Teaching Approaches to Literature

Teaching Approaches to Literature

Edited by Nathalie Denizot, Jean-Louis Dufays, and Brigitte Louichon
: Research in French Language Teaching,No. 11.

Because the didactics of literature is a young field of research, the diversity and vitality of recent work in this area raise questions about the research approaches and methods at play. This book is situated at the heart of this inquiry. Conceiving the didactics of literature as a specific content leads to viewing literature as a (meta)content of the French language discipline, one that can be examined using concepts developed in the didactics of French and in other didactics. Didactic Approaches to Literature should thus be understood as an open-ended inquiry, addressing not only the nature of these approaches and their history but also the notions and concepts they prioritize or neglect, as well as the methodologies they employ.

In keeping with the spirit of the AIRDF’s “Recherches en didactique du français” series, this volume brings together overviews by various authors to provide a progress report—inevitably provisional, yet indispensable—on this field of research. To this end, the first section of the book is devoted to the history and definition of the field of didactic approaches to literature, while a second section focuses on the notions and concepts explored in and through research in this field, and a third section examines the approaches and methods employed in this work.