A summer reading novel serves a vital role to stimulate a student's mind over the break. Therefore, an assignment of such importance should include a book that not only captivates the reader but also forces them to think. Although Fahrenheit 451 and Cannery Row both have advantages, Mrs. Fleek Airne should not change the summer reading assignment to Cannery Row. The connection to the modern world, challenging writing style of Ray Bradbury, and relatable characters far surpass the positive aspects of its counterpart.…
In Flannery O’Connor’s short essay, Total Effect and the Eighth Grade, she proposes that “…fiction, if it is going to be taught in high schools, should be taught as a subject and a subject with history.” (p. 137) In other words, fiction should be taught as a true subject rather than just a genre of writing. O’Connor supports the idea by explaining that “There is much to be enjoyed in the great British novels of the nineteenth century” (p. 138), and there is no valid that teachers could not teach students using this material. She then goes on to point out that to the less sophisticated or less motivated readers, these books can provide simple enjoyment.…
Throughout the essay, Prose argues that literatures in high schools are dumbing down the English curriculum. She says books that are “chosen for students to read are for ‘obvious lessons.’” However, Prose does not mention “great” books that students should read and that will help them to understand what the characters are feeling. “…The weaker novels of John Steinbeck, the fantasies of Ray Bradbury,” (424). Prose explains how her sons never read the better of Steinbeck’s novels in high school and she makes the assumption that all high school students read the so-called weaker Steinbeck novels. She also makes an argument that the English curriculum is an important issue both culturally and politically. If both the teachers and books are not challenging the young students minds, then how can we expect them to understand challenging books. “We hear the more books are being bought and sold than ever before, yet no one, as far as I know, is arguing that we are producing and becoming a nation of avid readers of serious literature” (423). Again, Prose brings up her own personal experience and what she has heard. From what she has heard, people today are not reading “serious” literature. She does not even go to defend her argument and further explain what she means by “serious literature” and “avid readers.”…
Books can cast a strange spell over you. It’s the intimacy of being let into such details of a character’s feelings and being that draws you to read The fluency of the writing and the drama, heroism, and intrigue exhibited by the characters can almost be too much for a person. The pure power of literature sometimes wont allow you to set the book aside and leave the characters life. The attraction and attachment of humans to fictional characters through reading is seen in the poem “The Reader” by Richard Wilbur and an excerpt from the short story “A General in the Library” by Italo Calvino.…
Kennedy, X.J. and Dana Gioia. Literature: An Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, and Drama. New York: Pearson Longman , 2005…
Home AS and A Level English English Literature Criticism & Comparison Other Criticism & Comparison Utopia vs Dystopia…
social climate we live in? These questions shed an interesting light on the history of literature…
Richard, Allen. Approaching literature- The Realist Novel. Routledge, London. Great Britain: The Open University, 1995.…
This course focuses on World Literature to expand high school students’ literary landscape. Students will read about, write about, and research different cultures based on the theme of coming of age. This will allow us to emphasize the human experience as seen on a global scale. We will examine literary works with a global perspective focusing on cultural influences such as language, art, music, media, and pop culture. Our class will look at all of these and more in order to better understand both commonalities and differences in other countries and our own.…
George, Diana and Trimbur, John. Reading Culture: Contexts for critical reading and writing. New York: Longman, 2007. Print.…
Daniels, H. (2002). Literature circles: Voice and choice in book clubs and reading groups. Portland, ME: Stenhouse.…
book, magazine, newspaper or online. If you carry a poem in your wallet and you look at it once a year, we count you. If you have just finished Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks in German for the third time, or you’ve read one page of a Harlequin Romance and given up because it’s too hard, we count you as equals. We are very egalitarian! What you see for the first time in American history is that less than half of the U.S. adult American population is reading literature. I’m going to talk about what the causes of the problem are, and then I’ll talk about the consequences and the solutions. To go into the data a little big further, we see that we’re producing the first generation of educated people, in some cases college graduates, who no longer become lifelong readers. This is disturbing for reasons above and…
The study of literature "is the place—there is no other in most schools—the place wherein the chief matters of concern are particulars of humanness—individual human feeling, human response, and human time, as these can be known through the written expression (at many literary levels) of men living and dead, and as they can be discovered by student writers seeking through words to name and compose and grasp their own experience. English [that is, literature] in sum is about my distinctness and the distinctness of other human beings. Its function, like that of some books called 'great,' is to strive at once to know the world through art, to know what if anything he uniquely is, and what some brothers uniquely are. The instruments employed are the imagination, the intellect, and texts or events that rouse the former to life . . . . [T]he goal . . . is to expand the areas of the human world—areas that would not exist but for art—with which individual man can feel solidarity and coextensiveness." [Benjamin DeMott, Supergrow: Essays and Reports on Imagination in America 143 (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1969)]…
In eighteenth-century England, the concept ofliterature was not confined as it sometimes is today to 'creative' or 'imaginative' writing. It meant the whole body of valued writing in society: philosophy, history, essays and letters as well as poems. What made a text 'literary' was not whether it was fictional- the eighteenth century was in grave doubt about whether the new upstart form of the novel was literature at all- but whether it conformed to certain standards of 'polite letters'. The criteria of what counted as literature, in other words, were frankly ideological: writing which embodied the values and 'tastes' of a particular social class qualified as literature, whereas a street ballad, a popular romance and perhaps even the drama did not. At this historical point, then, the 'value-Iadenness' of the concept of literature was reasonably self-evident. In the eighteenth century, however, literature did more than 'embody' certain social values: it was a vital instrument for their deeper entrenchment and wider dissemination.…
For the first time Cope is beginning to ask himself the right questions that will lead to sobriety. For example, he asked, “What did I mean by God? Where would I find this faith? Why was I the only one in our family who became addicted? And most importantly, why do I keep relapsing?” Cope realizes everything he has in his whole life depends on his sobriety. I think this is the first step for anyone recovering. Admitting you are powerless over drugs and alcohol goes hand in hand with realizing your whole life depends on your sobriety. Cope was no longer in a hurry to leave treatment. In fact the excuses he was using to leave treatment were the same excuses he used to stay in treatment. Cope finally admits to himself that pleasing people had always been his main ambition and the greatest affirmation of his worth. All he wanted was for people to know that he really was a good guy, a generous, kind, thoughtful person deep down. He wanted them to know so they would like him and approve of what he did. I think with Cope and probably with most addicts and alcoholics telling their story is also a big part of recovery. If people with substance abuse issues know that society won’t judge them because of their addiction and that people will like them even though they know about their past I think sobriety would be easier. I think a lot of people carry around feelings of guilt and shame regarding their addictions. They feel like failures, especially after relapsing. Who wants to admit to being a failure? Even worse, admitting you failed at your sobriety and having society judge you for failing. If more people look at addiction as a progressive disease maybe there would be less judgment passed upon people with substance abuse…