Finding Teaching Aids for Huckleberry Finn

My goal in this research was to find ideas, teaching aids, or lesson plans to help teach students about Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain. I was interested in this because it is an area of focus for one of my classmates Bri Zabriske. To do so I went to the MLA bibliography online database. This database is a detailed bibliography of articles, books, book chapters and dissertations. The electronic version dates back to the 1920s and is home to 1.8 million indexed works.

I started like I do most research queries by just typing in the title of the book and see what comes up to start. First off I found that I have a very difficult time spelling the word "Huckleberry" (and consequently just as difficult of a time typing it, the post has involved a lot of backspace already.) But once I got that minor issue taken care of I went from 0 results to hundreds. Trying to narrow down my search a little bit and find a little more easily information on teaching Huck Finn I went to the advanced search. I tried putting "Huckleberry Finn AND teaching aids" but I didn't get any results. So I reduced my search to "Huckleberry Finn AND Teaching." This is where I found a really interesting article on teaching Huck Finn.  Howard, Douglas L. "Silencing Huck Finn." Chronicle of Higher Education 50.48 (2004): C1-4. Print. (reference put together by the site RefWorks. Such a great tool for those who are in school or put together scholarly works.)

This article isn't exactly the angle or medium that I was looking for from the start, but I think it presents an interesting way to teach Huckleberry Finn. Douglas shows how by showing that a book was once censored from public schools drives kids to want to read it to see why. I think that this article has validity because it points out that a natural curiosity (even if its morbid) will always supersede and artificial sort.

Finding How a Southerner Might Look at To Kill a Mockingbird

My goal in starting this research was to find an article using Project Muse that shows some of the opposition they may have arisen when Harper Lee was trying to get To Kill a Mockingbird published. Project Muse is an online database that indexes full text of over 200 scholarly journals in Humanities, social sciences, and mathematics.

This is an angle that one of my classmates Alymarie Rutter is taking as she studies To Kill a Mockingbird. In class we have a chance to update one another how our research is going and this is an area that she said she was working on. I chose Project Muse because it offers the full text online so I could read into the articles and see if that it is what I am looking for. I first searched "To Kill a Mocking Bird and found a lot of different things that weren't related at all to the topic. So I put my search in quotations and added racism to the searching using an AND Boolean. This produced the article that I was looking for. Murray, Jennifer. "More than One Way to (Mis)Read a Mockingbird." Southern Literary Journal 43.1 (2010): 75-91. Print.

The article is tells a history of what took place to get Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird published and a about the different themes. What I really found about this article interesting is refers to quotes and actual events as they took place when the book was being put together. There is a lot of material on this classic in more contemporary settings but not as much period information. I hope this can help Alymarie in her endeavors.

The Screwtape Letters and Reader Response Criticism

My goal was to use the search database Literature Online to find is to ways in which the Screwtape letters can be looked at as a viable option for Reader Response Criticism. Literature Online otherwise known as LION is an online database that indexes full text literature on topics such as, English poetry and drama, 18th century literature, Shakespeare, among others.

I actually started my research looking in JSTOR another literary database under the title, The Screwtape Letters. I found useful background information but nothing that stuck out as reader response criticism. There were many reviews on the topic that could be helpful in other areas of study so I used Diigo, a social bookmarking site, to save that search so that I could come back to it later. I then entered the Literature Online database to see if there was other results that I could produce. I searched "The Screwtape Letters" and had a couple pages of results. I tried to narrow my search by using key words like "Reader Response" and "Criticism", but they produced no search results. So I went back to the generic search and came a book that was along the line of what I was looking for. Walsh, Chad. C. S. Lewis Apostle to the Skeptic. [Folcroft Pa.]: Folcroft Library Editions, 1970. Print. 

The premise of the book is that C.S. Lewis' literature lead people to become Christians. This is a perfect example of anyalsying reader response. In more informal ways I have been able to gauge the effect of the Screwtape Letters by contacting those who have written reviews to share their opinion, but it is good to have scholarly research on how Lewis' work has influenced people on a broad scale.