SOURCE: Grobman, Laurie. “(Re)Interpreting Storyteller in the Classroom: Teaching at the Crossroads.” College Literature 27, no. 3 (fall 2000): 88–110.

In the following essay, Grobman argues for a new classroom approach to Storyteller, contending that “the text itself provides a theoretical framework by which to teach it, one that emulates the kind of multicultural democracy implicit in multicultural education.”

Changes to the literary canon have led to increased scrutiny of pedagogical practices as well as the instructors who utilize them, but we remain at the crossroads of old and new, familiar and unfamiliar territories. We find ourselves in a new critical and pedagogical space, eager to meet the needs of unfamiliar texts but without clear guidelines for doing so. As Bruce Goebel and James Hall assert, pedagogical specialists have failed to adequately connect new classroom methods (e.g., writing process, collaborative learning) to “contemporary debates regarding the relationship among a literary...