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Growing up in Cleveland after the Civil War and during the brutal rollback of Reconstruction and the onset of Jim Crow, Charles W. Chesnutt could have passed as white but chose to identify himself as black. An intellectual and activist involved with the NAACP who engaged in debate with Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois, he wrote fiction and essays that addressed issues as various as segregation, class among both blacks and whites, Southern nostalgia, and the Wilmington coup d’état of 1898. The portrayals of race, racial violence, and stereotyping in Chesnutt’s works challenge teachers and students to contend with literature as both a social and an ethical practice.
In part 1 of this volume, “Materials,” the editors survey the critical reception of Chesnutt’s works in his lifetime and after, along with the biographical, critical, and archival texts available to teachers and students. The essays in part 2, “Approaches,” address such topics in teaching Chesnutt as his use of dialect, the role of intertextuality and genre in his writing, irony, and his treatment of race, economics, and social justice.
Winner of the Sylvia Lyons Render Award from the Charles W. Chesnutt Association
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.
The novels of the South African writer J. M. Coetzee won him global recognition and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2003. His work offers substantial pedagogical richness and challenges. Coetzee treats such themes as race, aging, gender, animal rights, power, violence, colonial history and accountability, the silent or silenced other, sympathy, and forgiveness in an allusive and detached prose that avoids obvious answers or easy ethical reassurance.
Part 1 of this volume, “Materials,” identifies secondary materials, including multimedia and Internet resources, that will help instructors guide their students through the contextual and formal complexities of Coetzee’s fiction. In part 2, “Approaches,” essays discuss how to teach works that are sometimes suspicious of teachers and teaching. The essays aim to help instructors negotiate Coetzee’s ironies and allegories in his treatment of human relationships in a changing South Africa and of the shifting connections between human beings and the biosphere.
Richard Matlak, the editor of this Approaches volume, depicts Coleridge as both a model student and an accomplished teacher. “Stimulate the heart to love, and the mind to be early accurate,” Coleridge advised during a lecture on education, “and all other virtues will rise of their own accord.” The essays in this collection will help teachers apply Coleridge’s precept to the teaching of his poetry and prose.
One of seven books on Romantic poetry in the MLA’s Approaches to Teaching World Literature series, this volume is divided into two parts. The first part, “Materials,” evaluates texts, the teacher’s library, student reading, and audiovisual materials. In the second part, “Approaches,” seventeen established scholars describe the methods they have found most effective in presenting Coleridge in the classroom. The first two essays examine the many different sides of the poet’s personality and explore his relation to British society. In the essays that follow, contributors discuss Coleridge’s prose, the Conversation poems, and the Mystery poems—individually and in combination—from linguistic, psychological, sociological, historical, New Critical, feminist, intertextual, and other perspectives.
In 1881, Carlo Collodi intended simply to write a children’s story about an inexplicably animate piece of wood. The Adventures of Pinocchio has since become one of Italy’s most successful literary exports, giving life to numerous adaptations. The novel is meaningful to college students today, as it deals with the difficulty of abandoning childhood, the value of education, and what it means to be human.
This volume, like others in the MLA’s Approaches to Teaching World Literature series, is divided into two parts. Part 1, “Materials,” gives the instructor bibliographic information on the text and contexts of the book, the critical literature, and audiovisual and electronic resources. Part 2, “Approaches,” contains nineteen essays on teaching Pinocchio and its adaptations, which cover such topics as Collodi’s life, society in post-Unification Italy, the gothic element, the Frankenstein theme, myths and archetypes, the influence of Ariosto and other writers, children’s literature and censorship, the animal fable, and how the famous Disney movie is both a help and a hindrance in the classroom.
Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness” and “The Secret Sharer” are among the most taught and studied works of twentieth-century British fiction. Noted for their psychological depth and stylistic artistry, the two stories have been celebrated as exemplars of modernism. They have also given rise to controversy. Scholars have debated whether “Heart of Darkness” is a critique of British imperialism or a paean to it. In 1975, Chinua Achebe condemned the novella’s author as racist, a charge that has provoked much discussion.
