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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.
Once merely a footnote in Restoration and eighteenth-century studies and rarely taught, Oroonoko; or, The Royal Slave (1688), by Aphra Behn, is now essential reading for scholars and a classroom favorite. It appears in general surveys and in courses on early modern British writers, postcolonial literature, American literature, women’s literature, drama, the slave narrative, and autobiography.
Part 1 of this volume, “Materials,” provides not only resources for the teacher of Oroonoko but also a brief chronology of Behn’s life and work. In part 2, “Approaches,” essays offer a diversity of perspectives appropriate to a text that challenges student assumptions and contains not one story but many: Oroonoko as a romance, as a travel account, as a heroic tragedy, as a window to seventeenth-century representations of race, as a reflection of Tory-Whig conflict in the time of Charles II.
During recent decades, the study of Beowulf has flourished in liberal arts colleges, community colleges, and high schools. Useful for new instructors as well as medieval scholars, this collection of twenty-eight essays suggests ways to teach the poem to undergraduate, graduate, and mixed classes, in Old English or in translation.
Like other books in the MLA’s Approaches to Teaching World Literature series, Approaches to Teaching Beowulf is divided into two parts. The first part, “Materials,” reviews the many editions and translations of Beowulf and evaluates reference works, aids to teaching, critical studies, and facsimiles. The second, “Approaches,” begins with a survey of how and to whom Beowulf is taught, followed by four sections of essays on teaching the poem at specific levels of instruction. The last two sections of essays offer ideas for presenting the background of the poem (history, religion, oral tradition) and for using special approaches, such as discussing the role of women in the poem and teaching Beowulf as performance.
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.
“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.
Although British women poets such as Charlotte Turner Smith, Letitia Elizabeth Landon, and Felicia Hemans were influential and widely acknowledged during the Romantic period, only recently have many scholars and teachers begun to rediscover, study, and teach their verse. This exciting recovery has brought with it challenges for the instructor wishing to introduce the poets’ works into the classroom: finding reliable and accessible scholarly editions, incorporating new writers into already-crowded syllabi, and dealing with entrenched notions of Romanticism. The contributors to this volume have undertaken, in the words of the editors, “the liberating and invigorating task of redrawing the landscape of Romantic poetry,” and in twenty-six essays they share their experiences and their innovations.
Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights has long held a high position in the academy and in popular culture. It is taught at levels from high school English to doctoral studies and has been adapted in enough film and television versions that many students who know nothing about the book know who Heathcliff is. Nevertheless it is not an easy novel to teach. Thus in addition to surveying experienced teachers of Wuthering Heights, the editors sought to learn directly from students what in the novel was difficult for them and what worked best in engaging their interest. As a result, the approaches suggested in this volume reflect practices that have proved successful for both students and teachers.
Part 1 of this Approaches volume, “Materials,” surveys and assesses the available editions of Wuthering Heights, identifies editions of other works by Emily Brontë, reviews biographies and other background materials, notes the critical studies most frequently mentioned as useful by instructors, and provides an annotated list of resources on the Internet.
Among the classroom strategies described in part 2, “Approaches,” are the following:
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
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.
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