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Italo Calvino, whose works reflect the major literary and cultural trends of the second half of the twentieth century, is known for his imagination, humor, and technical virtuosity. He explores topics such as neorealism, folktale, fantasy, and social and political allegory and experiments with narrative style and structure. Students take delight in Calvino’s wide-ranging and inventive work, whether in Italian courses or in courses in comparative or world literature, literary criticism, cultural studies, philosophy, or even architecture.
Given the range of his writing, teaching Calvino can seem a daunting task. This volume aims to help instructors develop creative and engaging classroom strategies. Part 1, “Materials,” presents an overview of Calvino’s writings, nearly all of which are available in English translation, as well as critical works and online resources. The essays in part 2, “Approaches,” focus on general themes and cultural contexts, address theoretical issues, and provide practical classroom applications. Contributors describe strategies for teaching Calvino that are as varied as his writings, whether having students study narrative theory through If on a winter’s night a traveler, explore literary genre with Cosmicomics, improve their writing using Six Memos for the Next Millennium, or read Mr. Palomar in a general education humanities course.
Thirty-five years ago Germaine Brée wrote that The Plague “is, within its limits, a great novel, the most disturbing, most moving novel yet to have come out of the chaos of the mid-century.” Even though Camus’s place within the literary canon has fluctuated over the last four decades, he remains a rare phenomenon: a foreign writer widely read in the United States and easily accessible to and popular with students. In high schools and colleges, The Plague is taught in courses on literature, language, philosophy, theology, political science, and history.
The volume, like others in the MLA’s Approaches to Teaching World Literature series, is divided into two parts. The first part, “Materials,” reviews French and English editions of The Plague and of other works by Camus, reference works, background studies, and audiovisual aids. In the second part, “Approaches,” Germaine Brée’s prologue reflecting on Camus’s career in North American academe is followed by essays suggesting ways to present The Plague in the classroom. The first essay situates The Plague in a world literature survey; the next ten contributors discuss teaching the novel in courses on French literature; in the study of philosophy, law, and medicine; and within the novel’s historical, biographical, and geographical contexts. A final essay by Mary Ann Caws offers personal observations on the relevance of Camus’s oeuvre.
Unlike many other great works of English literature, My Ántonia is immediately accessible to today’s students. “Cather’s novel is so clear,” Susan J. Rosowski says, “so apparently effortless, that it hardly seems art at all, and the challenge for instructors is to move their students beyond a surface reading to an understanding of the novel’s art and its place in literary history.” Yet few instructors have had training in fields relating to Cather studies. The aim of this collection of essays, then, is to provide background and ideas instructors have found most helpful in teaching My Ántonia.
This volume, like others in the MLA’s Approaches to Teaching World Literature series, is divided into two parts. The first part, “Materials,” reviews required and recommended student reading, reference works, background studies, and critical commentary. In the second part, “Approaches,” twenty-five teachers share their strategies for presenting the novel in the classroom; their essays are arranged in four sections that focus on Cather’s life and times, the novel’s literary and philosophical traditions, teaching the novel in particular courses, and, finally, exploring specific aspects of the novel.
“All prose fiction is a variation on the theme of Don Quixote,“ remarked Lionel Trilling about the novel that influenced writers ranging from Fielding to Faulkner. Approaches to Teaching Cervantes’ Don Quixote brings together resources and strategies for teaching the novel to undergraduates. Although beginning instructors and nonspecialists might be expected to profit most from this collection, even seasoned Cervantistas will discover much of interest to them and their students.
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 texts, translations, reference works, secondary sources, and aids to teaching. In the second part, “Approaches,” fifteen essays reflect on ways to make Don Quixote come alive for students, explain the interpretive underpinnings behind selected strategies for teaching the novel, examine the work’s oral and written language traditions, discuss the protagonist as the archetypal baroque man, and describe successful ways of presenting Don Quixote to nonmajors.
This second edition of Approaches to Teaching Cervantes’s Don Quixote highlights dramatic changes in pedagogy and scholarship in the last thirty years: today, critics and teachers acknowledge that subject position, cultural identity, and political motivations afford multiple perspectives on the novel, and they examine both literary and sociohistorical contextualization with fresh eyes.
Part 1, “Materials,” contains information about editions of Don Quixote, a history and review of the English translations, and a survey of critical studies and Internet resources. In part 2, “Approaches,” essays cover such topics as the Moors of Spain in Cervantes’s time; using film and fine art to teach his novel; and how to incorporate psychoanalytic theory, satire, science and technology, gender, role-playing, and other topics and techniques in a range of twenty-first-century classroom settings.
