Writing America

Writing America

Author: Sarah Robbins

Publisher: Teachers College Press

Published: 2005

Total Pages: 196

ISBN-13: 9780807745274

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This practical volume addresses teachers' most immediate and constant wish to engage students in meaningful learning. Written by teachers affiliated with the National Writing Project, this engrossing collection presents examples of classroom-based community studies projects that showcase teachers' reflective practice in action, models for professional growth, collaborative staff development programs, and much more. It features: replicable projects emphasizing approaches to doing research and writing that are both engaging for students and academically rigorous; comprehensive curricular models for building energetic, public connections between the classroom and the larger community; chapters that connect the standards-based classroom work to teacher professional development and to emerging trends in American Studies and literacy instruction.


Writing the Nation: A Concise Introduction to American Literature 1865 to Present

Writing the Nation: A Concise Introduction to American Literature 1865 to Present

Author: Amy Berke

Publisher: Good Press

Published: 2023-12-01

Total Pages: 743

ISBN-13:

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In 'Writing the Nation: A Concise Introduction to American Literature 1865 to Present,' editors Amy Berke, Robert Bleil, Jordan Cofer, and Doug Davis curate a comprehensive exploration of American literary evolution from the aftermath of the Civil War to contemporary times. This anthology expertly weaves a tapestry of diverse literary styles and themes, encapsulating the dynamic shifts in American culture and identity. Through carefully selected works, the collection illustrates the rich dialogue between historical contexts and literary expression, showcasing seminal pieces that have shaped American literatures landscape. The diversity of periods and perspectives offers readers a panoramic view of the countrys literary heritage, making it a significant compilation for scholars and enthusiasts alike. The contributing authors and editors, each with robust backgrounds in American literature, bring to the table a depth of scholarly expertise and a passion for the subject matter. Their collective work reflects a broad spectrum of American life and thought, aligning with major historical and cultural movements from Realism and Modernism to Postmodernism. This anthology not only marks the evolution of American literary forms and themes but also mirrors the nations complex history and diverse narratives. 'Writing the Nation' is an essential volume for those who wish to delve into the heart of American literature. It offers readers a unique opportunity to experience the multitude of voices, styles, and themes that have shaped the countrys literary tradition. This collection represents an invaluable resource for students, scholars, and anyone interested in the development of American literature and the cultural forces that have influenced it. The anthology invites readers to engage with the vibrant dialogue among its pages, fostering a deeper understanding and appreciation of the United States' literary and cultural heritage.


Writing America

Writing America

Author: Shelley Fisher Fishkin

Publisher: Rutgers University Press

Published: 2015-11-11

Total Pages: 584

ISBN-13: 0813575990

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Winner of the John S. Tuckey 2017 Lifetime Achievement Award for Mark Twain Scholarship from The Center for Mark Twain Studies American novelist E.L. Doctorow once observed that literature “endows places with meaning.” Yet, as this wide-ranging new book vividly illustrates, understanding the places that shaped American writers’ lives and their art can provide deep insight into what makes their literature truly meaningful. Published on the eve of the 50th anniversary of the Historic Preservation Act, Writing America is a unique, passionate, and eclectic series of meditations on literature and history, covering over 150 important National Register historic sites, all pivotal to the stories that make up America, from chapels to battlefields; from plantations to immigration stations; and from theaters to internment camps. The book considers not only the traditional sites for literary tourism, such as Mark Twain’s sumptuous Connecticut home and the peaceful woods surrounding Walden Pond, but also locations that highlight the diversity of American literature, from the New York tenements that spawned Abraham Cahan’s fiction to the Texas pump house that irrigated the fields in which the farm workers central to Gloria Anzaldúa’s poetry picked produce. Rather than just providing a cursory overview of these authors’ achievements, acclaimed literary scholar and cultural historian Shelley Fisher Fishkin offers a deep and personal reflection on how key sites bore witness to the struggles of American writers and inspired their dreams. She probes the global impact of American writers’ innovative art and also examines the distinctive contributions to American culture by American writers who wrote in languages other than English, including Yiddish, Chinese, and Spanish. Only a scholar with as wide-ranging interests as Shelley Fisher Fishkin would dare to bring together in one book writers as diverse as Gloria Anzaldúa, Nicholas Black Elk, David Bradley, Abraham Cahan, S. Alice Callahan, Raymond Chandler, Frank Chin, Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, Countee Cullen, Frederick Douglass, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Jessie Fauset, William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Allen Ginsberg, Jovita González, Rolando Hinojosa, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Lawson Fusao Inada, James Weldon Johnson, Erica Jong, Maxine Hong Kingston, Irena Klepfisz, Nella Larsen, Emma Lazarus, Sinclair Lewis, Genny Lim, Claude McKay, Herman Melville, N. Scott Momaday, William Northup, John Okada, Miné Okubo, Simon Ortiz, Américo Paredes, John P. Parker, Ann Petry, Tomás Rivera, Wendy Rose, Morris Rosenfeld, John Steinbeck, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Henry David Thoreau, Mark Twain, Yoshiko Uchida, Tino Villanueva, Nathanael West, Walt Whitman, Richard Wright, Hisaye Yamamoto, Anzia Yezierska, and Zitkala-Ša. Leading readers on an enticing journey across the borders of physical places and imaginative terrains, the book includes over 60 images, and extended excerpts from a variety of literary works. Each chapter ends with resources for further exploration. Writing America reveals the alchemy though which American writers have transformed the world around them into art, changing their world and ours in the process.


