Category: Book review

  • Post-Structuralism has influenced the political and ideological world around us in visible and measurable ways – and handling this concept as a procedure can have significant influence on the critical lives of students.

  • A clear introduction to structuralism in literary criticism, exploring how theorists such as Todorov, Propp, Greimas, Lévi‑Strauss, and Barthes reveal the deep structures that organise narrative. This post outlines the core procedures of structuralist analysis and shows how meaning emerges from patterns, relations, and underlying narrative systems rather than from surface themes or authorial intention.

  • In this series of posts, we explore what procedures, routines or sequences a critical reader does when analysing a text. This area of Literature at secondary school is not well developed, and often the process applied to reading falls more into the realm of Literacy rather then Literature – that is, we develop reading capacity,…

  • There has been a gap in my knowledge. I hold my hands up and announce; my degree was in English (not Literature), with a minor in Journalism. I was not trained academically in the procedures of Literature analysis. This has led in the past to what I now see as deficiencies in my delivery of…

  • My next read, on recommendation from a trusted colleague. Though, I have to return this at some point… Download QR

  • In my previous post, I attempted to impart some of Adrian Johns’ examination of the durability, permanence or ‘fixity’ inherent in printed literature, to maintain meanings indefinitely. It has been assumed by other academics that the very technology, the print itself and the construction of the book, carries some innate permanence as a priori, but…

  • Something that struck me as of paramount importance when designing these lessons was to open with some discussion of ‘what literature is’, The small ‘l’ denoting the common, concrete noun of the object-in-hand, as opposed to capital ‘L’ denoting the proper, abstract noun of the course; Literature. How we define this object as literary, and…