Exam Board: SQA Level: National 4/5 Subject: Administration & IT The National 4 & 5 Administration Course Notes provide comprehensive guidance for the entire CfE course. Course Notes give a practical, supportive approach to help deliver the new curriculum and offer an appropriate blend of sound teaching and learning with exam and assessment guidance. Progress and attainment for all * Course specifications are fully covered * 'You should already know' sections identify prior learning and skills * 'Key questions' ensure that every student can progress securely Active learning * 'Make the link' features encourage broader thinking between and across subjects * 'Skills for Life, Learning & Work' features invite students to contextualise learning * 'Watch point' features give helpful tips and highlight important information Assessment and practice you can rely on * 'Activities' provide opportunities to apply knowledge and put practical skills to work * 'Learning checklists' enable students to monitor progress regularly

While studies of literature may include traditionally marginalized works, theories of literary form remain grounded in writings that affirm the status quo. Carole Anne Taylor now reconceives the theories of tragedy and comedy, drawing on African American literature to show how the two are often interrelated.

Through readings of works by such writers as Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Gloria Naylor, Toni Cade Bambara, and South African-born Bessie Head, Taylor argues for ways in which genre theory and modern and postmodern literature can be brought together. She demonstrates how these writers interrogate relations of power from vantage points that theorize both intracultural and intercultural difference, and how they question the notion of a literature too much at ease with such opposites as oral and written, self and other, and tragedy and comedy. By then reconsidering works by William Faulkner, Gertrude Stein, and Zora Neale Hurston, Taylor further shows how theories generated "at the margins" can enrich, complicate, and even embrace the literary canon.

Taylor rethinks such traditional critical terms as "catharsis" in productive ways that illuminate both marginalized and canonical literature. She also provides a model for what "resistant criticism" can contribute to a transformation of traditional theory -- a transformation necessary if theories of genre are to cease excluding African American works from their definition of what literature is and does.