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Teaching The Woman Warrior can be a challenging project for instructors who are unfamiliar with the work’s cultural and historical traditions. As the volume editor, Shirley Geok-lin Lim, explains in her preface, one of the goals of Approaches to Teaching Kingston’s The Woman Warrior is “to introduce teachers and students to the larger body of Asian American and ethnic literature [and] to inform them of the immigrant and ethnic traditions that Kingston’s work comes from and contributes to.”
This Approaches volume, like others in the series, is divided into two parts. Part 1, “Materials,” surveys resources for classroom instruction (such as anthologies, background materials, and cultural studies), presents bibliographic and biographical information, and describes other works by Maxine Hong Kingston. In part 2, “Approaches,” seventeen essays discuss The Woman Warrior in cultural, historical, pedagogical, and critical contexts and suggest ways to include the work in courses on women’s studies, American literature, ethnic literature, history, and composition. The volume features a personal statement by Kingston on the reception of The Woman Warrior and on its relation to her other works.
Frequently identified in French literary histories as the first modern novel—that is, the first to focus on its characters’ thoughts and feelings instead of their heroic actions—Lafayette’s La Princesse de Clèves has provoked discussion and strong opinions since it was published in 1678. Today instructors use this increasingly popular novel not only in French literature courses but also in comparative literature courses, women’s studies courses, and theme-oriented courses; but its unfamiliar historical setting can be daunting to contemporary classes. In the words of the editors, this collection aims to “give colleagues . . . a sense of seventeenth-century France and show how the novel is a product of this milieu, for these are the keys to making the novel comprehensible and indeed enjoyable to students.”
As the volume editor, Frederick W. Shilstone, explains in his preface, this book originated in hallways, at conferences, and in classrooms, with colleagues and students “who share my enthusiasm for Byron yet consider his works, especially when taught in survey courses, problematic.” Aimed at instructors teaching Byron for the first time as well as those more experienced who wish to explore new methods of presentation, this volume attempts to keep classroom discussion lively and engaging.
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 and anthologies, bibliographies, scholarly studies, teaching aids, films, videos, and musical performances. The second part, “Approaches,” gathers twenty-three essays by instructors with extensive experience in teaching Byron. Using a wide range of critical strategies, the contributors explore philosophical, textual, biographical, social, historical, and aesthetic issues in Byron’s poetry. The essays also confront problems that complicate the teaching of Byron—the poet’s use of various poetic guises, his personal intrusions into the poems, and the question of Byron’s place among his contemporaries. The collection focuses on the works most frequently taught in undergraduate courses and includes six essays devoted to Don Juan.
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.
According to the editors of this collection of essays, Madame Bovary is “arguably the greatest novel of nineteenth-century France.” It “raises key issues in human relations, ethics, and social justice, as well as problems concerning the use and misuse of language, novelistic structure, tone, and figurative expression in literature.” Twenty Flaubert scholars show how they present this rich material to students in a variety of courses and settings, using methods that balance aesthetic (text-centered) and cultural (society-centered) studies.
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 Madame Bovary and background materials useful to students and teachers. In the second part, “Approaches,” teachers examine the novel’s social milieu; offer course plans based on a variety of methodologies (including thematic, feminist, traditional humanistic, and deconstructionist approaches); and describe how to teach Madame Bovary in courses on film studies, world literature, and writing.
Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice is one of the most popular and widely taught works of English literature. Despite its enormous appeal—the novel has been in print almost continuously since its publication in 1812—there are few scholarly works devoted to teaching it. As Marcia McClintock Folsom notes in her introduction to Approaches to Teaching Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, respondents to an MLA survey on teaching this Austen novel expressed the need for relevant background materials, brief reviews of criticism, and descriptions of pedagogical strategies
This volume, like others in the MLA’s Approaches to Teaching World Literature series, is divided into two parts. The first part, “Materials,” reviews available editions of Pride and Prejudice and works of criticism. The section also includes a handy biographical chronology and a map. In the second part, “Approaches,” sixteen teachers offer ideas for presenting the novel in the classroom, such as examining the social and economic conditions of late-eighteenth-century England; discussing biographical details, Austen’s unpublished writing (e.g., her juvenilia and letters), and the influence of other works on her fiction; considering the structure and themes of the novel; and analyzing Austen’s use of language. This collection is an indispensable resource for teachers of courses ranging from introductory literature surveys and continuing-education classes to graduate-level seminars.
Responses to a survey conducted for this volume indicate that most teachers of Blake begin with Songs of Innocence and of Experience; the work is included in the syllabi of courses on literature and poetry at all levels, as well as courses in religious studies, humanities, and composition. The book’s continuing fascination can be attributed to the many intellectual, theoretical, and pedagogical challenges it presents for students and teachers alike, such as the particulars of Blake’s language and punctuation, his use of illustrations, differences in the order of the poems among the various extant editions, and considerations of what—for Blake and for other poets—constitutes “writing” and “the book.”
This Approaches volume, like other volumes in the MLA’s Approaches to Teaching World Literature series, is divided into two parts. The first part, “Materials,” reviews editions and anthologies, critical works (including a survey of available commentaries on each poem), background materials, and facsimile and microfiche reproductions. In the second part, “Approaches,” distinguished teachers and scholars describe strategies for presenting the Songs in the classroom. The first four essays discuss how teachers can bring theoretical concerns, such as textual and feminist approaches, to bear on specific poems. The following four essays address the inclusion of Songs in particular classes, from a survey on English Romanticism to a literature course at a technological institute. The third set of essays examines the Songs from specific literary perspectives, such as an analysis of the variations among different editions and an investigation of the work’s biblical foundations. The final four essays present approaches for teaching individual poems.
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.
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.
Old Goriot is not only the most read of Balzac’s works but also one of the most commonly taught of all French novels. This collection of essays, as the editor says, offers “fresh interpretations that reflect on and revise the critical tradition.” It thus conveys a sense of what Balzac’s realist novel may mean to students and teachers more than a hudred and fifty years after its first publication.
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