Read Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird for Free Online Page B

novel.
    Looking for Critical Literacy
    Many of the teachers’ answers in the working sample demonstrate strong familiarity with a text-centered approach to literature that resembles New Criticism. Their answers frequently move back and forth among generalizations, brief quotations, and focused analyses of the quoted passages. For example, one teacher writes perceptively about the “strong dramatic irony” present in the scene in front of the jailhouse door:
    We [the readers] know that the group of men who confront Atticus at the jail is a lynch mob that has come for Tom Robinson. Scout, however, does not understand the danger of the situation as it unfolds. When she innocently places herself in the middle of it, she sees not a group of potential murderers but a neighbor she recognizes, Walter Cunningham.
    At the same time, however, many of the teachers’ answers also demonstrate a reliance on pre-critical terminology, such as “essential truth,” and do not demonstrate a suspicion of “authorial intent,” a concept that is antithetical to New Critical close readings of texts. As famously stated by the New Critics W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe C. Beardsley, “[T]he design or intention of the author is neither available nor desirable as a standard for judging the success of a work of literary art” Lee’s biography is also not a common topic in the teachers’ answers in the working sample or in the full set of answers, yet a series of text searches of the full collection show that many of the students’ questions ask explicitly about the author’s “intent,” “choice,” or “purpose.” These questions often sound like homework assignments given by teachers to students, and the teachers’ answers in the full collection never challenge the idea of speculating on authorial intent. When it comes to incorporating more recent (post–New Critical) theoretical perspectives on literature and modeling critical engagement with the text, the teachers’ answers are often less successful.
    Moral Character
    The answers contributing to the emerging theme of Moral Character demonstrate only a limited degree of critical literacy. The answer identifying “perhaps the only chink in [Atticus’] armor” is critically sophisticated in that it challenges the easy and widespread classification of characters into good and evil and even hints at the power of Lee’s narrative in shaping the readers’ opinion of the characters: “we [as readers] are supposed to like Atticus.” Even the double turn in the short paragraph of this teacher’s answer—with one “however” after another—shows an interest in ongoing exploration rather than premature judgment and closure. This answer thus demonstrates an approach aligned with reader response criticism and perhaps even with deconstruction, as the answer presents (in comparison to many of the other answers) a “reading against the grain.” Two posted questions outside of the working sample also draw explicitly on reader response criticism; these questions come from tenth-grade students and ask how the reader “has . . . been positioned” to respond to specific characters in the novel. No other clear instances of reader response criticism are evident in the working sample or the full collection of postings. Instead, when talking about the characters in the novel, the answers tend to reduce the literary work to a moral lesson on how and how not to behave. Such answers pursue what is called a pre-critical approach; they seek to find a moral or general truth rather than to examine the particulars of the narrative being discussed. Critical literacy might be improved by exploring how the narrative is not impartial; the novel establishes for the reader a strong sense of familiarity with some characters (the Finches, in particular) and a lack of identification with others