Why Literature Matters in the 21st Century

Why Literature Matters in the 21st Century PDF Author: Mark William Roche
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300129599
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
Not just another jeremiad against prevailing isms and orthodoxies, Why Literature Matters in the 21st Century examines literature in its connection to virtue and moral excellence. The author is concerned with literature as the teacher of virtue. The current crisis in the humanities, Mark William Roche argues, may be traced back to the separation of art and morality. (“When the distinction between is and ought is leveled,” he writes, “the power of the professions increases.”) The arts and humanities concern themselves with the fate and prospects of humankind. Today that fate and those prospects are under the increasing influence of technology. In a technological age, literature gains in importance precisely to the extent that our sense of intrinsic value is lost. In its elevation of play and inexhaustible meaning, literature offers a counterbalance to reason and efficiency. It helps us grasp the ways in which diverse parts form a comprehensive and complex whole, and it connects us with other ages and cultures. Not least, great literature grapples with the ethical challenges of the day.

Why Literature Matters in the 21st Century

Why Literature Matters in the 21st Century PDF Author: Mark William Roche
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300129599
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 320

Get Book Here

Book Description
Not just another jeremiad against prevailing isms and orthodoxies, Why Literature Matters in the 21st Century examines literature in its connection to virtue and moral excellence. The author is concerned with literature as the teacher of virtue. The current crisis in the humanities, Mark William Roche argues, may be traced back to the separation of art and morality. (“When the distinction between is and ought is leveled,” he writes, “the power of the professions increases.”) The arts and humanities concern themselves with the fate and prospects of humankind. Today that fate and those prospects are under the increasing influence of technology. In a technological age, literature gains in importance precisely to the extent that our sense of intrinsic value is lost. In its elevation of play and inexhaustible meaning, literature offers a counterbalance to reason and efficiency. It helps us grasp the ways in which diverse parts form a comprehensive and complex whole, and it connects us with other ages and cultures. Not least, great literature grapples with the ethical challenges of the day.

The Politics of Literature in a Divided 21st Century

The Politics of Literature in a Divided 21st Century PDF Author: Katharina Donn
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000074269
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
How does literature matter politically in the 21st century? This book offers an ecocritical framework for exploring the significance of literature today. Featuring a diverse body of texts and authors, it develops a future-oriented politics embedded in those transgressive realities which our political system finds impossible to tame. This book re-imagines political agency, voices, bodies and borders as transformative processes rather than rigid realities, articulating a ‘dia-topian’ literary politics. Taking a contextual approach, it addresses such urgent global issues as biopolitics, migration and borders, populism, climate change, and terrorism. These readings revitalize fictional worlds for political enquiry, demonstrating how imaginative literature seeds change in a world of closed-off horizons. Prior to the pragmatics of power-play, literary language breathes new energy into the frames of our thought and the shapes of our affects. This book shows how relation, metamorphosis and enmeshment can become salient in a politics beyond the conflict line.

The Invention of Solitude

The Invention of Solitude PDF Author: Paul Auster
Publisher: Faber & Faber
ISBN: 0571266746
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 210

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Book Description
'One day there is life . . . and then, suddenly, it happens there is death.' So begins Paul Auster's moving and personal meditation on fatherhood. The first section, 'Portrait of an Invisible Man', reveals Auster's memories and feelings after the death of his father. In 'The Book of Memory' the perspective shifts to Auster's role as a father. The narrator, 'A', contemplates his separation from his son, his dying grandfather and the solitary nature of writing and story-telling.

Rescuing Socrates

Rescuing Socrates PDF Author: Roosevelt Montas
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691224390
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 248

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Book Description
A Dominican-born academic tells the story of how the Great Books transformed his life—and why they have the power to speak to people of all backgrounds What is the value of a liberal education? Traditionally characterized by a rigorous engagement with the classics of Western thought and literature, this approach to education is all but extinct in American universities, replaced by flexible distribution requirements and ever-narrower academic specialization. Many academics attack the very idea of a Western canon as chauvinistic, while the general public increasingly doubts the value of the humanities. In Rescuing Socrates, Dominican-born American academic Roosevelt Montás tells the story of how a liberal education transformed his life, and offers an intimate account of the relevance of the Great Books today, especially to members of historically marginalized communities. Montás emigrated from the Dominican Republic to Queens, New York, when he was twelve and encountered the Western classics as an undergraduate in Columbia University’s renowned Core Curriculum, one of America’s last remaining Great Books programs. The experience changed his life and determined his career—he went on to earn a PhD in English and comparative literature, serve as director of Columbia’s Center for the Core Curriculum, and start a Great Books program for low-income high school students who aspire to be the first in their families to attend college. Weaving together memoir and literary reflection, Rescuing Socrates describes how four authors—Plato, Augustine, Freud, and Gandhi—had a profound impact on Montás’s life. In doing so, the book drives home what it’s like to experience a liberal education—and why it can still remake lives.

