The Idea of Difficulty in Literature

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The Idea of Difficulty in Literature

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Alan C. Purves - Editor

SUNY series, Literacy, Culture, and Learning: Theory and Practice

N/A
Hardcover - 176 pages

Release Date: September 1991

ISBN10: 0-7914-0673-3
ISBN13: 978-0-7914-0673-1

Price: $31.95
Paperback - 176 pages

Release Date: September 1991

ISBN10: 0-7914-0674-1
ISBN13: 978-0-7914-0674-8

Available as a Google eBook for other eReaders and tablet devices. Click icon below...

Summary

This book redefines the nature of textual difficulty in literature and shows the implications of the new definition for teachers at all levels of education. Contrary to the traditional use of grade levels or readability formulae, the authors redefine difficulty in terms of readers and the texts they meet. They base their arguments on contemporary linguistic theory, on historical and comparative studies of criticism, on literary theory about readers and texts, on post-Freudian psychology, on empirical research concerning the nature of reading literature, and on studies of classrooms, curricula, and testing. What emerges is a coherent work that builds a case for seeing difficulty in literature as a human phenomenon more than a textual one.

"I like the fact that this collection revolves around a single phenomenon, but examines that phenomenon from a range of different disciplinary perspectives --literary criticism, cognitive psychology, linguistics, educational research, post-structuralist criticism, etc. This text should be useful in addressing a central ambiguity in secondary and college literature instruction --the conflict between the need to provide 'appealing/relevant' texts and the need to intellectually challenge students." -- Richard Beach, University of Minnesota

Alan C. Purves is Director of the Center for Writing and Literacy, and Professor of English and Humanities at the State University of New York at Albany.

Table of Contents

Introduction
Alan C. Purves

PART I. DIFFICULTY IN THEORY AND PRACTICE

1. Sources of Difficulty in the Processing of Written Language
Wallace Chafe

2. The Difficulty of Difficulty
Hazard Adams

3. Literary Theory and the Notion of Difficulty
William Touponce

4. The Difficulty of Reading
Helen Regeiro Elam

PART II. DIFFICULTY IN PRACTICE AND THEORY

5. Kinds of Understanding, Kinds of Difficulties in the Reading of Literature
Gunnar Hansson

6. Questions of Difficulty in Literary Reading
Susan Hynds

7. Making it Hard: Curriculum and Instruction as Factors in the Difficulty of Literature
Martin Nystrand

8. Indeterminate Texts, Responsive Readers, and the Idea of Difficulty in Literature
Alan C. Purves

Contributors

Name Index

Related Subjects

Literary Criticism

22480/23801(PR/DF/)

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