Approaches to Teaching World Literature
There are 173 products in Approaches to Teaching World Literature
Approaches to Teaching Eliot’s Middlemarch
“Middlemarch,“ writes Kathleen Blake, “is the great Eliot novel, the one to teach, because it has the kind of appeal that can carry students forward toward becoming people who will return to it.” Taught to undergraduates in introductory surveys as well as in specialized upper-division courses, Middlemarch presents challenges to both teachers and students—in its length, its rich philosophical and psychological insights, its range of characters, its historical scope, its multiple plots and dense style. The sixteen essays in Approaches to Teaching Eliot’s Middlemarch describe imaginative ways experienced teachers have dealt with these challenges to share their love of the novel with their students.
Like other books in the MLA’s Approaches to Teaching World Literature series, this volume is divided into two parts. Part 1, “Materials,” surveys editions of Middlemarch, background readings on the Victorian period, textual and critical studies, and audiovisual aids. In part 2, “Approaches,” contributors describe specific strategies for teaching the novel. Among the topics discussed are critical trends in the classroom (e.g., narrative theory, deconstruction, feminist criticism, reader-response analysis), teachers’ responses to student difficulties with the novel, textual and contextual perspectives, and ways instructors overcome curricular and institutional constraints. The volume also offers a chronology of the writing and publication of Middlemarch, a genealogical chart for its large cast of characters, and an extensive bibliography.
Approaches to Teaching Eliot’s Poetry and Plays
According to a survey of English teachers, most students are introduced to T. S. Eliot’s poetry during the first two years of college. Approaches to Teaching Eliot’s Poetry and Plays addresses the challenge of teaching these complex works to advanced high school students and undergraduates and presents a cross-section of views and experiences that both new and experienced instructors will find useful.
Like other books in the MLA’s Approaches to Teaching World Literature series, this volume is divided into two parts. Part 1, “Materials,” surveys editions, anthologies, bibliographies, music, films, and other instructional aids. Many of the essays in part 2, “Approaches,” focus on specific poems or plays, including “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” “The Hollow Men,” Ash-Wednesday, The Waste Land, Four Quartets, Murder in the Cathedral, and The Cocktail Party. Several other essays examine issues in Eliot’s larger body of work, including his treatment of women, his debt to the Romantic tradition, and the influence of music on his poetry.
Approaches to Teaching Ellison’s Invisible Man
Teachers of Invisible Man differ about which aspect of Ralph Ellison’s novel deserves the most emphasis. According to Susan Resneck Parr, a coeditor of this volume, “some [teachers] argue that a thematic approach is the most appropriate because the text can and should speak for itself, [while] others are as fervent that the novel cannot be understood unless its readers are informed about the literary, biblical, psychological, musical, philosophical, classical, and historical motifs that permeate it.” Most often, how the novel is taught depends on the course in which it is included, the time allotted, and the sophistication of the students. The essays collected in Approaches to Teaching Ellison’s Invisible Man reflect this diversity of teaching methods and classroom settings.
This Approaches volume, like others in the MLA series, is divided into two parts. Part 1, “Materials,” surveys resources for classroom instruction, such as critical scholarship, and reviews background studies on a variety of topics, including American Communism, Freudian psychology, African American history, and existentialism. In part 2, “Approaches,” sixteen contributors suggest a variety of teaching strategies; consider the novel in the context of African American, American, and Western literary traditions, among others; and discuss Ellison’s debt to music and folk tradition.
Approaches to Teaching the Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson
A leader of the transcendentalist movement and one of the country’s first public intellectuals, Ralph Waldo Emerson has been a long-standing presence in American literature courses. Today he is remembered for his essays, but in the nineteenth century he was also known as a poet and orator who engaged with issues such as religion, nature, education, and abolition.
This volume presents strategies for placing Emerson in the context of his time, for illuminating his rhetorical techniques, and for tracing his influence into the present day and around the world. Part 1, “Materials,” offers guidance for selecting classroom editions and information on Emerson’s life, contexts, and reception. Part 2, “Approaches,” provides suggestions for teaching Emerson’s works in a variety of courses, not only literature but also creative writing, religion, digital humanities, media studies, and environmental studies. The essays in this section address Emerson’s most frequently anthologized works, such as Nature and “Self-Reliance,” along with other texts including sermons, lectures, journals, and poems.
