Approaches to Teaching Baraka's Dutchman
Approaches to Teaching Baraka's Dutchman

Author: Matthew Calihman

Publisher: Modern Language Association

Published: 2018-05-01

Total Pages: 309

ISBN-13: 1603293566

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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.

Approaches to Teaching the Works of Ralph Ellison
Approaches to Teaching the Works of Ralph Ellison

Author: Tracy Floreani

Publisher: Modern Language Association

Published: 2024-07-19

Total Pages: 205

ISBN-13: 1603296735

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One of the most important American authors and public intellectuals of the twentieth century, Ralph Ellison had a keen and unsentimental understanding of the relationship between race, art, and activism in American life. He contended with other writers of his day in his examination of the entrenched racism in society, and his writing continues to inform national conversations in letters and culture. The essays in Approaches to Teaching the Works of Ralph Ellison will help instructors in colleges, high schools, and prisons teach not only the indispensable Invisible Man but also Ellison's short stories, his essays, and the two editions of his second, unfinished novel, Juneteenth and Three Days before the Shooting . . . . In considering Ellison's works in relation to jazz, technology, humor, politics, queerness, and disability, this volume mirrors the breadth of Ellison's own life, which extended from the Jim Crow era through the Black Power movement.

The Beats
The Beats

Author: Nancy Grace

Publisher: Liverpool University Press

Published: 2021-03-11

Total Pages: 416

ISBN-13: 1949979962

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'[This] survey of the many little magazines carrying the Beat message is impressive in its coverage, drawing attention to the importance of their paratextual content in providing valuable socio-political context. [...] The collection contains a range of insightful close readings, astute contextualizing, and inventive lateral pedagogical thinking, charting the transformation of the Beat scene from its free-wheeling, self-help, heady revolutionary 1960’s days to its contemporary position as an increasingly respectable component of the curriculum. [...] The Beats: A Teaching Companion is successful on a number of levels; it is a noteworthy contribution to the ever expanding field of Beat studies and, more broadly, cultural studies; and it is a collection that at its best gives hope that in referring to its ideas the inspired teacher may still be able to enlarge the lives of their students.' John Shapcott, Keele University

Essays and Interviews on Contemporary American Poets, Poetry, and Pedagogy
Essays and Interviews on Contemporary American Poets, Poetry, and Pedagogy

Author: Daniel Morris

Publisher: Anthem Press

Published: 2024-09-10

Total Pages: 192

ISBN-13: 1839992255

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In sixteen chapters devoted to avant-garde contemporary American poets, including Kenneth Goldsmith, Adeena Karasick, Tyrone Williams, Hannah Weiner, and Barrett Watten, prolific scholar and Purdue University professor Daniel Morris engages in a form of cultural repurposing by “learning twice” about how to attend to writers whose aesthetic contributions were not part of his education as a student in Boston and Chicago in the 1980s and 1990s when new formalism and post-confessional modes reigned supreme. Morris’s study demonstrates his interest in moving beyond formalism to offer what Stephen Fredman calls “a wider cultural interpretation of literature that emphasizes the ‘new historicist’ concerns with hybridity, ethnicity, power relations, material culture, politics, and religion.” Essays address from multiple perspectives—prophetic, diasporic, ethical—the vexing problems and sublime potential of disseminating lyrics—the ancient form of transmission and preservation of the singular, private human voice across time and space—to an individual reader, in an environment in which e-poetry and digitalized poetics pose a crisis (understood as both opportunity and threat) to traditional page poetry.

Uncle Tom's Cabins
Uncle Tom's Cabins

Author: Tracy C Davis

Publisher: University of Michigan Press

Published: 2020-04-20

Total Pages: 415

ISBN-13: 0472037765

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As Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin traveled around the world, it was molded by the imaginations and needs of international audiences. For over 150 years it has been coopted for a dazzling array of causes far from what its author envisioned. This book tells thirteen variants of Uncle Tom’s journey, explicating the novel’s significance for Canadian abolitionists and the Liberian political elite that constituted the runaway characters’ landing points; nineteenth-century French theatergoers; liberal Cuban, Romanian, and Spanish intellectuals and social reformers; Dutch colonizers and Filipino nationalists in Southeast Asia; Eastern European Cold War communists; Muslim readers and spectators in the Middle East; Brazilian television audiences; and twentieth-century German holidaymakers. Throughout these encounters, Stowe’s story of American slavery serves as a paradigm for understanding oppression, selectively and strategically refracting the African American slave onto other iconic victims and freedom fighters. The book brings together performance historians, literary critics, and media theorists to demonstrate how the myriad cultural and political effects of Stowe’s enduring story has transformed it into a global metanarrative with national, regional, and local specificity.

