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Cthulhuic Literacy:
Teaching secondar y English
with a Dose of Lovecraft
David R. Cole, University of Western Sydney
Abstract: This paper suggests how the weird iction of H.P. Lovecraft might be mobilised within
secondary English classrooms to examine aspects of visual literacy, literary style, narrative form and
intertextuality. The approach that is outlined is characterised, after Lovecrafts famous monster, as
a Cthulhuic literacy and is framed by Multiple Literacy Theory that positions learning as intrinsically
relational and encourages teachers to use affect positively to enhance textual practice (Masny &
Cole, 2009). Affect is put to work in the classroom as an organising principle, beginning with the
choice of text to be used and continuing through the particular ways in which teacher and students
work with the selected text.
Introduction
H.P. Lovecraft is perhaps one of the most fascinating and strangely misunderstood literary
personalities to emerge in the last 100 years. This article and set of lesson ideas for high
school English teachers, will attempt to capture and augment the fascinating, but rather
obscure literary quality that Lovecraft possesses to mobilise and enhance effective secondary
English teaching and learning practice. such effective teaching and learning practice relies on
speciic principles and ideas that have been articulated in recent English teaching and learning theory and research based on the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari (see
Cole 2009 & 2008), and these notions will be demonstrated throughout this article around
and through six key points:
1. The links and connections between effective speaking and listening, reading and writing
practice through the use of literature as pedagogy may be strengthened and theorised
through the notion of affective literacy (see Amsler 2002).
2. Affective literacy deines a manner of introducing and using unconscious forces (see
Guattari 2013) in the English literature teaching and learning context.
3. The non-linear development of and full engagement with the subject of secondary
English may be understood and acted upon through the emergence and use of affective
but variant themes and literacies for reading, writing, speaking and listening (Masny,
2006) such as the Cthulhuic Literacy of this article.
4. Affective literacy is an important aspect of multiple literacies theory (MLT) that demonstrates ways to complexify and contextualise the English teaching and learning space
through identiication with minor literacies (Masny & Cole, 2009, pp.167181), and critically in relation to and with alterity. MLT has been deined as reading the world, reading
the self and reading text (Masny & Cole, 2009, p.3).
5. Multiple literacies theory and affective literacy include mediated and digitised literacies
that have come about by working seamlessly with and through ICT applications in education (e.g. Cole & Pullen, 2010) and the application of technology to the study of literature.
6. The English literature teaching and learning contexts as described through this article
work against sameness (cf. Cole & Hager, 2010) to exploit the difference opened up
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Figure 1. Picture of Cthulhu by Alexander Liptak. Image used with permission under Creative Commons repository.
Attribution 3.0 Unported licence.
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Note
1 Editors note: Another Cthulhuic parody is the old spice
advertisement available at: http://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=Xc90UhV6hJA Thanks to one of our anonymous
reviewers for this link.
References
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Guattari, F. (2013). Schizoanalytic Cartographies (trans. A
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