Rejoining the Common Reader

Rejoining the Common Reader PDF Author: Clara Claiborne Park
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 9780810109919
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
Rejoining the Common Reader is suffused with the impulse that motivates Clara Claiborne Park's distinguished writing and teaching: the desire to related literature to the experience of its readers. This humane, balanced, and entertaining book will appeal to anyone who longs to recapture the pleasure of reading for personal enrichment and to teachers of literature who have grown to resent the intrusiveness of theory and theorizing and wish to reexamine what they are doing to, for, and with their students.

Rejoining the Common Reader

Rejoining the Common Reader PDF Author: Clara Claiborne Park
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 9780810109919
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 260

Get Book Here

Book Description
Rejoining the Common Reader is suffused with the impulse that motivates Clara Claiborne Park's distinguished writing and teaching: the desire to related literature to the experience of its readers. This humane, balanced, and entertaining book will appeal to anyone who longs to recapture the pleasure of reading for personal enrichment and to teachers of literature who have grown to resent the intrusiveness of theory and theorizing and wish to reexamine what they are doing to, for, and with their students.

Counting Descent

Counting Descent PDF Author: Clint Smith
Publisher: SCB Distributors
ISBN: 1938912667
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 102

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Book Description
From the author of How the Word is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America * Winner, 2017 Black Caucus of the American Library Association Literary Award * Finalist, 2017 NAACP Image Awards * "One Book One New Orleans" 2017 Book Selection * Published in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Poetry Magazine, The Paris Review, New Republic, Boston Review, The Guardian, The Rumpus, and The Academy of American Poets "So many of these poems just blow me away. Incredibly beautiful and powerful." -- Michelle Alexander, Author of The New Jim Crow "Counting Descent is a tightly-woven collection of poems whose pages act like an invitation. The invitation is intimate and generous and also a challenge; are you up to asking what is blackness? What is black joy? How is black life loved and lived? To whom do we look to for answers? This invitation is not to a narrow street, or a shallow lake, but to a vast exploration of life. And you’re invited. -- Elizabeth Acevedo, Author of Beastgirl & Other Origin Myths "These poems shimmer with revelatory intensity, approaching us from all sides to immerse us in the America that America so often forgets." -- Gregory Pardlo "Counting Descent is more than brilliant. More than lyrical. More than bluesy. More than courageous. It is terrifying in its ability to at once not hide and show readers why it wants to hide so badly. These poems mend, meld and imagine with weighted details, pauses, idiosyncrasies and word patterns I've never seen before." -- Kiese Laymon, Author of Long Division Clint Smith's debut poetry collection, Counting Descent, is a coming of age story that seeks to complicate our conception of lineage and tradition. "Do you know what it means for your existence to be defined by someone else’s intentions?" Smith explores the cognitive dissonance that results from belonging to a community that unapologetically celebrates black humanity while living in a world that often renders blackness a caricature of fear. His poems move fluidly across personal and political histories, all the while reflecting on the social construction of our lived experiences. Smith brings the reader on a powerful journey forcing us to reflect on all that we learn growing up, and all that we seek to unlearn moving forward.

Bread for the Journey

Bread for the Journey PDF Author: Thomas W. Currie
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
ISBN: 1498231853
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 267

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Book Description
Preparing for ministry involves more than the acquisition of certain skills. The shape of a disciple's soul as he or she embarks on this journey is as important if not more so than learning how to exegete a text or engage in pastoral care. Ministry is not easy, and the preparation for this form of Christian discipleship is open to a variety of temptations, not least of which is a kind of despair over the paucity of one's own resources, or worse, the illusion that one is better off relying on one's own talents and virtues. What is needed is bread for this journey, not necessarily exhortations to work harder, but words of encouragement and grace that bear witness to the surprising reality that ministry is, in fact, a joyful gift. These notes from a dean, who sought to help his students discover that joy in their study and preparation, bear witness to the One, whose life provides bread for every journey, especially for the journey of pastoral ministry.

Tracing the Essay

Tracing the Essay PDF Author: George Douglas Atkins
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 9780820327877
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 196

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Book Description
The essay, as a notably hard form of writing to pin down, has inspired some unflattering descriptions: It is a “greased pig,” for example, or a “pair of baggy pants into which nearly anything and everything can fit.” In Tracing the Essay, G. Douglas Atkins embraces the very qualities that have moved others to accord the essay second-class citizenship in the world of letters. Drawing from the work of Montaigne and Bacon and recent practitioners such as E. B. White and Cynthia Ozick, Atkins shows what the essay means--and how it comes to mean. The essay, related to assaying (attempting), mines experience for meaning, which it then carefully weighs. It is a via media creature, says Atkins, born of and embracing tension. It exists in places between experience and meaning, literature and philosophy, self and other, process and product, form and formlessness. Moreover, as a literary form the essay is inseparable from a way of life requiring wisdom, modesty, and honesty. “The essay was, historically,” notes Atkins, “the first form to take the experience of the individual and make it the stuff of literature.” Atkins also considers the essay’s basis in Renaissance (and Reformation) thinking and its participation in voyages of exploration and discovery of that age. Its concern is “home-cosmography,” to use a term from seventeenth-century writer William Habington. Responding to influential critiques of the essay’s supposed self-indulgence, lack of irony, and absence of form, Atkins argues that the essay exhibits a certain “sneakiness” as it proceeds in, through, and by means of the small and the mundane toward the spiritual and the revelatory.

