1st Edition

Critical Approaches to Teaching the High School Novel Reinterpreting Canonical Literature

Edited By Crag Hill, Victor Malo-Juvera Copyright 2019
    244 Pages
    by Routledge

    244 Pages 1 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    This edited collection will turn a critical spotlight on the set of texts that has constituted the high school canon of literature for decades. By employing a set of fresh, vibrant critical lenses—such as youth studies and disabilities studies— that are often unfamiliar to advanced students and scholars of secondary English, this book provides divergent approaches to traditional readings and pedagogical practices surrounding these familiar works. By introducing and applying these interpretive frames to the field of secondary English education, this book demonstrates that there is more to say about these texts, ways to productively problematize them, and to reconfigure how they may be read and used in the classroom.

    1. Introduction: The Center of the Canon: The High School Classroom



    Crag Hill and Victor Malo-Juvera



    2. Why Did the "Star-Crossed Lovers" Never Have a Chance? (Mis)Guided Adult Interference in Romeo and Juliet



    Mark A. Lewis



    3. Dances, Dresses, and Speaking Her Mind: The Cultural Work of Pride and Prejudice



    Katharine Montwieler, University of North Carolina Wilmington



    4. Teaching Huckleberry Finn in an Era of Tenuous Race Relations



    Judith A. Hayn and Autumn M. Dodge



    5. It’s Really All About Tom: Performances of the Masculine Self in The Great Gatsby



    Michael Macaluso and Kati Macaluso



    6. Readers’ Hearts Seek Connection: Transactional Theory Applied to The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter



    Sharon Kane



    7. Disturbing the Universe: Reading The Stranger Through a Lens of Philosophical Criticism



    Sean P. Connors



    8. What Does The Glass Menagerie and Its Discussion Questions Teach about Disability?



    And How to Undo It



    Patricia A. Dunn and Angela Broderick



    9. Reinterpreting Revolutions: An "Encoding/Decoding" Analysis of Animal Farm



    Lara Searcy, Jonathan B. Allred, Seth D. French, and Christian Z. Goering





    10. When New Criticism and Reader Response Aren’t Enough: Reading "Against" To Kill a Mockingbird Through a Critical Whiteness Lens



    Susan L. Groenke



    11. Literary Authorship and Community Seers in Bless Me, Última and The House on Mango Street: ‘Let me begin at the beginning’



    R. Joseph Rodríguez



    12. "We got to be smart to git away": Revisiting African American Language and Emancipatory Literacy in Alice Walker’s The Color Purple and Sapphire’s PUSH



    Raquel Kennon



    Biography

    Crag Hill is an associate professor of English Education at the University of Oklahoma, USA.





    Victor Malo-Juvera is an associate professor of English Education at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, USA.