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The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman tells the story of a woman, a community, and the African American experience from the Civil War through Jim Crow to the civil rights movement. This narrative and Gaines’s other novels and short stories explore the life of blacks in the South, their religious traditions and folkways, and their struggles under oppression. The southern communities described are diverse: blacks, creoles of color, poor whites, and wealthy landowners.
Part 1 of this volume provides biographical information about Ernest Gaines and a discussion of critical and background studies of his narrative. The essays in part 2 will help teachers of African American literature, American literature, and southern literature convey to their students various aspects of Gaines’s work and the adaptations of it in relation to southern literature, history, music, folk culture, and vernaculars of English.
David Foster Wallace’s works engage with his literary moment—roughly summarized as postmodernism—and with the author’s historical context. From his famously complex fiction to essays critical of American culture, Wallace’s works have at their core essential human concerns such as self-understanding, connecting with others, ethical behavior, and finding meaning. The essays in this volume suggest ways to elucidate Wallace’s philosophical and literary preoccupations for today’s students, who continue to contend with urgent issues, both personal and political, through reading literature.
Part 1, “Materials,” offers guidance on biographical, contextual, and archival sources and critical responses to Wallace’s writing. The essays in part 2, “Approaches,” discuss teaching key works and genres in high school settings, first-year undergraduate writing classes, American literature surveys, seminars on Wallace, and world literature courses. They examine Wallace’s social and philosophical contexts and contributions, treating topics such as gender, literary ethics, and the culture of writing programs.
The prizewinning author of novels, nonfiction, and hybrid texts, Amitav Ghosh grew up in India and trained as an anthropologist. His works have been translated into over thirty languages. They cross and mix a number of genres, from science fiction to the historical novel, incorporating ethnohistory and travelogue and even recuperating dead languages. His subjects include climate change, postcolonial identities, translocation, migration, oceanic spaces, and the human interface with the environment.
Part 1 of this volume discusses editions of Ghosh’s works and the scholarship on Ghosh. The essays in part 2, “Approaches,” present ideas for teaching his works through considerations of postcolonial feminism, historicity in the novels, environmentalism, language, sociopolitical conflict, genre, intersectional reading, and the ethics of colonized subjecthood. Guidance for teaching Ghosh in different contexts, such as general education, world literature, or single-author classes, is provided.
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.
A trailblazing modernist, Gertrude Stein studied psychology at Radcliffe with William James and went on to train as a medical doctor before coming out as a lesbian and moving to Paris, where she collected contemporary art and wrote poetry, novels, and libretti. Known as a writer’s writer, she has influenced every generation of American writers since her death in 1946 and remains avant-garde.
Part 1 of this volume, “Materials,” provides information and resources that will help teachers and students begin and pursue their study of Stein. The essays of part 2, “Approaches,” introduce major topics to be covered in the classroom—race, gender, feminism, sexuality, narrative form, identity, and Stein’s experimentation with genre—in a wide range of contexts, including literary analysis, art history, first-year composition, and cultural studies.
Two additional texts by Caterina Albert, with translations by Kathleen McNerney, are available online for free.
Caterina Albert i Paradís (1869–1966) began her career with a scandal. Her dramatic monologue “The Infanticide” won prizes and garnered the attention of the Catalan literary world, but its harsh theme drew outrage when the anonymous author was revealed to be a woman. She continued to write unflinching narratives, mostly in Catalan, of the people and life around her, producing a body of work still enlisted today to help the Catalan language resist the dominance of Peninsular Spanish.
Albert shares with her contemporaries Anton Chekhov and Emilia Pardo Bazán an intense interest in the psychological development of characters and in narrative strategies, and the short stories collected here highlight her range of style and grasp of human nature. Kathleen McNerney’s introduction contextualizes Albert’s themes, feminism, and formal techniques as well as recent Catalan political and literary history.
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.
Understanding the complexities of Arab politics, history, and culture has never been more important for North American readers. Yet even as Arabic literature is increasingly being translated into English, the modern Arabic literary tradition is still often treated as other—controversial, dangerous, difficult, esoteric, or exotic. This volume examines modern Arabic literature in context and introduces creative teaching methods that reveal the literature’s richness, relevance, and power to anglophone students.
Addressing the complications of translation head on, the volume interweaves such important issues such as gender, the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, and the status of Arabic literature in world literature. Essays cover writers from the recent past, like Emile Habiby and Tayeb Salih; contemporary Palestinian, Egyptian, and Syrian literatures; and the literature of the nineteenth-century Nahda.
Honorable Mention in the Idaho State University Teaching Literature Book Award
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
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