Zones of Re-membering

Zones of Re-membering PDF Author: Don Gifford
Publisher: Rodopi
ISBN: 904203260X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 149

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Book Description
Don Gifford in Zones of Re-membering shows clearly, thoughtfully, yet entertainingly how no one explanation will account for the depth and complexity of human experience and its grounding in Memory. Because consciousness is a function of Memory, “life without Memory is no life at all” as Alzheimer’s all too frequently demonstrates. Both our individual and collective Memory is stored in the arts, he contends, which in turn provide a way of knowing and of nourishing Memory and consciousness. Memory, like language, is never really stable or accurate but appears as narrative and these narratives collectively form our entire culture. For Gifford, the profoundest explorer of the human consciousness, time, and memory is James Joyce and in its range of reference, wit, and humanity the spirit of Joyce permeates this book.

On the Familiar Essay

On the Familiar Essay PDF Author: G. Atkins
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230101240
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 212

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Book Description
Rooted in close reading of texts, including the essays of E.B. White, this comprehensive assessment of the oft-slighted subform of the literary essay situates the familiar at the heart of the essay as form.

Flannery O'Connor

Flannery O'Connor PDF Author: R. Neil Scott
Publisher: Timberlane Books
ISBN: 9780971542808
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 1098

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Book Description


Reading Essays

Reading Essays PDF Author: G. Douglas Atkins
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 082033653X
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 298

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Book Description
Approaches abound to help us beneficially, enjoyably read fiction, poetry, and drama. Here, for the first time, is a book that aims to do the same for the essay. G. Douglas Atkins performs sustained readings of more than twenty-five major essays, explaining how we can appreciate and understand what this currently resurgent literary form reveals about the “art of living.” Atkins’s readings cover a wide spectrum of writers in the English language--and his readings are themselves essays, gracefully written, engaged, and engaging. Atkins starts with the earliest British practitioners of the form, including Francis Bacon, John Dryden, Alexander Pope, and Samuel Johnson. Transcendentalist writers Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson are included, as are works by Americans James Baldwin, Zora Neale Hurston, and E. B. White. Atkins also provides readings of a number of contemporary essayists, among them Annie Dillard, Scott Russell Sanders, and Cynthia Ozick. Many of the readings are of essays that Atkins has used successfully in the classroom, with undergraduate and graduate students, for many years. In his introduction Atkins offers practical advice on the specific demands essays make and the unique opportunities they offer, especially for college courses. The book ends with a note on the writing of essays, furthering the author’s contention that reading should not be separated from writing. Reading Essays continues in the tradition of such definitive texts as Understanding Poetry and Understanding Fiction. Throughout, Atkins reveals the joy, delight, grace, freedom, and wisdom of “the glorious essay.”

Swift’s Satires on Modernism: Battlegrounds of Reading and Writing

Swift’s Satires on Modernism: Battlegrounds of Reading and Writing PDF Author: G. Atkins
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137311045
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 112

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Book Description
More than three centuries later, Jonathan Swift's writing remains striking and relevant. In this engaging study, Atkins brings forty-plus years of critical experience to bear on some of the greatest satires ever written, revealing new contexts for understanding post-Reformation reading practices and the development of the modern personal essay.

The Fourth Dimension of a Poem: and Other Essays

The Fourth Dimension of a Poem: and Other Essays PDF Author: M. H. Abrams
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393089231
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
A new collection of essays by the legendary literary scholar and critic. In the year of his one-hundredth birthday, preeminent literary critic, scholar, and teacher M. H. Abrams brings us a collection of nine new and recent essays that challenge the reader to think about poetry in new ways. In these essays, three of them never before published, Abrams engages afresh with pivotal figures in intellectual and literary history, among them Kant, Keats, and Hazlitt. The centerpiece of the volume is Abrams’s eloquent and incisive essay “The Fourth Dimension of a Poem” on the pleasure of reading poems aloud, accompanied by online recordings of Abrams’s revelatory readings of poems such as William Wordsworth’s “Surprised by Joy,” Alfred Tennyson’s “Here Sleeps the Crimson Petal,” and Ernest Dowson’s “Cynara.” The collection begins with a foreword by Abrams’s former student Harold Bloom.