Approaches to Teaching Dickens's Bleak House

Approaches to Teaching Dickens's Bleak House PDF Author: John O. Jordan
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
A central text both in Dickens's career and in the history of the novel itself, Bleak House provides students and teachers occasion to discuss Victorian social concerns involving law, crime, family, education, and money and to learn about every stratum of English society, from the aristocracy to the homeless. But the sheer size of the novel and its narrative intricacy pose pedagogical obstacles. The essays in this volume offer instructors an array of practical strategies for use in the classroom: some describe courses organized exclusively around Bleak House; others offer ideas for teaching a single scene or topic in the novel. The book opens with part 1, "Materials," which assesses editions and provides a guide to the wealth of resources available to instructors, including reference works, critical studies, and background readings, in print and on the Web. The essays in part 2, "Approaches," discuss nineteenth-century British culture and Victorian social texts; present ways to teach specific scenes, patterns, and problems in the novel; describe intertextual approaches; and detail specific courses taught in different settings and at a variety of educational levels.

Approaches to Teaching Dickens's Bleak House

Approaches to Teaching Dickens's Bleak House PDF Author: John O. Jordan
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 256

Get Book Here

Book Description
A central text both in Dickens's career and in the history of the novel itself, Bleak House provides students and teachers occasion to discuss Victorian social concerns involving law, crime, family, education, and money and to learn about every stratum of English society, from the aristocracy to the homeless. But the sheer size of the novel and its narrative intricacy pose pedagogical obstacles. The essays in this volume offer instructors an array of practical strategies for use in the classroom: some describe courses organized exclusively around Bleak House; others offer ideas for teaching a single scene or topic in the novel. The book opens with part 1, "Materials," which assesses editions and provides a guide to the wealth of resources available to instructors, including reference works, critical studies, and background readings, in print and on the Web. The essays in part 2, "Approaches," discuss nineteenth-century British culture and Victorian social texts; present ways to teach specific scenes, patterns, and problems in the novel; describe intertextual approaches; and detail specific courses taught in different settings and at a variety of educational levels.

Supposing Bleak House

Supposing Bleak House PDF Author: John O. Jordan
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 0813930928
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 202

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Book Description
Supposing "Bleak House" is an extended meditation on what many consider to be Dickens’s and nineteenth-century England’s greatest work of narrative fiction. Focusing on the novel’s retrospective narrator, whom he identifies as Esther Woodcourt in order to distinguish her from her younger, unmarried self, John Jordan offers provocative new readings of the novel’s narrative structure, its illustrations, its multiple and indeterminate endings, the role of its famous detective, Inspector Bucket, its many ghosts, and its relation to key events in Dickens’s life during the years 1850 to 1853. Jordan draws on insights from narratology and psychoanalysis in order to explore multiple dimensions of Esther’s complex subjectivity and fractured narrative voice. His conclusion considers Bleak House as a national allegory, situating it in the context of the troubled decade of the 1840s and in relation to Dickens’s seldom-studied A Child’s History of England (written during the same years as his great novel) and to Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx.Supposing "Bleak House" claims Dickens as a powerful investigator of the unconscious mind and as a "popular" novelist deeply committed to social justice and a politics of inclusiveness. Victorian Literature and Culture Series

Approaches to Teaching the Works of Primo Levi

Approaches to Teaching the Works of Primo Levi PDF Author: Nicholas Patruno
Publisher: Modern Language Association
ISBN: 1603291792
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 178

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Book Description
Primo Levi, Holocaust survivor and renowned memoirist, is one of the most widely read writers of post-World War II Italy. His works are characterized by the lean, dispassionate eloquence with which he approaches his experience of incarceration in Auschwitz. His memoirs--as well as his poetry and fiction and his many interviews--are often taught in several fields, including Jewish studies and Holocaust studies, comparative literature, and Italian language and literature, and can enrich the study of history, psychology, and philosophy. The first part of this volume provides instructors with an overview of the available editions, anthologies, and translations of Levi's work and identifies other useful classroom aids, such as films, music, and online resources. In the second part, contributors describe different approaches to teaching Levi's work. Some, in presenting Survival in Auschwitz, The Reawakening, and The Drowned and the Saved, look at the place of style in Holocaust testimony and the reliability of memory in autobiography. Others focus on questions of translation, complicated by the untranslatable in the language and experiences of the concentration camps, or on how Levi incorporates his background as a chemist into his writing, most clearly in The Periodic Table.

