Approaches to Teaching World Literature
There are 173 products in Approaches to Teaching World Literature
Approaches to Teaching Joyce’s Ulysses
Ulysses is generally recognized as the most influential of all modernist literary texts, and seven decades after its publication the novel continues to fascinate, tease, and engage students. The essays collected in this Approaches volume offer suggestions for teaching Ulysses in courses ranging from first-year literature surveys to graduate-level seminars.
The volume, like others in the MLA’s Approaches to Teaching World Literature series, is divided into two parts. The first part, “Materials,” reviews editions of Ulysses (as well as manuscripts and prepublication materials), biographical resources, critical works, and audiovisual materials. The sixteen essays in the second part, “Approaches,” discuss the aesthetic and political backgrounds against which Ulysses was written and examine the changing perspectives from which it has been read. The book includes course syllabi and essay assignments, conversion formulas for two recent United States editions of Ulysses, and several adaptations of Joyce’s schema of Homeric correspondence for classroom use.
Approaches to Teaching Kafka’s Short Fiction
Ever since English-speaking readers “discovered” Kafka in the 1950s, his works have been a cornerstone of undergraduate world literature studies. Hoping to make Kafka and the modernist writing he represents more accessible to students, the editor and twelve contributors to this volume explain how they present “one of the most taught and least understood writers of our century.”
The book, like others in the MLA Approaches to Teaching World Literature series, is divided into two parts. Part 1, “Materials,” surveys resources useful for classroom instruction, such as dual-language editions, critical studies, reference works, and audiovisual aids. Part 2, “Approaches,” comprises thirteen essays that focus on ways to teach five of Kafka’s stories—”The Judgment,” The Metamorphosis, “In the Penal Colony,” “A Country Doctor,” and “A Hunger Artist”—and also provide strategies for teaching Kafka’s other works of short fiction. The approaches described include teaching Kafka as a modernist writer, reading Kafka in a second-year German course, studying the stories alongside the expressionist film classic The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, and examining Kafka’s treatment of his female characters. Intended for those who teach Kafka in translation or in the original, Approaches to Teaching Kafka’s Short Fiction presents fresh ideas that have been tested and refined by experienced instructors.
Approaches to Teaching Keats’s Poetry
“Few poets are as congenial to undergraduates as Keats,” write the volume editors. But they warn that if the poetry and the life and character of the poet are attractive and accessible, there is more to Keats than at first meets the eye.
This volume, like others in the MLA’s Approaches to Teaching World Literature series, is divided into two parts. The first, “Materials,” reviews works on Romanticism and on Keats, editions of Keats, critical studies, various other reference materials, and audiovisual resources. It also gives reading lists for students, the poems most frequently taught, sample assignments, and a subject index of the poet’s letters. The second part, “Approaches,” contains sixteen essays gathered into three groups: classroom strategies, to help students interact with the poems; theoretical approaches, which all have a practical classroom dimension; and thematic orientations, including myths, death, images of women, and the problem of imagination. “If there is any single characteristic that mediates the diversity of these essays,” write Walter Evert and Jack Rhodes, “it is clearly the abhorrence of interpretive closure in teaching.” The collection attempts to present a balanced spectrum of the ways that Keats is taught.
Approaches to Teaching Kingston’s The Woman Warrior
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.
Approaches to Teaching Lafayette’s The Princess of Clèves
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.”
Approaches to Teaching Langland’s Piers Plowman
A series of dream visions, Piers Plowman is a moral reckoning of the whole of medieval England, in which every part of society—from church and king to every sort of “folk”—is considered in the light of the narrator’s interpretation of Christian revelation. The Middle English poem, rich and beautiful, is a particular challenge to teach: it exists in three versions, lacks a continuous narrative, is written in a West Midlands dialect, weaves a complex allegory, and treats complicated social and political issues, such as labor, Lollardy, and popular uprising.
