Browsing by Subject "Lee, Harper. To kill a mockingbird"

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    Beyond the sentimental text: the practice and pedagogy of critical literacy in Harper Lee's To kill a mockingbird
    (2004) Dunne, Lindsay; Stadler, Gustavus
    Many readers and teachers approach Harper Lee's novel as a moral fable or self-interpreting text, because of its strong emotional appeal to readers. Beyond its sentimental surface, however, Lee's text both demonstrates and proposes a more expansive mode of critical reading. This essay traces the factors that affect the main character Scout in her development of critical literacy - a literacy of consciousness beyond the basic skills of reading and writing. Through her encounters with Maycomb's characters, her problematic interactions with her father Atticus, and her own social performances, Scout expands her ability to read both the written word and the texts of her social world, and consequently develops a sense of her own agency in response to a stifling social structure. As the narrator of her story, Scout constructs her text to advocate such active critical literacy.
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    “The ‘Her’ They Were Talking About”: Gender, Childhood, and Queer Time in the Works of Harper Lee
    (2017) Herman, Katy; Zwarg, Christina, 1949-
    This essay analyzes both of Harper Lee’s novels, To Kill a Mockingbird and Go Set a Watchman, arguing that their protagonist, Scout, conceives of normative adult womanhood as restrictive and therefore finds ways to circumvent growing up linearly. Through close reading of moments demonstrating Scout’s tomboy role, her existence in liminal spaces, and her tendency towards flashback, as well as the use of queer and trauma theory as presented by authors such as Kathryn Bond Stockton, J. Halberstam, and Elizabeth Freeman, this essay seeks to demonstrate how gender, childhood, and time are inextricably related in both of these works. Examining the two novels together allows readers to better see how Scout refuses to move straightly, normatively, into adulthood, instead enacting a sort of sideways growth. Looking at both novels also reveals a queer timeline of Lee’s own writing process. The queer temporal patterns of Mockingbird and Watchman’s writing, setting, and release echo Scout’s own nonlinear growth and suggests that issues of gender and time were perhaps even more central to Lee than the racial themes for which the novel has come to be known. The essay concludes by aligning Scout and Lee as two figures that exemplify Stockton’s notion of queer childhood, and discussing how both the writing process and reading experience of Mockingbird and Watchman are extra-textual demonstrations of queer time that mirror Scout’s own experience in the texts.