Approaches to Teaching World Literature
There are 173 products in Approaches to Teaching World Literature
Approaches to Teaching Woolf’s To the Lighthouse
“Good, motivated, well-read students can have trouble reading To the Lighthouse,” admit the editors of this volume in the Approaches to Teaching series; “not-so-well-read students may have even greater difficulty.” Yet many instructors still find Woolf’s fifth novel her most accessible because it grapples with issues that interest students. The essays in this collection show how teachers can tackle the often threatening question “Why are we reading this?” with thoughtful answers that make the novel come alive in the classroom.
Like other books in the series, this volume is divided into two parts. Part 1, “Materials,” discusses the available editions of the novel and further reading for students, as well as reference works, bibliographies, critical works, and teaching aids. Part 2, “Approaches,” gathers twenty-one essays that provide instructors with strategies for introducing students to a difficult text. The first group of these essays focuses on how to read To the Lighthouse; the volume then presents a range of critical approaches, including autobiographical, contextual, and intertextual methods. As the editors note, all the essays “aim to help undergraduates new to Woolf’s novel become the readers Woolf ultimately wants: open, curious, sensitive, active.”
Approaches to Teaching Wordsworth’s Poetry
A central figure of the English Romantic movement and the author of scores of canonical works, William Wordsworth is a mainstay of literature courses ranging from freshmen surveys to upper-level seminars. The essays in this collection discuss teaching the poet in these and other settings, using a variety of critical perspectives and pedagogical strategies.
This Approaches volume, like others in the MLA series, is divided into two parts. Part 1, “Materials,” surveys editions, anthologies, student readings, reference works, background studies, and critical scholarship. Part 2, “Approaches,” comprises thirty essays by experienced instructors, beginning with two personal reflections on how Wordsworth courses have changed since the 1950s and on how rewarding teaching the poet can be. Thirteen essays focus on specific works, including Lyrical Ballads, The Prelude, the Immortality Ode, and selected sonnets. Eight position the poetry in historical, literary, or theoretical contexts. Other contributions describe ways of teaching Wordsworth at a two-year college, along with the visual arts, or in a modern poetry course.
Approaches to Teaching Wright’s Native Son
Richard Wright predicted that Bigger Thomas, his most powerful literary creation, would become “a symbolic figure of American life, a figure who would hold within him the prophecy of our future.” The essays collected in this volume attest to the accuracy of that prediction and to the ability of Native Son—even after half a century—to fascinate, shock, and divide its readers. The novel raises many challenging questions for today’s teachers and students: How much did Wright’s radical political views influence the fabric of the novel? Is Bigger a racial archetype or racial stereotype? How does one reconcile Bigger’s claims of free will with the book’s grim environmental determinism? Who is responsible for the tragedy of Bigger Thomas?