Taught more frequently than any of Charlotte Brontë’s other novels, Jane Eyre presents distinct problems for the contemporary undergraduate instructor, one being the work’s sheer length. Almost all the instructors who responded to a survey conducted for this volume spent two to three weeks teaching the novel in their courses and seminars; their students discovered, in the words of the volume coeditor Diane Long Hoeveler, “as much about themselves, their own memories of childhood, their own struggles for autonomy, as they [did] about the cultural, social, economic, religious, and literary backgrounds that constitute the milieu of the novel.”
Like other books in the MLA’s Approaches to Teaching World Literature series, this one is divided into two parts. The first part, “Materials,” discusses editions, relevant background and critical studies, biographies, bibliographies, and other aids to teaching. In the second part, “Approaches,” twenty contributors discuss Brontë’s background and biography; the influence of Christianity, fairy tales, and Gothic fiction on her work; the themes of the novel and its social and political implications; its film and stage adaptations; relevant artworks (paintings, etchings, and portraits); and various theoretical approaches to teaching the book.
The inaugural volume in the MLA’s popular Approaches to Teaching World Literature series comprises bibliographic and instructional essays devoted to the first great English poet. The consultant editor, Florence H. Ridley, notes in her introduction, “As teachers we are faced with the challenge of enabling our students to see how Chaucer’s poetry passes the ultimate test of the world’s greatest literature.” The pieces collected here address the special difficulties of introducing students to Chaucer’s language and his political, social, and intellectual milieu.
Like other books in the Approaches series, this volume is divided into two parts. Part 1, “Materials,” surveys editions, anthologies, recommended student readings, recordings, films, and other instructional aids. In part 2, “Approaches,” fifteen teachers discuss how to present Chaucer in settings ranging from survey courses for nonmajors to seminars devoted to the author. Readers will find within a variety of useful information, including discussions of Chaucer’s cultural context, the representation of women in medieval literature, and the theme of pilgrimage in fourteenth-century poetry.
Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales was the subject of the first volume in the Approaches to Teaching series, published in 1980. But in the past thirty years, Chaucer scholarship has evolved dramatically, teaching styles have changed, and new technologies have created extraordinary opportunities for studying Chaucer. This second edition of Approaches to Teaching Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales reflects the wide variety of contexts in which students encounter the poem and the diversity of perspectives and methods instructors bring to it. Perennial topics such as class, medieval marriage, genre, and tale order rub shoulders with considerations of violence, postcoloniality, masculinities, race, and food in the tales.
The first section, “Materials,” reviews available editions, scholarship, and audiovisual and electronic resources for studying The Canterbury Tales. In the second section, “Approaches,” thirty-six essays discuss strategies for teaching Chaucer’s language, for introducing theory in the classroom, for focusing on individual tales, and for using digital resources in the classroom. The multiplicity of approaches reflects the richness of Chaucer’s work and the continuing excitement of each new generation’s encounter with it.
This Approaches to Teaching volume aims to provide students with a vision of Chaucer that highlights the great variety, breadth, and depth of his entire body of work. Although Chaucerians recognize that Troilus and Criseyde and the shorter poems are as entertaining and complex as the more familiar Canterbury Tales, teachers of medieval English do not readily include these texts in their courses. The materials collected here offer instructors ideas and strategies for making Chaucer’s lesser-taught works as memorable and engrossing for students as any of the narrative gems in Canterbury Tales.
Part 1, “Materials,” discusses available teaching resources, focusing not only on the many editions of Chaucer’s works in Middle English but also on translations for teachers whose students turn to modern English as a study aid.
The essays in part 2, “Approaches,” begin by exploring the poetry’s backgrounds, including sources and genre; the growth of the English vernacular as a literary language; Chaucer’s conception of history in its Christian, classical, and English political senses; the role of manuscript study in illuminating the historical record; and Chaucer’s representation of gender. The section on teaching the poems features essays that offer suggestions for overcoming students’ difficulties with Middle English, consider the relation between Chaucer and his readers, assess various theoretical models, and show how a wide range of visual imagery can be used in the classroom. A final section on course contexts includes essays on teaching these poems for the first time, as well as designing classes for nonmajors and graduate students. The volume concludes with an appendix on reading Chaucer aloud with students.
Chekhov’s works are unflinching in the face of human frailty. With their emphasis on the dignity and value of individuals during unique moments, they help us better understand how to exist with others when we are fundamentally alone. Written in Russia at the end of the nineteenth century, when the country began to move fitfully toward industrialization and grappled with the influence of Western liberalism even as it remained an autocracy, Chekhov’s plays and stories continue to influence contemporary writers.
The essays in this volume provide classroom strategies for teaching Chekhov’s stories and plays, discuss how his medical training and practice related to his literary work, and compare Chekhov with writers both Russian and American. The volume also aims to help instructors with the daunting array of new editions in English, as well as with the ever-growing list of titles in visual media: filmed theater productions of his plays, adaptations of the plays and stories scripted for film, and amateur performances freely available online.
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