Search Modern Language Association
Log in to Modern Language Association
Essays and reports on undergraduate preparation of teachers and on professional development for teachers already in the field, with practical advice for examining programs and initiating reforms.
Performance pedagogy does more than involve students in the acting, directing, and production work needed to bring a play text to life. It engages them in interpretation; it makes issues of structure or subtext immediate; it deepens understanding of stage history; in film, it demonstrates the role of camera, lighting, sound.
Teaching Shakespeare through Performance is designed for teachers of both high school and college English courses who wish to introduce performance strategies into their classroom. The volume illustrates how attention to theatrical detail can give insight into Shakespeare’s work and world: the significance of an omitted exit or entrance, the role of stage directions in King Lear, costumes and transvestism on the Renaissance stage, the changing fashions of acting Juliet, how experimenting with the use of different personal props in a scene from Hamlet reveals cultural attitudes, and much more.
The first edition of A Guide to Serial Bibliographies for Modern Literatures was praised by The Year’s Work in English Studies as an “excellent [and] very useful work of reference.” The second edition, updated and expanded, includes information on electronic serial bibliographies.
The guide lists 777 serial bibliographies, including the major humanities and general periodical indexes; works that cover national literatures, literary periods, genres, themes and subjects, and literary authors; and other bibliographies in subjects related to literature, to literary study, and to the literary profession. It describes reference tools such as the Vertical File Index and Essay and General Literature Index, electronic databases and information services such as Lexis/Nexis and Ethnic Newswatch, and bibliographies that are published as part of journals and newsletters such as Hispania and the Keats-Shelley Journal.
The first two chapters summarize the scope of the guide and list comprehensive bibliographies. The following two chapters focus on bibliographies for English and foreign literatures. A chapter on subjects describes bibliographies on topics ranging from African American studies to women’s studies, and the final chapter covers authors from Hans Christian Andersen to Émile Zola. An appendix lists all the electronic bibliographies discussed in the guide.
A standard resource for any reference collection in the humanities, A Guide to Serial Bibliographies for Modern Literatures will be invaluable to graduate students and scholars of modern languages.
Twelve previously unpublished essays relate the teaching of writing to various aspects of postmodern thought, including feminism, neo-Marxist theories, the historiography of Michel Foucault, and cultural criticism. The first ten essays examine modes of discourse ranging from Socratic dialogue to the “false magic” of the National Enquirer, review the present disciplinary impulses of composition studies, and propose new directions for the teaching of writing. The two closing articles synthesize the arguments of the essays and respond critically to the collection as a whole.
The fifteen essays and six responses in this volume of the MLA’s Research and Scholarship in Composition series “push the boundaries of knowledge in both feminism and composition,” as the coeditor Susan C. Jarratt writes, “by exploring the productive intersections and tensions of the two.” She goes on to say, “Composition at its best works against the grain of conventional institutional practices. . . . Both feminist inquiry and post-current-traditional composition studies/styles challenge assumptions and seek to transform ways of thinking, teaching, and learning.” Both are complex, containing different agendas and different voices.
Feminism and Composition Studies: In Other Words is a feminist project that boldly places at its center differences among women. Topics discussed include American history, politics, language, racism, pedagogy, contingent labor in the teaching of writing, e-mail behavior, and the need for educational and institutional reform. Teachers, graduate students, program administrators, and feminists will find valuable the critiques, theoretical as well as personal, contained in this unusually honest and thought-provoking volume.
Designed for courses on literary translation, Translating Literature discusses the process and the product of literary translation, incorporating both practical advice for translators and theoretical discussion on the role translations play in the evolution and interpretation of literatures. Exercises and examples highlight problems in translation.
This collection of essays, the second Approaches volume devoted to Shakespeare (the first discussed King Lear), covers four of the Bard’s later plays: The Tempest, The Winter’s Tale, Cymbeline, and Pericles. Developed from a survey of ninety-three faculty members who teach these romances, the volume presents both practical and imaginative approaches to presenting the works in the classroom.
Like other books in the MLA’s Approaches to Teaching World Literature series, this one is divided into two parts. The first part, “Materials,” evaluates editions of the plays, recommends readings for students and teachers, and suggests aids to teaching. In the second part, “Approaches,” the first five essays treat the late romances as a group, connecting them with Shakespeare’s tragedies and with political discourse of the period, examining the father-daughter theme and viewing them as family romance, and defining the dramaturgy of the late romances. The remaining thirteen essays focus on specific plays and explain how to use performance, audiovisual aids, and various historical and critical approaches to enhance the plays’ presentation.
The increased attention to women’s literature of the early modern period has reinvigorated literary study, not by supplanting the traditional canon but by renewing our interest in it. As the volume editors note, “Teaching Spenser’s The Faerie Queene is a richer experience when one also teaches Wroth’s Urania.”
Teaching Tudor and Stuart Women Writers summarizes the latest scholarship on British women writers who lived from roughly 1500 to 1700 and suggests strategies for presenting their works in the classroom. Thirty-six essays discuss frequently anthologized pieces by such women as Margaret Cavendish, Elizabeth I, Mary Sidney, and Mary Wroth as well as the writings of women who have come to the notice of scholars only recently.
The volume addresses women’s roles in early modern society and women’s limited access to education and opportunities for writing; provides background for understanding literary, religious, historical, and social texts; gives biographies of certain writers; lists texts suitable for presentation in the undergraduate classroom; suggests models for lower-level surveys as well as semester-length graduate seminars; and details the availability of primary sources.
James Harner’s popular pamphlet, first published in 1985, has been revised and updated in the light of advances in computer technology and the availability of humanities databases. Harner offers useful information on planning research, organizing an annotated bibliography, compiling entries, using a computer to prepare the manuscript, and editing. While the booklet focuses on the preparation of a comprehensive bibliography on a single literary author, the procedures and techniques are easily adapted to selective or subject bibliographies and to other periods and disciplines.
Courses in literature and medicine flourish in undergraduate, medical school, and continuing-education programs throughout the United States and Canada. This volume presents a variety of approaches to the subject. It is intended both for literary scholars and for physicians who teach literature and medicine or who are interested in interdisciplinary breadth.
The essays describe model courses; list readings widely taught in literature and medicine courses; discuss the value of texts in both medical education and the practice of medicine; and provide bibliographic resources, including works in the history of medicine from classical antiquity.
View Cart