My colleague Allen Carey-Webb's _Literature and lives : a response-based,
cultural studies approach to teaching English_ (NCTE, 2001) devotes a full
chapter to the use of HF in the high school classroom. Based on many years
spent training and mentoring (at the college level) high school teachers to
teach literature, this book offers some useful and stimulating ideas for how
to broach the controversies with intelligence and sensitivity.

I'd also like to say that the "less combative" designation obscures or
denies more useful responses to MT's novel. As long as we treat HF as the
one indispensible source on late-19th-c. racial issues, then it will of
course seem annoying or troublesome to some readers. The novel's cultural
centrality is not to be denied, and that makes it a useful teaching tool.
The inclusion of, say, Douglass and Washington and Chesnutt, just to name a
few, can relieve MT of the burden of being the token spokesnovelist for
American race and, potentially, relieve critics and supporters alike of the
burden of claiming that it's HF or nothing. Why does it have to be a one or
the other scenario?

Nicolas Witschi
Western Michigan University