Public Scholarship in Literary Studies
Public Scholarship in Literary Studies

Author: Rachel Arteaga

Publisher: Amherst College Press

Published: 2021-05-21

Total Pages: 170

ISBN-13: 1943208220

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Public Scholarship in Literary Studies demonstrates that literary criticism has the potential not only to explain, but to actively change our terms of engagement with current realities. Rachel Arteaga and Rosemary Johnsen bring together accomplished public scholars who make significant contributions to literary scholarship, teaching, and the public good. The volume begins with essays by scholars who write regularly for large public audiences in primarily digital venues, then moves to accounts of research-based teaching and engagement in public contexts, and finally turns to important new models for cross-institutional partnerships and campus-community engagement. Grounded in scholarship and written in an accessible style, Public Scholarship in Literary Studies will appeal to scholars in and outside the academy, students, and those interested in the public humanities. "There are books of literary criticism that attempt to reach crossover audiences but none that take this particular public-humanities-focused-on-literary criticism perspective."--Kathryn Temple, Georgetown University Contributions by Rachel Arteaga, Christine Chaney, Jim Cocola, Daniel Coleman, Christopher Douglas, Gary Handwerk, Cynthia L. Haven, Rosemary Erickson Johnsen, Anu Taranath, Carmaletta M. Williams, and Lorraine York.

Roth's Wars
Roth's Wars

Author: James D. Bloom

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2022-07-12

Total Pages: 189

ISBN-13: 1666913855

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Treating Philip Roth as a war writer—as well as a sportswriter, crime reporter, political commentator, and Newark chronicler—Roth’s Wars: A Career in Conflict offers a thoroughly researched account of the novelist’s preoccupation with wars around the world and wars at home. This wide-ranging social and cultural history of Roth’s career examines intersections between Roth’s preoccupations as a writer and the work of contemporaries, such as J.D. Salinger, Joan Didion, George Plimpton, Hannah Arendt, E.L. Doctorow, Flannery O’Connor, Michael Herr, and Don DeLillo. The legends and icons who figure in this account of Roth’s career include Dwight Eisenhower, Meyer Lansky, Ernie Pyle, Bob Dylan, Johnny Appleseed, Anne Frank, JFK, Mickey Mantle, the Marx Brothers, Thomas Paine, Sandy Koufax, and Franz Kafka.

The Beats, Black Mountain, and New Modes in American Poetry
The Beats, Black Mountain, and New Modes in American Poetry

Author: Matt Theado

Publisher: Liverpool University Press

Published: 2021-09-15

Total Pages: 344

ISBN-13: 1949979946

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The Beats, Black Mountain, and New Modes of American Poetry explores correspondences amongst the Black Mountain and Beat Generation writers, two of most well-known and influential groups of poets in the 1950s. The division of writers as Beat or Black Mountain has hindered our understanding of the ways that these poets developed from mutual influences, benefitted from direct relations, and overlapped their boundaries. This collection of academic essays refines and adds context to Beat Studies and Black Mountain Studies by investigating the groups’ intersections and undercurrents. One goal of the book is to deconstruct the Beat and Black Mountain labels in order to reveal the shifting and fluid relationships among the individual poets who developed a revolutionary poetics in the 1950s and beyond. Taken together, these essays clarify the radical experimentation with poetics undertaken by these poets.

Ralph Ellison in Context
Ralph Ellison in Context

Author: Paul Devlin

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2021-12-02

Total Pages: 751

ISBN-13: 1108802230

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Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man is the second-most assigned American novel since 1945 and is one of the most enduring. It is studied by many thousands of high school and college students every year and has been since the 1950s. His landmark essays, with their blend of personal history and cultural theory, have been extraordinarily influential. Ralph Ellison in Context includes authoritative chapters summing up longstanding conversations, while offering groundbreaking essays on a variety of topics not yet covered in the copious critical and biographical literature. It provides fresh perspectives on some of the most important people and places in Ellison's life, and explores where his work and biography cross paths with some of the pressing topics of his time. It includes chapters on Ellison's literary influences and offers a definitive overview of his early writings. It also provides an overview of Ellison's reception and reputation from his death in 1994 through 2020.