This examines the historical relationships between literary theory, literature curriculum, and classroom practice. Clearly, theory has played a role in the development of our thinking about curriculum and teaching. At the same time theories have come into prominence in certain periods as part of or a response to particular historical moments and movements. The contexts listed continue...
Current Approaches and Practices
Cultural Studies
Integrates a variety of approaches with an emphasis on addressing social inequality. Origins in British social theory (Birmingham School), European socialism (Frankfurt School), American popular culture, and multicultural, postcolonial, and feminist movements. continue...
Deconstruction
Derrida, the founder of deconstruction, challenges universal ideals, metaphysical certainties, or claims to unchanging truths about the human condition. "Truths" when examined closely, when "deconstructed," turn out to be fictions created by language and particular systems of meaning situated in time and place.continue ...
New Historicism
New Historicism incorporates the insights from multicultural studies, gender studies, political criticism, media studies, popular culture, cultural studies, etc. as it looks literature of the past. New Historicists distrust expressions like "in the eyes of the later middle ages" and tend to see historical periods not as consistent or coherent, but as made up of different social groups in contest with one another. Literature should not be thought of as transcending the time continue ...
Post-marxism
Breaking with certain more rigid marxist ideas such as the necessary determination of a social system by its economic structure, the inevitability of revolution, or the justice of a one-party state, many postmarxist scholars continue to draw insight and inspiration from socialist continue...
Postmodernism
Postmodernism foregrounds the concept of difference, the jarring, collage-like existence of contemporary life The world is seen as a cartoonesque Disneyland, an unremitting play of striking cultural difference, the overflow of an uneven and diverse globalism where African slum dwellers watch the Cosby show, continue ...
Poststructuralism
Consciousness resides in language and is socially made, not uniquely individual or divinely given. English courses can address the discourses from which identity (subjectivity, subject positions) arise. No escape from the "stereotype" only richer and richer explorations of roles and possibilities. Poststructuralism can take different forms, such as postmodernism, deconstruction, post-marxism.
Read more about these theories of teaching literature at the the Western michigan website or at teachingliterature.org.
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