, copies, copying and copied is never far off. In a semantic sense then, the act of "copying", both as a verb and the indexing of "copies" as…

This article excavates how style in writing was represented and taught in the under-investigated mid-twentieth century. I trace four editions of the textbook "Modern Rhetoric" (1949-1979), authored by Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren; I detail how the book was surprisingly innovative for the time, despite its eventual re-entrenchment to a…

The Common Core generally eschews mandating texts in favor of promoting critical analysis and rigor. So it's significant that Shakespeare is the only author invoked in imperatives. His explicit inclusion offers a significant opportunity for educators to rethink how we approach Shakespearean instruction. Rather than the traditional learning of…

State and national education initiatives provide American students with opportunities to engage in close readings of complex texts from diverse perspectives as they actively construct complicated understandings as they explore complex texts. Opportunities for interdisciplinary units emerge as the role of non-fiction in English/language arts and…

According to Merriam-Webster dictionary, a parody is "a literary or musical work in which the style of an author or work is closely imitated for comic effect or in ridicule." A parody is a respectful yet critical satire, takeoff, or spoof of an original. In literature, a parody is when a person imitates an author's style or work to ridicule or…

Chinua Achebe in his novel "Things Fall Apart" gives us a unique picture of life in Africa before the arrival of Christianity and colonization and the era afterwards. He shows how African people lost their traditional culture and values, replacing them with foreign beliefs. In this article, the way black people lived before the arrival…

This study makes an attempt to analyze the manifold aspects of Shaw's "Androcles and the Lion" on a postmodernist standpoint, meanwhile, demonstrates the dominion of modernism, which is portrayed through the vehicle of comedy with a bitter ironic language through the play. Regardless of the historical period in which the play occurs, the…

Why do educators teach literature? The author thinks they can hear the answer in the voice of Huckleberry Finn and David Copperfield and Holden Caulfield and the omniscient narrator in "Beloved." It's the wonderful sound of those words, the gorgeous flow of those well-crafted sentences, and the marvelous way Twain and Dickens and Morrison and…

This dissertation is about a group of African American inner-city public librarians who, over the course of 16 months, read the literary genre Street Lit in an inquiry-based book club for the purpose of professional development. I explore their literary responses to Street Literature to learn what it means to be an educated, African American…

Writing, as an advanced model of output, not only conveys the subject but also realizes the communication between readers and writers. Metadiscourse can help writers arrange and organize the discourse to influence readers' understanding of the text and their attitude towards its content. Taking writing samples of College English Test Band 4…

According to Wilhelm, a teacher's power lies in learning to work "with" students, starting with listening. He recommends setting up conditions and mechanisms that help you learn from your students what they are learning, what challenges they are facing, and how best to teach them. Through inquiry, the classroom can become a vital and engaging…