Approaches to Teaching the Novels of Henry Fielding

Approaches to Teaching the Novels of Henry Fielding PDF Author: Jennifer Preston Wilson
Publisher: Modern Language Association
ISBN: 160329225X
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 247

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Book Description
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.

Approaches to Teaching Petrarch's Canzoniere and the Petrarchan Tradition

Approaches to Teaching Petrarch's Canzoniere and the Petrarchan Tradition PDF Author: Christopher Kleinhenz
Publisher: Modern Language Association
ISBN: 160329175X
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 310

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Book Description
One of the most important authors of the Middle Ages, Petrarch occupies a complex position: historically, he is a medieval author, but, philosophically, he heralds humanism and the Renaissance. Teachers of Petrarch's Canzoniere and his formative influence on the canon of Western European poetry face particular challenges. Petrarch's poetic style brings together the classical tradition, Christianity, an exalted sense of poetic vocation, and an obsessive love for Laura during her life and after her death in ways that can seem at once very strange and--because of his style's immense influence--very familiar to students. This volume aims to meet the varied needs of instructors, whether they teach Petrarch in Italian or in translation, in surveys or in specialized courses, by providing a wealth of pedagogical approaches to Petrarch and his legacy. Part 1, "Materials," reviews the extensive bibliography on Petrarch and Petrarchism, covering editions and translations of the Canzoniere, secondary works, and music and other audiovisual and electronic resources. Part 2, "Approaches," opens with essays on teaching the Canzoniere and continues with essays on teaching the Petrarchan tradition. Some contributors use the design and structure of the Canzoniere as entryways into the work; others approach it through discussion of Petrarch's literary influences and subject matter or through the context of medieval Christianity and culture. The essays on Petrarchism map the poet's influence on the Italian lyric tradition as well as on other national literatures, including Spanish, French, English, and Russian.

Approaches to Teaching Behn's Oroonoko

Approaches to Teaching Behn's Oroonoko PDF Author: Cynthia Richards
Publisher: Modern Language Association
ISBN: 1603291717
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 219

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Book Description
Once merely a footnote in Restoration and eighteenth-century studies and rarely taught, Oroonoko; or, The Royal Slave (1688), by Aphra Behn, is now essential reading for scholars and a classroom favorite. It appears in general surveys and in courses on early modern British writers, postcolonial literature, American literature, women's literature, drama, the slave narrative, and autobiography. Part 1 of this volume, "Materials," provides not only resources for the teacher of Oroonoko but also a brief chronology of Behn's life and work. In part 2, "Approaches," essays offer a diversity of perspectives appropriate to a text that challenges student assumptions and contains not one story but many: Oroonoko as a romance, as a travel account, as a heroic tragedy, as a window to seventeenth-century representations of race, as a reflection of Tory-Whig conflict in the time of Charles II.

Approaches to Teaching Austen's Mansfield Park

Approaches to Teaching Austen's Mansfield Park PDF Author: Marcia McClintock Folsom
Publisher: Modern Language Association
ISBN: 1603291997
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
There were no reviews of Mansfield Park when it first appeared in 1814. Austen's reputation grew in the Victorian period, but it was only in the twentieth century that formal and sustained criticism began of this work, which addresses the controversies of its time more than Austen's earlier novels did. Lionel Trilling praised Mansfield Park for exploring the difficult moral life of modernity; Edward Said brought postcolonial theory to the study of the novel; and twenty-first-century critics scrutinize these and other approaches to build on and go beyond them. This volume is the third in the MLA Approaches series to deal with Austen's work (Pride and Prejudice and Emma were the subject of the first and second volumes on Austen, respectively). It provides information about editions, film adaptations, and digital resources, and then nineteen essays discuss various aspects of Mansfield Park, including the slave trade, the theme of reading, elements of tragedy, gift theory, landscape design, moral improvement in the spirit of Samuel Johnson and of the Reformation, sibling relations, card playing, and interpretations of Fanny Price, the heroine, not as passive but as having some control.