Approaches to Teaching English Renaissance Drama
Many college students are familiar with the works of William Shakespeare but may know little about other playwrights of his era. This volume explores the compelling dramatic techniques and rich language found in a wide variety of both well-known and less-familiar Renaissance plays. A series of reading, performance, and research strategies is outlined for teachers who wish to encourage students to understand the English Renaissance from a fresh perspective.
Like the other volumes in the Approaches to Teaching World Literature series, this one offers classroom advice from experienced teachers. The first section, “Materials,” surveys classroom practice and discusses the resources available to teachers, including editions, historical information on performance conditions, films and videos of productions, and related Internet sites. The second section, “Approaches,” offers strategies for teaching the plays as performance, for introducing students to the language of Renaissance drama, and for demonstrating the collaborative nature of Renaissance authorship. Contributors also consider the plays in the context of racial, gender, religious, and class issues in the Renaissance and compare the dramas to Stuart masques, festive practices, and other art forms such as painting.
Approaches to Teaching the Works of Louise Erdrich
This volume seeks to enrich teachers—and students—understanding of the fictional world Louise Erdrich creates and to address the challenges of teaching her novels and poetry.
The first part of the book provides background readings that establish a context for teaching Erdrich and acquaint teachers with Native American traditions, history, customs, and culture—especially those of the Ojibwe, or Chippewa. In the second section, experienced teachers of Erdrich discuss the strategies they use to engage students in a sometimes unfamiliar world. Essays provide information on Erdrich’s tribe, the Turtle Mountain Chippewa of North Dakota, and an overview of tribal history for the past 150 years; sort through Erdrich’s large cast of fictional characters, with their complicated family ties and clan relationships; examine her collaborative relationship with her late husband, Michael Dorris; and offer analysis, cultural references, and approaches to teaching Erdrich’s most widely anthologized poems.
Approaches to Teaching the Dramas of Euripides
Known for their fully drawn characters, artistic complexity, and a multifaceted engagement with social issues, the plays of Euripides inspire divergent critical views. While some scholars find that the dramatist writes from a traditional Greek perspective, others see a radically innovative artist who criticizes Athenian politics, the treatment of women, and the Olympian gods. Readers will find both views in this collection of essays designed to help teachers present Euripides and his plays to today’s students.
Approaches to Teaching Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury
The works of William Faulkner have become part of the undergraduate canon in the decades since he received the Nobel Prize in 1950. While many of Faulkner’s novels and stories are assigned to high school and college students, the editors of this volume focus on The Sound and the Fury because the novel is representative of Faulkner’s best writing and accessible to many levels of teaching and learning. The novel also lends itself to exploration of many topics, including biographical fiction, the decline of the Old South and the rise of the New South, the influence of American and European literary traditions, and the treatment of subjectivity and language.
Approaches to Teaching Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying
As I Lay Dying is considered by many both the most enigmatic and the most accessible of Faulkner’s major works. It is also the most dramatic; the journey of the Bundrens, a family of poor farmers in the South in the early twentieth century, unfolds like a one-act play, full of natural disaster and human madness. Taught in high school, college, and graduate courses, the novel lends itself to a wide range of interpretations, posing both challenges and opportunities for the instructor.
Part 1 of this Approaches volume, “Materials,” offers an extensive guide to reference materials helpful for both reading and teaching As I Lay Dying. In Part 2, “Approaches,” fourteen essays examine the historical, geographic, and cultural aspects of the novel; consider it as a modernist narrative; address such issues as gender, materiality, language, and family dynamics; and discuss the novel in comparative and intertextual terms. Teachers will find suggestions for course design, in-class exercises, and assignments to help students explore a variety of themes, including death and mourning, the role of the mother, work, and the relation between nature and culture.
Approaches to Teaching the Novels of Henry Fielding
The works of Henry Fielding, though written nearly three hundred years ago, retain their sense of comedy and innovation in the face of tradition, and they easily engage the twenty-first-century student with many aspects of eighteenth-century life: travel, inns, masquerades, political and religious factions, the ’45, prisons and the legal system, gender ideals and realities, social class.
Part 1 of this volume, “Materials,” discusses the available editions of Joseph Andrews, Tom Jones, Shamela, Jonathan Wild, and Amelia; suggests useful critical and contextual works for teaching them; and recommends helpful audiovisual and electronic resources. The essays of part 2, “Approaches,” demonstrate that many of the methods and models used for one novel—the romance tradition, Fielding’s legal and journalistic writing, his techniques as a playwright, the ideas of Machiavelli—can be adapted to others.
