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“A novel is a mirror moving along a highway,” writes Stendhal in The Red and the Black, his chronicle of French Restoration politics, class, and society on the eve of the July Revolution of 1830. “One minute you see it reflect the azure skies, next minute the mud and puddles on the road.” Stendhal’s defense of his work and the widely taught novel in which it appears set forth two problematic topics for students: literary realism (and its limitations) and the presentation of history in literature. The editors of this volume focus on how best to address these questions in courses on French literature, world literature, European intellectual history, comparative literature, and more.
Based on a true story, Claire de Duras’s Ourika relates the experiences of a Senegalese girl who is rescued from slavery and raised by an aristocratic French family during the time of the French Revolution. Brought up in a household of learning and privilege, she is unaware of her difference until she overhears a conversation that suddenly makes her conscious of her race—and of the prejudice it arouses. From this point on, Ourika lives her life not as a French woman but as a black woman who feels “cut off from the entire human race.” As the Reign of Terror threatens her and her adoptive family, Ourika struggles with her unusual position as an educated African woman in eighteenth-century Europe.
A best-seller in the 1820s, Ourika captured the attention of Duras’s peers, including Stendhal, and became the subject of four contemporary plays. The work represents a number of firsts: the first novel set in Europe to have a black heroine; the first French literary work narrated by a black female protagonist; and, as John Fowles points out, “the first serious attempt by a white novelist to enter a black mind.”
In a recent survey of college teachers, Walden was mentioned more frequently than any other work as a text regularly included in nineteenth-century American literature courses. Today’s students are as likely to encounter Thoreau in freshman composition classes as they are in upper-level environmental literature seminars. “The challenge of teaching Thoreau, then,” Richard J. Schneider says, “is how to make most effective use of his obvious appeal amid the variety of possible course structures, critical theories, and pedagogical methods.”
This handy volume provides a general introduction to the practice, followed by many Victorian novelists, of publishing their works in installments in newspapers and magazines.
The bulk of the volume contains charts for 192 novels. Each chart lists the dates of appearance of individual parts and their relation to the chapters of the final book. The authors include Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, Thomas Hardy, Rudyard Kipling, Robert Louis Stevenson, William Makepeace Thackeray, Anthony Trollope, and others.
“To know Goethe’s Faust is to know the humanities,” writes the editor of this book. But Faust may be difficult to present to undergraduates, not only because of the problems of translation, if the play is taught in English, but also because of the special uses of language, mythology, history, and science in Goethe’s sprawling cosmo-drama. This volume provides help and encouragement to the teacher of Faust; it contains suggestions by teachers of German literature, Romance literatures, English and American literatures, comparative literature, history, and psychology.
Like other volumes in the MLA’s Approaches to Teaching World Literature series, it is divided into two parts. The first, “Materials,” discusses the editions and translations available, aids to teaching, background works, and critical studies. In the second part, “Approaches,” twenty-four essays discuss topics ranging from the genre of Faust to the problem of Gretchen’s docility to poetic devices to the devil in literature. The essays are marked by a tension between those that advocate a strictly literary approach to Goethe’s work and those that take interdisciplinary and interart approaches.
An MLA survey taken in preparation for this volume indicates that teachers are using The Awakening in no fewer than twenty areas of the college curriculum—from freshman writing and textual linguistics to American literature and women’s studies. The book is “something of a teacher’s dream,” writes Bernard Koloski; The Awakening is “an exceptionally rich work that rewards close literary analysis in surprising and exciting ways,” the prose is clear and accessible—and the novel is short.
Like other volumes in the MLA’s Approaches to Teaching World Literature series, the book is divided into two parts. Part 1, “Materials,” surveys editions and anthologies, readings for students, background studies, biographical and critical works, and audiovisual aids. In part 2, “Approaches,” twenty-three experienced teachers of The Awakening describe a variety of imaginative instructional strategies, from exploring the novel’s theme of childbirth and motherhood to comparing the lead character, Edna, to the mythological figures of Icarus and Psyche.