Part 1 of this volume, “Materials,” discusses the different versions, critical and classroom editions, and translations of the poem, as well as the many secondary sources. Part 2, “Approaches,” helps students engage with the poem’s versification, understand its protagonist and its treatment of poverty and equity, and discern connections to the work of other medieval poets, such as Dante and Chaucer.
Approaches to Teaching the Novels of Nella Larsen
Nella Larsen’s novels Quicksand and Passing, published at the height of the Harlem Renaissance, fell out of print and were thus little known for many years. Now widely available and taught, Quicksand and Passing challenge conventional “tragic mulatta” and “passing” narratives. In part 1, “Materials,” of Approaches to Teaching the Novels of Nella Larsen, the editor surveys the canon of Larsen’s writing, evaluates editions of her works, recommends secondary readings, and compiles a list of useful multimedia resources for teaching.
The essays in part 2, “Approaches,” aim to help students better understand attitudes toward women and race during the Harlem Renaissance, the novels’ relations to other artistic movements, and legal debates over racial identities in the early twentieth century. In so doing, contributors demonstrate how new and seasoned instructors alike might use Larsen’s novels to explore a wide range of topics—including Larsen’s short stories and letters, the relation between her writings and her biography, and the novels’ discussion of gender and sexuality.
Approaches to Teaching the Works of D. H. Lawrence
Lawrence’s forceful language, imagery, and rhythms can make readers feel they are being attacked or challenged. These essays describe ways to encourage students to read his works more closely, accurately, and sensitively and to learn how to complicate their reading.
Approaches to Teaching Lazarillo de Tormes and the Picaresque Tradition
In 1554, Lazarillo de Tormes, a slim, unassuming little volume, unsigned by the author, made its first published appearance in the bookstalls of several important mercantile centers in Spain and the Netherlands. Since then, as narratives of pícaros—and pícaras—continued to follow in the footsteps of Lázaro’s fictional life, picaresque literature developed into a major genre in literary studies that remains popular to this day.
Yet the genre’s definition is anything but simple, as the diversity of this volume demonstrates. Part 1, “Materials,” reviews editions and translations of Lazarillo and other picaresque works, as well as the critical and historical resources related to them. The essays in part 2, “Approaches,” explore the picaresque’s place in language and literature classrooms of all levels. Some contributors contextualize Lazarillo in the early modern Spanish culture it satirizes, investigating the role of the church and the marginalization of Muslims and Jews. Others pair Lazarillo with Alemán’s Guzmán de Alfarache or Quevedo’s Buscón to concentrate on the genre’s literary aspects. A cluster of essays focuses on teaching the picaresque (including the female picaresque) to nonspecialist students in interdisciplinary courses. The volume concludes with a section devoted to the picaresque novel’s influence on other literary traditions, from early modern autobiographies, such as Teresa of Ávila’s Libro de la vida, to post–Spanish Civil War texts to twentieth-century Latin American novels and 1950s American beat narratives.
Approaches to Teaching Lessing’s The Golden Notebook
When The Golden Notebook was published in 1962, Irving Howe called it “the most exciting piece of new fiction” produced in the decade. Throughout this complex novel, Doris Lessing invites the reader to contemplate the fragmentation of modern life, to grapple with conflicting elements in order to see the world anew. The novel touches on a variety of themes—including African history, leftist politics before Stalin’s death, trends in psychoanalysis, the effects of war, male-female relations, and madness—and has attracted a wide range of critical and pedagogical approaches.
This volume, like others in the MLA’s Approaches to Teaching World Literature series, is divided into two parts. The first, “Materials,” evaluates the corpus of scholarly and critical material published on the novel and recommends background reading. In the second part, “Approaches,” seventeen essays place the novel historically, politically, philosophically, and aesthetically—examining it in such contexts as Lessing’s life, Jungian psychology, modernism and postmodernism, feminism, film theory, and musical forms—and discuss the teaching of The Golden Notebook in different times, circumstances, and classrooms.