This volume, like others in the MLA series Approaches to Teaching World Literature, is divided into two parts. Part 1, “Materials,” gives editions, criticism, and resources available to the instructor of these two complex texts. Part 2, “Approaches,” contains essays that treat historical contexts, such as slavery and the ivory trade in the Congo of the 1890s; examine literary issues, such as Conrad’s use of the unreliable narrator; discuss the place of gender and race in the stories; tell of students’ responses in a variety of public and private institutions; and explore specific pedagogical methods, including the use of films such as Coppola’s Apocalypse Now in the classroom.
A cosmopolitan author who spent nearly a decade in Europe and was versed in the works of his British and French contemporaries, James Fenimore Cooper was also deeply concerned with the America of his day and its history. His works embrace themes that have dominated American literature since: the frontier; the oppression of Native Americans by Europeans; questions of race, gender, and class; and rugged individualism, as represented by figures like the pirate, the spy, the hunter, and the settler. His most memorable character, Natty Bumppo, has entered into American popular culture.
The essays in this volume offer students bridges to Cooper's novels, which grapple with complex moral issues that are still crucial today. Engaging with film adaptations, cross-culturalism, animal studies, media history, environmentalism, and Indigenous American poetics, the essays offer new ways to bring these novels to life in the classroom.
Dante’s Divine Comedy can compel and shock readers: it combines intense emotion and psychological insight with medieval theology and philosophy. This volume will help instructors lead their students through the many dimensions—historical, literary, religious, and ethical—that make the work so rewarding and enduringly relevant yet so difficult.
Part 1, “Materials,” gives instructors an overview of the important scholarship on the Divine Comedy. The essays of part 2, “Approaches,” describe ways to teach the work in the light of its contemporary culture and ours. Various teaching situations (a first-year seminar, a creative writing class, high school, a prison) are considered, and the many available translations are discussed.
The contributors to this collection believe that Dante can be enjoyed by college students at every level whether or not they are literature or language majors. Primarily addressing instructors who teach the poem in translation, sixteen scholars suggest a variety of strategies and critical methods that will prove useful and informative to both experienced and novice teachers.
The volume, like others in the MLA’s Approaches to Teaching World Literature series, is divided into two parts. The first part, “Materials,” reviews commonly taught translations of the Divine Comedy, important reference works, background readings for teachers and students, and classroom aids such as paintings and illustrations. In the second part, “Approaches,” an introductory essay by Giovanni Cecchetti identifies nine key themes, ranging from Dante as the new Ulysses and the new Aeneas to Dante as poet and protagonist, that can structure an initial reading of the Divine Comedy. Other contributors take different perspectives including religious, political, and literary; apply several methodologies such as linguistic, typological, and analytical; and compare Dante with major modern authors like Proust and Joyce.
Long a centerpiece of eighteenth-century literary studies and a significant influence on the fiction of its day, Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe remains a standard text for teaching the period and continues to inspire popular adaptations and imitations, from children’s books to adventure films to reality TV. In teaching the work, instructors are challenged to separate the popular images of Crusoe from the text and its two sequels, creating distance from the myth without losing sight of why it is so powerful. Students need guidance in recognizing the way the novel blends genres—romance, travel tale, spiritual biography, diary, economic and political allegory—and in judging the character of Crusoe, a topic that has elicited much scholarly debate. The essays in this volume offer classroom tested strategies that address these and many other concerns.
Part 1, “Materials,” describes the novel’s publishing history, its critical reputation, its fictional predecessors, and its stature as an international text. It also surveys modern editions, scholarly biographies, and relevant Web sites and provides a brief biography of Defoe. Essays in part 2, “Approaches,” focus on genres such as travel writing and conduct books; consider how ideas about individualism, education, science, masculinity, and race helped shape Defoe’s trilogy; trace the themes of the colonial experience in castaway narratives and Robinsonades; and show how the Crusoe story unfolds in later periods, in J. M. Coetzee’s Foe, Derek Walcott’s poetry, children’s literature, and film.
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