Pondering the physical and metaphysical implications of the whale’s circulatory system, the narrator of Moby-Dick says, “But how easy and how hopeless to teach these fine things!” Ishmael’s exclamation is reflected in the two purposes of this volume: to provide a practical “starter kit,” particularly for instructors who are teaching the novel for the first time, and to stimulate the resourcefulness and creativity of all teachers—including those who have taught the novel for years. The many suggestions and approaches in this collection are distilled in large part from the responses to a lengthy survey of 139 teachers and 72 students.
This volume, like others in the MLA’s Approaches to Teaching World Literature series, is divided into two parts. The first part, “Materials,” reviews editions, critical and background reading, reference works, and aids to teaching (including audiovisual materials). In the second part, “Approaches,” fourteen teachers share strategies for presenting Moby-Dick to a range of college audiences, from members of a freshman honors course to non-English majors. The contributors consider basic questions on how to teach the novel (e.g., whether to teach the book while students are reading it or after they have finished; what types of background materials to present) and employ a spectrum of methodologies and techniques (e.g., encouraging students to keep journals; exploring the novel’s lexicon; incorporating the paintings of J. M. W. Turner).
The life and the range of topics and tones of Emily Dickinson suit her to be included in such courses as American literature, Romanticism, realism, nineteenth-century culture, and women’s literary traditions. Her poetry poses numerous challenges for readers because of its compressed style, indeterminacy, and constant surprises; her biography fascinates students and critics alike.
This volume emphasizes instruction of Dickinson’s poetry at the undergraduate level. Like other volumes in the MLA’s Approaches to Teaching World Literature series, it is divided into two parts. The first, “Materials,” discusses editions of Dickinson’s poetry, aids to teaching, reference works, biographies, critical studies, and background materials. In the second part, “Approaches,” twenty essays suggest ways to introduce Dickinson and her poetry, draw attention to different aspects of her art, and place the poems in larger contexts. Among the topics raised are love, epistemology, the treatment of death, and implications of gender. Among the courses described are a composition class and an advanced literature class. An appendix provides sample assignments.
“Middlemarch,“ writes Kathleen Blake, “is the great Eliot novel, the one to teach, because it has the kind of appeal that can carry students forward toward becoming people who will return to it.” Taught to undergraduates in introductory surveys as well as in specialized upper-division courses, Middlemarch presents challenges to both teachers and students—in its length, its rich philosophical and psychological insights, its range of characters, its historical scope, its multiple plots and dense style. The sixteen essays in Approaches to Teaching Eliot’s Middlemarch describe imaginative ways experienced teachers have dealt with these challenges to share their love of the novel with their students.
Like other books in the MLA’s Approaches to Teaching World Literature series, this volume is divided into two parts. Part 1, “Materials,” surveys editions of Middlemarch, background readings on the Victorian period, textual and critical studies, and audiovisual aids. In part 2, “Approaches,” contributors describe specific strategies for teaching the novel. Among the topics discussed are critical trends in the classroom (e.g., narrative theory, deconstruction, feminist criticism, reader-response analysis), teachers’ responses to student difficulties with the novel, textual and contextual perspectives, and ways instructors overcome curricular and institutional constraints. The volume also offers a chronology of the writing and publication of Middlemarch, a genealogical chart for its large cast of characters, and an extensive bibliography.
The novels of Charles Dickens have attracted a wide and enthusiastic readership since they first appeared in the mid-nineteenth century, and in recent decades their social, biographical, and psychological elements have brought them increasing academic attention. “David Copperfield,” writes Richard J. Dunn, “serves not only to introduce Dickens or the novel but also to demonstrate the relations of fiction and autobiography and the roles of myth, archetype, and fantasy in fiction.”
This volume, like others in the MLA’s Approaches to Teaching World Literature series, is divided into two parts. The first part, “Materials,” surveys editions of David Copperfield, background studies on the Victorian milieu, introductions to Dickens, critical and textual commentaries, and other Dickens works. In the second part, “Approaches,” sixteen essays explore the many ways teachers present the novel in courses of varied subject emphasis and student experience. Contributors explain the critical assumptions that underlie their choice of David Copperfield and describe their teaching strategies. They show, for example, how they develop a sophisticated response to this universally popular novel; tailor the presentation for particular student levels; play the devil’s advocate by introducing common criticisms of the work; and teach the work as a classic of world literature, as a central document of Victorian fiction, or as a combination of fiction and autobiography.
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