“The Fall of the House of Usher“ in EFL Classroom

Saša Simović,Marija Mijušković

doi:10.5901/mjss.2014.v5n16p609

Abstract

Edgar Allan Poe’s masterpiece “The Fall of the House of Usher” has always received great critical attention. It is a typical Poean Gothic story which exploits some of the writer’s most recognizable devices such as premature burial, “coming back” from the dead, the disintegration of the mind, the effect of doubling, special audio-visual effects, horror and decay, and the main protagonists as “isolato” characters detached from the realm of reality. The story was an excellent material to present the functioning of Poe’s theory of the short story in class. When it comes to teaching this masterpiece in the EFL classroom, research was conducted in an American literature lesson with third year university students of English as a foreign language. The aim of this research was to check whether the teaching procedure in the American literature class helps students to digest Poe's masterpiece more easily and to comprehend it successfully and whether students understand Poe’s theory of the short story as well as whether they consider it highly applicable to “The Fall of the House of Usher”. The participants of this study were 14 university students with English as their foreign language in their third year of studies who had attended the American literature course during one academic year. The researchers constructed a questionnaire as a tool to measure the extent of students’ understanding of Poe’s short story and the applicability of its postulates to “The Fall of the House of Usher”. The results of the study demonstrate that students improved in their identifying and comprehending the postulates of Poe’s short story and their applicability to “The Fall of the House of Usher”. This shows that the teaching approach, in the form of the described teaching procedure, was effective. The research implications for the EFL American literature classroom, concerning the short story aspect in Poe’s work, suggest that there is no disadvantage to the teaching procedure and only potential benefits are to be found. As a result, though, further research is necessary to demonstrate some other, different or additional ways to teaching Poe and reasons as to how and why the teaching methods work where a larger sample of students is included in the teaching and research. DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2014.v5n16p609

Highlights

Edgar Allan Poe was a writer, a poet, a literary critic, a magazine editor and one of the greatest American Romantic writers who left a recognizable stamp on world literature
The procedure we describe here was a part of the research we conducted in American literature lessons with thirdyear university students of English as a foreign language
The results of the study demonstrate that students improved in identifying and comprehending the postulates of Poe’s short story and that they found a high applicability of the postulates to “The Fall of the House of Usher”

Summary

Introduction

Edgar Allan Poe was a writer, a poet, a literary critic, a magazine editor and one of the greatest American Romantic writers who left a recognizable stamp on world literature. According to Poe the short story writer has to be a skilful artist able to plan every single step of the story’s creation process Otherwise, he would be doomed to artistic failure. The dénouement – in all other compositions the intended effect, should be definitely considered and arranged before writing the first word, and no word should be written which does not tend, or form a part of a sentence which tends, to the development of the dénouement, or to the strengthening of the effect” (Poe, 1984) In many of his stories, especially those written in the Gothic vein, he introduced the narrator and his disturbed mind, “isolato” characters, the effect of doubling, the Dopplegänger theme, the atmosphere of horror, fear and decay, special audio-visual effects, premature burials, the concept of the house as the mind, and the beautiful heroine that dies, leaving her companion bereft

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