LITERARY CRITICISM / EDUCATION

Dear Charles Dickens, Love, South LA tells the story of how students at Foshay Learning Center, a public school in South Los Angeles, studied Charles Dickens as part of their AP English curriculum, and how, in that journey, a fellow traveler emerged: the city itself.

Jacqueline Jean Barrios confronts the cultural challenges that big canonical books pose to new generations of readers. Instead of erasing the differences between Dickens’s implied audiences and his current ones, Barrios demonstrates how youth can serve as the visionaries who bridge the gap. By placing literature in everyday surroundings, students at any school and in any location can learn from the embodied and the poetic and even question the universalism that masks unexamined reverence for the Western canon.