The Oxford American Book of Great Music Writing

The Oxford American Book of Great Music Writing

Author: Marc Smirnoff

Publisher: University of Arkansas Press

Published: 2012-01-01

Total Pages: 456

ISBN-13: 9781610752992

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Not only have a breathtaking array of musical giants come from the South—think Elvis Presley, Robert Johnson, Louis Armstrong, Jimmie Rodgers, to name just obvious examples—but so have a breathtaking array of American music genres. From blues to rock & roll to jazz to country to bluegrass—and areas in between—it all started in the American South. Since its debut in 1996, The Oxford American's more-or-less annual Southern Music Issue has become legendary for its passionate and wide-ranging approach to music and for working with some of America's greatest writers. These writers—from Peter Guralnick to Nick Tosches to Susan Straight to William Gay—probe the lives and legacies of Southern musicians you may or may not yet be familiar with, but whom you'll love being introduced, or reintroduced, to. In one creative, fresh way or another, these writers also uncover the essence of music—and why music has such power over us. To celebrate ten years of Southern music issues, most of which are sold-out or very hard to find, the fifty-five essays collected in this dynamic, wide-ranging, and vast anthology appeal to both music fans and fans of great writing.


Writing of America

Writing of America

Author: Geoff Ward

Publisher: Polity

Published: 2002-06-10

Total Pages: 248

ISBN-13: 9780745626222

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In this lively and provocative study, Geoff Ward puts forward the bold claim that the founding documents of American identity are essentially literary. America was invented, not discovered, and it remains in thrall to the myth of an earthly Paradise. This is Paradise, and American ideology imprisons as it inspires. The Writing of America shows the tension between these forces in a wide range of literary and other texts, from Puritan sermons and the Declaration of Independence, through nineteenth-century classics, to folk and blues lyrics and the popular novel. Alongside his provocative reassessments of canonical writers, Ward offers new material on lost or neglected figures from the world of literature, film and music. His acute and often startling analyses of American literature and culture make this an essential guide to what Lincoln termed the last best hope of earth.


Writing America

Writing America

Author: Keith Donohue

Publisher: DIANE Publishing

Published: 2001-04

Total Pages: 118

ISBN-13: 9780756707620

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This edition of Writing America, published by the Nat. Endow. for the Arts (NEA), features the work of 50 NEA Literature Fellowship winners -- one from each state -- who paint a vivid portrait of the U.S. in the last decades of the 20th cent. They evoke the magnificent spectrum of people, places, and experiences that define America. Their biographies and personal narratives are stories in and of themselves, revealing each writer's own unique path to fulfill the call to write. The selections, which include a mix of poetry and prose, serve as inspiration to emerging writers and provide a glimpse of the tremendous vitality and diversity of contemporary American literature.