Approaches to Teaching the Works of Italo Calvino

Approaches to Teaching the Works of Italo Calvino PDF Author: Franco Ricci
Publisher: Modern Language Association
ISBN: 1603291652
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 283

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Book Description
Italo Calvino, whose works reflect the major literary and cultural trends of the second half of the twentieth century, is known for his imagination, humor, and technical virtuosity. He explores topics such as neorealism, folktale, fantasy, and social and political allegory and experiments with narrative style and structure. Students take delight in Calvino's wide-ranging and inventive work, whether in Italian courses or in courses in comparative or world literature, literary criticism, cultural studies, philosophy, or even architecture. Given the range of his writing, teaching Calvino can seem a daunting task. This volume aims to help instructors develop creative and engaging classroom strategies. Part 1, "Materials," presents an overview of Calvino's writings, nearly all of which are available in English translation, as well as critical works and online resources. The essays in part 2, "Approaches," focus on general themes and cultural contexts, address theoretical issues, and provide practical classroom applications. Contributors describe strategies for teaching Calvino that are as varied as his writings, whether having students study narrative theory through If on a winter's night a traveler, explore literary genre with Cosmicomics, improve their writing using Six Memos for the Next Millennium, or read Mr. Palomar in a general education humanities course.

Approaches to Teaching the Works of Anton Chekhov

Approaches to Teaching the Works of Anton Chekhov PDF Author: Michael C. Finke
Publisher: Modern Language Association
ISBN: 1603292691
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 242

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Book Description
Chekhov's works are unflinching in the face of human frailty. With their emphasis on the dignity and value of individuals during unique moments, they help us better understand how to exist with others when we are fundamentally alone. Written in Russia at the end of the nineteenth century, when the country began to move fitfully toward industrialization and grappled with the influence of Western liberalism even as it remained an autocracy, Chekhov's plays and stories continue to influence contemporary writers. The essays in this volume provide classroom strategies for teaching Chekhov's stories and plays, discuss how his medical training and practice related to his literary work, and compare Chekhov with writers both Russian and American. The volume also aims to help instructors with the daunting array of new editions in English, as well as with the ever-growing list of titles in visual media: filmed theater productions of his plays, adaptations of the plays and stories scripted for film, and amateur performances freely available online.

Approaches to Teaching Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings and Other Works

Approaches to Teaching Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings and Other Works PDF Author: Leslie A. Donovan
Publisher: Modern Language Association
ISBN: 1603292071
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 403

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Book Description
A philologist and medieval scholar, J. R. R. Tolkien never intended to write immensely popular literature that would challenge traditional ideas about the nature of great literature and that was worthy of study in colleges across the world. He set out only to write a good story, the kind of story he and his friends would enjoy reading. In The Hobbit and in The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien created an entire world informed by his vast knowledge of mythology, languages, and medieval literature. In the 1960s, his books unexpectedly gained cult status with a new generation of young, countercultural readers. Today, the readership for Tolkien's absorbing secondary world--filled with monsters, magic, adventure, sacrifice, and heroism--continues to grow. Part 1 of this volume, "Materials," introduces instructors to the rich array of resources available for teaching Tolkien, including editions and criticism of his fiction and scholarship, historical material on his life and times, audiovisual materials, and film adaptations of his fiction. The essays in part 2, "Approaches," help instructors introduce students to critical debates around Tolkien's work, its sources, its influence, and its connection to ecology, religion, and science. Contributors draw on interdisciplinary approaches to outline strategies for teaching Tolkien in a wide variety of classroom contexts.