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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.
List of contents
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
About the author
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.
Summary
This edited collection will turn a critical spotlight on the set of texts that has constituted the high school canon of literature by introducing and applying these interpretive frames to the field of secondary English education.