Re-writing America

Re-writing America

Author: Philip D. Beidler

Publisher: University of Georgia Press

Published: 1991

Total Pages: 366

ISBN-13: 9780820312644

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With his first book, American Literature and the Experience of Vietnam, Philip Beidler offered a pioneering study of the novels, plays, poetry, and "literature of witness" that sprang from the United States involvement in the Vietnam War. Reviewing the book, the journal American Literature declared, "[It is] more than just an introductory act. It also sets forth what are sure to be lasting types of American literary response to Vietnam, and of the scholarly response to the emerging literature of the war." In Re-Writing America, Beidler charts the ongoing achievements of the men and women who first gained public notice as Vietnam authors and who are now recognized as major literary interpreters of our national life and culture at large. These writers--among them Tim O'Brien, Philip Caputo, Winston Groom, David Rabe, John Balaban, Robert Stone, Michael Herr, Gloria Emerson, and Frances Fitzgerald--have applied in their later efforts, says Beidler, "many of the hard-won lessons of literary sense-making learned in initial works attempting to come explicitly to terms with Vietnam." Beidler argues that the Vietnam authors have done much to reenergize American creative writing and to lead it out of the poststructuralist impasse of texts as endless critiques of language, representation, and authority. With their direct experience of a divisive and frustrating war--"a war not of their own making but of the making of politicians and experts, a war of ancient animosities that cost nearly everything for those involved and settled virtually nothing"--these writers in many ways resemble the celebrated generation of poets and novelists who emerged from World War I. Like their forebears of 1914-18, those of the Vietnam generation have undertaken a common project of cultural revision: to "re-write America," to create an art that, even as it continues to acknowledge the war's painful memory, projects that memory into new dimensions of mythic consciousness for other--and better--times. Beidler fills his book with detailed, illuminating analyses of the writers' works, which, as he notes, have moved across an almost infinite range of subject, genre, and mode. From David Rabe, for example, have come innovative plays in which overt statements on the traumas of Vietnam (The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel, Streamers) have made way for broader commentaries on sex, power, and violence in American life (In the Boom Boom Room, HurlyBurly). Winstom Groom has moved from Better Times Than These, a rather traditional (even anachronistic) war novel, to further reaches of rambunctious humor in Forrest Gump. And journalist Michael Herr, whose Dispatches memorably defined a Vietnam landscape at once real and hallucinatory, carried his vision into collaborations on the films Apocalypse Now and Full Metal Jacket. As Beidler notes, the immense price that Vietnam exacted from the American soul continues to draw a plethora of interpretations and depictions. Vietnam authors remind us, in Tim O'Brien's words, of "the things they carried." But as Beidler makes clear, they now command us not only to remember but to imagine new possibilities as well.


Writing America into the Twenty-First Century

Writing America into the Twenty-First Century

Author: Elizabeth Boyle

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2010-04-16

Total Pages: 165

ISBN-13: 1443821993

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Writing America into the Twenty-First Century: Essays on the American Novel seeks to explore an exciting period in American literary scholarship. Concentrating on novels written after 1990 and through to the new millennium and to the present day, this collection presents a refreshing and much-needed analysis of recent American fiction. Representing the work of established scholars and emerging critical voices, the essays interrogate a range of fiction including works by Philip Roth, Jeffrey Eugenides, Don DeLillo, Thomas Pynchon and Cormac McCarthy. Accessible to students, scholars and the interested reader, this invigorating collection navigates the works of several key male American authors of the last twenty years and, in so doing, offers a new way of examining the American novel. This volume’s strength lies in its careful academic focus on recent American fiction and seeks to re-acquaint the reader with well-known authors and introduce them to new literary voices such as Christopher John Farley, Anthony Giardina and Daniel Suarez. The collection is organised into four large topic areas: ‘Youth and Age,’ ‘War and Crime,’ ‘Culture’ and ‘Spaces and Patterns.’ Each essay deals with its own particular subject and author but the full impact of each section on the concept of writing the American novel into the present day can only really be understood when read in conjunction with the others. Writing America, a companion volume to Reading America: New Perspectives on the American Novel (2008) would be a valuable asset to any university or branch library. The volume will also attract strong interest from established academics, especially those researching the fields of literature, critical theory, cultural history and politics.