Critical Approaches to Teaching the High School Novel

Reinterpreting Canonical Literature

Crag Hill, Victor Malo-Juvera, Crag Hill, Victor Malo-Juvera

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780367584344
• eBook ISBN: 9781351214681
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction: The Center of the Canon: The High School Classroom
• 2 Why Did the “Star-Crossed Lovers” Never Have a Chance? (Mis)Guided Adult Interference in Romeo and Juliet
• 3 Dances, Dresses, and Speaking Her Mind: The Cultural Work of Pride and Prejudice
• 4 Teaching Huckleberry Finn in an Era of Tenuous Race Relations
• 5 It’s Really All About Tom: Performances of the Masculine Self in The Great Gatsby
• 6 Readers’ Hearts Seek Connection: Transactional Theory Applied to The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter
• 7 Disturbing the Universe: Reading The Stranger Through a Lens of Philosophical Criticism
• 8 What Does The Glass Menagerie and Its Discussion Questions Teach About Disability? And How to Undo It
• 9 Reinterpreting Revolutions: An “Encoding/Decoding” Analysis of Animal Farm
• 10 When New Criticism and Reader Response Aren’t Enough: Reading “Against” To Kill a Mockingbird Through a Critical Whiteness Lens
• 11 Literary Authorship and Community Seers in Bless Me, Última and The House on Mango Street: “Let Me Begin at the Beginning”
• 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
• List of Contributors
• Index