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“What separates the Decameron from most of the canon is that it is fun to read,” says the editor in his preface to this volume. “Though its narrators sometimes weep, they laugh much more often.” Boccaccio’s highly teachable work is easily excerpted, and the essays in this collection describe stimulating ways to introduce these tales to undergraduates.
Teaching Elizabethan poems, Patrick Cheney and Anne Lake Prescott tell us in their preface to this book, “can provide pleasure and insight, but it can also be a challenge: modern students, and even modern teachers, sometimes find shorter Elizabethan poems aesthetically or emotionally engaging but culturally remote and intellectually difficult.” This collection of essays presents materials and strategies for helping students and teachers share in the enjoyment of Elizabethan poetry, including verse by authors such as Thomas Campion, John Donne, Michael Drayton, Elizabeth I, George Gascoigne, Ben Jonson, Christopher Marlowe, Walter Ralegh, Mary Sidney, Philip Sidney, William Shakespeare, John Skelton, Edmund Spenser, the earl of Surrey, Mary Wroth, and Thomas Wyatt.
Like other books in the Approaches to Teaching World Literature series, this volume is divided into two parts. Part 1, “Materials,” suggests texts and anthologies for use in the classroom and identifies important background resources and critical studies for the instructor. From this profusion of information, the coeditor, Patrick Cheney, recommends a convenient list of items for the instructor in a hurry. Part 2, “Approaches,” contains thirty-seven essays on teaching individual poems and authors or a selection of poems, as well as developing an entire course using a coherent critical narrative.
One of the most frequently taught slave narratives, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass is assigned in many courses, including American and African American literature, African American studies, women’s studies, and even composition. Regularly excerpted in introductory American literature and composition anthologies, Douglass’s classic first-person account is ideal for exploring the artistic accomplishment of the slave narrator. In this Approaches to Teaching World Literature volume, sixteen essays on teaching the work testify to the complexity of such accounts and their possibilities in the classroom.
Like other books in the MLA’s Approaches series, this one is divided into two parts. The first part, “Materials,” discusses the reference works, historical and critical studies, and other materials most commonly used and recommended by teachers of Douglass’s work. In the second part, “Approaches,” a diverse group of scholars describe methods of presentation that they have found effective for enlivening classroom discussion and enhancing students’ appreciation of the text. Their essays outline the challenges posed by Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass and the fundamental literary and historical debates surrounding the narrator’s account. They also evaluate problems of cultural authority and historical record, provide examples of teaching the text alongside other slave narratives, and suggest ways to incorporate it into introductory courses such as humanities and world literature.
In this era of shifting geopolitical boundaries, numerous books and articles question what “American” literature is, what “the literary” is, and how what is called early American literature can best be taught. This fifteenth volume of the MLA series Options for Teaching examines these issues and offers approaches and methods to help teachers and their students reconceptualize early American literatures as a complex body of multifaceted works rather than as merely an offshoot of British culture or a putatively American past.
Part 1 consists of both multidisciplinary approaches and more narrowly framed investigations. Some essays discuss the rewards of teaching early American materials from groups not considered dominant—Native Americans, African Americans, women, French and Spanish colonials. Others treat English and Anglo-American writings, including those of the Puritans, the Federalists and Anti-Federalists, and American Enlightenment thinkers. Four essays on genre studies focus on early poetry, fiction, drama, autobiography, and captivity narratives.
In part 2, five teachers describe courses they have taught and give detailed syllabi. Completing the book is a bibliographic essay that reviews existing literature in the areas covered and provides a quick survey of secondary materials.
Designed for teachers at the undergraduate and graduate levels, Teaching the Literatures of Early America shows the rigorous, invigorating, and innovative ways in which scholars and teachers have been addressing the richness and variety of early materials.
Greatly influenced by writers ranging from Dickens and Proust to Woolf and Colette, Anna Banti was a prominent figure on the Italian literary scene from the 1940s until her death in 1985. The five tales in “The Signorina” and Other Stories display her talent across many genres—fiction, science fiction, historical fiction, mystery.
Banti’s stories portray the ageless conflict between the expectations of society and the aspirations of the individual. In “Uncertain Vocations,” the young Ofelia becomes a pianist after her marriage prospects fail, but self-doubt turns her success into miserable mediocrity. In the futuristic “The Women Are Dying,” men acquire a new evolutionary ability; women, lacking that ability, are consigned to the status of an inferior race. “Joveta of Betania,” set in the time of the Crusades, follows the daughter of King Baldwin II of Jerusalem as she escapes to a life of seclusion as an abbess—a life that becomes for her a source of proud freedom and deep bitterness. In “Sailing Ships,” a young boy creates an imaginary world from an uncertain childhood memory. “The Signorina” tells of a young woman who eventually finds herself, as a writer.
Greatly influenced by writers ranging from Dickens and Proust to Woolf and Colette, Anna Banti was a prominent figure on the Italian literary scene from the 1940s until her death in 1985. The five tales in “La signorina” e altri racconti display her talent across many genres—fiction, science fiction, historical fiction, mystery.
Banti’s stories portray the ageless conflict between the expectations of society and the aspirations of the individual. In “Vocazioni indistinte,” the young Ofelia becomes a pianist after her marriage prospects fail, but self-doubt turns her success into miserable mediocrity. In the futuristic “Le donne muoiono,” men acquire a new evolutionary ability; women, lacking that ability, are consigned to the status of an inferior race. “Joveta di Betania,” set in the time of the Crusades, follows the daughter of King Baldwin II of Jerusalem as she escapes to a life of seclusion as an abbess—a life that becomes for her a source of proud freedom and deep bitterness. In “I velieri,” a young boy creates an imaginary world from an uncertain childhood memory. “La signorina” tells of a young woman who eventually finds herself, as a writer.
Since 1974, the Florence Howe Award has honored distinguished feminist literary criticism written by scholars in the fields of language and literature study. Seventeen winning essays—many never before published—are collected in one volume, Courage and Tools. Written by leading scholars and theorists, these groundbreaking essays discuss topics such as resistance to the patriarchal order and the development of a feminist literary theory and explore the works of writers such as Margaret Atwood, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, George Eliot, Henry James, Herman Melville, Toni Morrison, Sylvia Plath, and Alexander Pope.
Junior Faculty Development is designed to encourage mentoring and developmental programs for junior professors. It also serves as a self-help manual for junior and senior faculty members at a variety of institutions, from junior colleges to research universities, and as a guide for job seekers who want to evaluate an academic institution’s developmental programs.
Jarvis has studied existing junior faculty development programs; interviewed over one hundred teachers, researchers, and administrators; and reviewed the fields of personnel and faculty development. This volume offers recommendations for incentives, evaluation techniques, and model programs that promote not only sound research and writing habits but also the art of good teaching and institutional citizenship.
Now in its fourth printing, this collection of thirteen essays reviews the major scholarship in a variety of fields that are shaping composition studies, including rhetoric, literary theory, cognitive studies, collaborative learning, and artificial-intelligence research.
Writing Theory and Critical Theory discusses the growing body of work linking composition studies and literary studies. Enlisting the strategies of deconstruction, hermeneutics, postmodernism, feminism, neo-Marxism, neopragmatism, psychoanalysis, reader-response criticism, and cultural studies, the twenty-seven contributors investigate the resources that critical theory can bring to an examination of discourse. Composition teachers, critical theorists, and writing program administrators will find this collection a provocative and insightful overview of the field of composition studies.
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