Teaching Writing in the Twenty-First Century

Teaching Writing in the Twenty-First Century PDF Author: Beth L. Hewett
Publisher: Modern Language Association
ISBN: 160329547X
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 487

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Book Description
Teaching Writing in the Twenty-First Century is a comprehensive introduction to writing instruction in an increasingly digital world. It provides both a theoretical background and detailed practical guidance to writing instructors faced with novel and ever-changing digital learning technologies, new approaches to access needs and usability design, increasing student diversity, and the multiliteracies of reading, alphabetic writing, and multimodal composition. A companion volume, Administering Writing Programs in the Twenty-First Century, considers the role of administrators in addressing these issues. Covering all aspects of teaching online, various composition genres, and the technologies available to teachers, Teaching Writing in the Twenty-First Century addresses composing processes and approaches; designing and scaffolding assignments; providing response, feedback, and evaluation; communicating effectively; and supporting students. These strategic and practical ideas are prefaced by a history of the relation between composition and rhetoric and a guide to diversity, inclusion, and access. The volume ends with a chapter on envisioning the future of composition.

Man in the Age of Technology

Man in the Age of Technology PDF Author: Arnold Gehlen
Publisher: New York : Columbia University Press
ISBN:
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 216

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Book Description


Latino/a Literature in the Classroom

Latino/a Literature in the Classroom PDF Author: Frederick Luis Aldama
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317933974
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 542

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Book Description
In one of the most rapidly growing areas of literary study, this volume provides the first comprehensive guide to teaching Latino/a literature in all variety of learning environments. Essays by internationally renowned scholars offer an array of approaches and methods to the teaching of the novel, short story, plays, poetry, autobiography, testimonial, comic book, children and young adult literature, film, performance art, and multi-media digital texts, among others. The essays provide conceptual vocabularies and tools to help teachers design courses that pay attention to: Issues of form across a range of storytelling media Issues of content such as theme and character Issues of historical periods, linguistic communities, and regions Issues of institutional classroom settings The volume innovatively adds to and complicates the broader humanities curriculum by offering new possibilities for pedagogical practice.

André Gide

André Gide PDF Author: Patrick Pollard
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 9780300049985
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 532

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Book Description
Andre Gide, renowned French essayist, novelist, and playwright, was also a homosexual apologist whose sexuality was central to the whole of his literary and political discourse. This book by Patrick Pollard--the first serious study of homosexuality in Gide's theater and fiction--analyzes his ideas and traces the philosophical, anthropological, scientific, and literary movements that influenced his thought. Pollard begins by discussing Corydon, a defense of pederasty that Gide felt was his most important book. He then provided a historical and analytical survey of books that contributed to Gide's perception of homosexuality, including works on philosophy, social theory, natural history, and medicolegal questions. Pollard goes on to investigate works of fiction--ancient and modern, European and Oriental--in which Gide saw homosexual elements. He concludes by considering the homosexual themes in Gide's own works, analyzing the ways that Gide constantly tried to resolve conflicts between nature and culture, hypocrisy and honesty, corruption and sound moral judgment, anomaly and conformity, and sexual freedom and religious constraint. The book provides a new perspective on Gide's work, a reconstruction of the moral and intellectual climate in Europe at the beginning of the twentieth century, and a substantial contribution to the cultural history of homosexuality.

Why Literary Periods Mattered

Why Literary Periods Mattered PDF Author: Ted Underwood
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 0804788448
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 210

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Book Description
In the mid-nineteenth century, the study of English literature began to be divided into courses that surveyed discrete "periods." Since that time, scholars' definitions of literature and their rationales for teaching it have changed radically. But the periodized structure of the curriculum has remained oddly unshaken, as if the exercise of contrasting one literary period with another has an importance that transcends the content of any individual course. Why Literary Periods Mattered explains how historical contrast became central to literary study, and why it remained institutionally central in spite of critical controversy about literature itself. Organizing literary history around contrast rather than causal continuity helped literature departments separate themselves from departments of history. But critics' long reliance on a rhetoric of contrasted movements and fateful turns has produced important blind spots in the discipline. In the twenty-first century, Underwood argues, literary study may need digital technology in particular to develop new methods of reasoning about gradual, continuous change.

Why Race Still Matters

Why Race Still Matters PDF Author: Alana Lentin
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1509535721
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 161

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Book Description
'Why are you making this about race?' This question is repeated daily in public and in the media. Calling someone racist in these times of mounting white supremacy seems to be a worse insult than racism itself. In our supposedly post-racial society, surely it’s time to stop talking about race? This powerful refutation is a call to notice not just when and how race still matters but when, how and why it is said not to matter. Race critical scholar Alana Lentin argues that society is in urgent need of developing the skills of racial literacy, by jettisoning the idea that race is something and unveiling what race does as a key technology of modern rule, hidden in plain sight. Weaving together international examples, she eviscerates misconceptions such as reverse racism and the newfound acceptability of 'race realism', bursts the 'I’m not racist, but' justification, complicates the common criticisms of identity politics and warns against using concerns about antisemitism as a proxy for antiracism. Dominant voices in society suggest we are talking too much about race. Lentin shows why we actually need to talk about it more and how in doing so we can act to make it matter less.