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An informative and original collection of twenty-five essays, the Resource Guide to Asian American Literature offers background materials for the study of this expanding discipline and suggests strategies and ideas for teaching well-known Asian American works.
The volume focuses on fifteen novels and book-length prose narratives (among them Meena Alexander’s Nampally Road, Louis Chu’s Eat a Bowl of Tea, Monica Sone’s Nisei Daughter, Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club) and six works of drama (including David Henry Hwang’s M. Butterfly). Each essay contains information about the work (e.g., its publication or production history), its popular and critical reception, a biographical sketch of the author, the historical context, major themes, critical issues, pedagogical topics, a list of comparative works, an assessment of resources, and a bibliography. The Resource Guide concludes with four essays that present themes and approaches for the study and teaching of short fiction, poetry, and panethnic anthologies.
This volume provides a fresh look at what “Asian American literature” means and serves as an introduction to the study and teaching of this flourishing field. It is an essential collection for students, teachers, and scholars of all American literatures.
Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, with sales exceeding three million copies, is one of the most widely read works of contemporary fiction. A classic of African literature, it is taught in college courses ranging from graduate seminars in English and comparative literature to undergraduate offerings in English, history, ethnic studies, anthropology, folklore, and political science; it is also studied in high school literature and social studies classes. Yet teaching such a book presents special problems; Things Fall Apart is rooted in African social and historical realities that are often unfamiliar to North American readers. This collection of essays, all written by experienced teachers, aims to help instructors introduce students to the rich cultural background of the novel as well as to its narrative and structural complexities.
Like other books in the MLA’s Approaches to Teaching World Literature series, this volume is divided into two parts. Part 1, “Materials,” surveys biographical sources and interviews, background studies, critical commentaries, films based on Things Fall Apart, and other instructional aids. In part 2, “Approaches,” sixteen contributors describe strategies they have used to teach Achebe’s work. Several essays were solicited from eminent African scholars who, having taught abroad, know firsthand the challenges of conveying cross-cultural understanding through African literature. The volume features an introductory statement by Chinua Achebe, in which he comments on the responses his novel has elicited from readers around the world and offers advice on probing the significance of the story.
Margaret Atwood’s works, especially The Handmaid’s Tale, are widely taught not only in literature courses but also in economics, political science, sociology, film, and business courses. Her writings span a variety of genres and address such themes as identity, Canadian nationalism, struggle for survival, sexual politics, and shamanism; this rich and diverse range has proved fertile ground for teachers and critics alike. Approaches to Teaching Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and Other Works is the first book to focus on the teaching of this writer’s oeuvre exclusively.
First performed in 1964, Amiri Baraka’s play about a charged encounter between a black man and a white woman still has the power to shock. The play, steeped in the racial issues of its time, continues to speak to racial violence and inequality today.
This volume offers strategies for guiding students through this short but challenging text. Part 1, “Materials,” provides resources for biographical information, critical and literary backgrounds, and the play’s early production history. The essays of part 2, “Approaches,” address viewing and staging Dutchman theatrically in class. They help instructors ground the play artistically in the black arts movement, the beat generation, the theater of the absurd, pop music, and the blues. Background on civil rights, black power movements, the history of slavery, and Jim Crow laws helps contextualize the play politically and historically.
Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic has quickly joined the ranks of celebrated literary graphic novels. Set in part at a family-run funeral home, the book explores Alison’s complicated relationship with her father, a closeted gay man. Amid the tensions of her home life, Alison discovers her own lesbian sexuality and her talent for drawing. The coming-of-age story and graphic format appeal to students. However, the book’s nonlinear structure, frank representations of sexuality and death, and intertextuality with modernist novels, Greek myths, and other works present challenges in the classroom.
This volume offers strategies for teaching Fun Home in a variety of courses, including literature, women’s and gender studies, art, and education. Part 1, “Materials,” outlines the text’s literary, historical, and theoretical allusions. The essays of part 2, “Approaches,” emphasize the work’s genres, including autobiography and graphic narrative, as well as its psychological dimensions, including trauma, disability, and queer identity. The essays give options for reading Fun Home along with Bechdel’s letters and drafts; her long-running comic strip, Dykes to Watch Out For; the Broadway musical adaptation of the book; and other stories of LGBQT lives.
Waiting for Godot offers as much of a challenge in the classroom today as it did to its early audiences in the 1950s. It has become “the centerpiece of a range of college and university courses. Whatever the context and approach, the play continues to yield readings that richly contribute to the study of both drama and culture,” write June Schlueter and Enoch Brater, the book’s editors.
This volume, like others in the MLA’s Approaches to Teaching World Literature series, is divided into two parts. The first, “Materials,” gives editions and productions, readings for students, reference works, background and critical studies, and audiovisual resources. The second part, “Approaches,” contains twenty essays that situate the play in the Beckett canon, explore what it does rather than what it means, discuss its absurdity, put it in the context of contemporary drama, interpret it from different critical perspectives, examine its relation to Charlie Chaplin, compare its French and English texts, and share the pedagogical insights obtained by a teacher who directed it in a maximum-security prison in Florida.
Octavia E. Butler’s works of science fiction invite readers to consider the structures of power in society and to ask what it means to be human. Butler addresses social justice issues such as poverty, racism, and violence against women and connects the history of slavery in the United States with speculation on a biologically altered future world.
The first section of this volume, “Materials,” lists secondary sources and interviews with Butler and suggests texts that instructors might pair with her works. Essays in the second section, “Approaches,” situate Butler in science fiction, modernism, and Afrofuturism and provide interdisciplinary approaches from political science, philosophy, art, and digital humanities. The contributors present strategies for teaching Butler in literature courses as well as courses designed for adult learners, preservice teachers, and students at historically black colleges and universities.
Idaho State University Teaching Literature Book Award Winner
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.
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