Teaching with Paratext
Rereading Roald Dahl’s “Lamb to the Slaughter” in the Literature Classroom
Keywords:
Feminist, Pedagogy, Paratext, AnthologyAbstract
In this age of PDFs and free e-texts, literature gets separated from its initial context, perhaps even devoid of context all together. Taking Roald Dahl’s most anthologized short story “Lamb to the Slaughter” as its object of study, this article proposes a pedagogy that embraces the return of paratextual material to the literature classroom. Through a close reading of Dahl’s story and an account of the paratextual material surrounding its initial publication in Harper’s Magazine in 1953, the study of paratext can offer students a more complex and culturally textured understanding of a text, one that often expands and illuminates their own emplaced reading practices—i.e. practices situated in, reflective of, and partly determined by not just the particular cultural-historical moment of a story’s publication, but also by their own emplacedness as readers in the twenty-first century.Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:
1. Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
2. Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
3. Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work.