Approaches to Teaching the Plays of August Wilson

Approaches to Teaching the Plays of August Wilson PDF Author: Sandra G. Shannon
Publisher: Modern Language Association
ISBN: 1603292608
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 376

Get Book Here

Book Description
The award-winning playwright August Wilson used drama as a medium to write a history of twentieth-century America through the perspectives of its black citizenry. In the plays of his Pittsburgh Cycle, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning Fences and The Piano Lesson, Wilson mixes African spirituality with the realism of the American theater and puts African American storytelling and performance practices in dialogue with canonical writers like Aristotle and Shakespeare. As they portray black Americans living through migration, industrialization, and war, Wilson's plays explore the relation between a unified black consciousness and America's collective identity. In part 1 of this volume, "Materials," the editors survey sources on Wilson's biography, teachable texts of Wilson's plays, useful secondary readings, and compelling audiovisual and Web resources. The essays in part 2, "Approaches," look at a diverse set of issues in Wilson's work, including the importance of blues and jazz, intertextual connections to other playwrights, race in performance, Yoruban spirituality, and the role of women in the plays.

Approaches to Teaching the Plays of August Wilson

Approaches to Teaching the Plays of August Wilson PDF Author: Sandra G. Shannon
Publisher: Modern Language Association
ISBN: 1603292608
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 376

Get Book Here

Book Description
The award-winning playwright August Wilson used drama as a medium to write a history of twentieth-century America through the perspectives of its black citizenry. In the plays of his Pittsburgh Cycle, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning Fences and The Piano Lesson, Wilson mixes African spirituality with the realism of the American theater and puts African American storytelling and performance practices in dialogue with canonical writers like Aristotle and Shakespeare. As they portray black Americans living through migration, industrialization, and war, Wilson's plays explore the relation between a unified black consciousness and America's collective identity. In part 1 of this volume, "Materials," the editors survey sources on Wilson's biography, teachable texts of Wilson's plays, useful secondary readings, and compelling audiovisual and Web resources. The essays in part 2, "Approaches," look at a diverse set of issues in Wilson's work, including the importance of blues and jazz, intertextual connections to other playwrights, race in performance, Yoruban spirituality, and the role of women in the plays.

Conversations with August Wilson

Conversations with August Wilson PDF Author: Jackson R. Bryer
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781578068302
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 292

Get Book Here

Book Description
Collects a selection of the many interviews Wilson gave from 1984 to 2004. In the interviews, the playwright covers at length and in detail his plays and his background. He comments as well on such subjects as the differences between African Americans and whites, his call for more black theater companies, and his belief that African Americans made a mistake in assimilating themselves into the white mainstream. He also talks about his major influences, what he calls his "four B's"-- the blues, writers James Baldwin and Amiri Baraka, and painter Romare Bearden. Wilson also discusses his writing process and his multiple collaborations with director Lloyd Richards--Publisher description.

Fences

Fences PDF Author: August Wilson
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0593087585
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 130

Get Book Here

Book Description
From legendary playwright August Wilson comes the powerful, stunning dramatic bestseller that won him critical acclaim, including the Tony Award for Best Play and the Pulitzer Prize. Troy Maxson is a strong man, a hard man. He has had to be to survive. Troy Maxson has gone through life in an America where to be proud and black is to face pressures that could crush a man, body and soul. But the 1950s are yielding to the new spirit of liberation in the 1960s, a spirit that is changing the world Troy Maxson has learned to deal with the only way he can, a spirit that is making him a stranger, angry and afraid, in a world he never knew and to a wife and son he understands less and less. This is a modern classic, a book that deals with the impossibly difficult themes of race in America, set during the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 60s. Now an Academy Award-winning film directed by and starring Denzel Washington, along with Academy Award and Golden Globe winner Viola Davis.

The Ground on which I Stand

The Ground on which I Stand PDF Author: August Wilson
Publisher: Theatre Communications Grou
ISBN: 9781559361873
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 54

Get Book Here

Book Description
August Wilson's radical and provocative call to arms.

The Cambridge Companion to August Wilson

The Cambridge Companion to August Wilson PDF Author: Christopher Bigsby
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139827995
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 417

Get Book Here

Book Description
One of America's most powerful and original dramatists, August Wilson offered an alternative history of the twentieth century, as seen from the perspective of black Americans. He celebrated the lives of those seemingly pushed to the margins of national life, but who were simultaneously protagonists of their own drama and evidence of a vital and compelling community. Decade by decade, he told the story of a people with a distinctive history who forged their own future, aware of their roots in another time and place, but doing something more than just survive. Wilson deliberately addressed black America, but in doing so discovered an international audience. Alongside chapters addressing Wilson's life and career, and the wider context of his plays, this Companion dedicates individual chapters to each play in his ten-play cycle, which are ordered chronologically, demonstrating Wilson's notion of an unfolding history of the twentieth century.

August Wilson's Pittsburgh Cycle

August Wilson's Pittsburgh Cycle PDF Author: Sandra G. Shannon
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 0786478004
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 221

Get Book Here

Book Description
Providing a detailed study of American playwright August Wilson (1945-2005), this collection of new essays explores the development of the author's ethos across his twenty-five-year creative career--a process that transformed his life as he retraced the lives of his fellow "Africans in America." While Wilson's narratives of Pittsburgh and Chicago are microcosms of black life in America, they also reflect the psychological trauma of his disconnection with his biological father, his impassioned efforts to discover and reconnect with the blues, with Africa and with poet/activist Amiri Baraka, and his love for the vernacular of Pittsburgh.

Approaches to Teaching the Works of Oscar Wilde

Approaches to Teaching the Works of Oscar Wilde PDF Author: Philip E. Smith
Publisher: Approaches to Teaching World L
ISBN:
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 304

Get Book Here

Book Description
It is both a challenge and a pleasure to teach the works of Oscar Wilde, "the master of paradox," in the words of this volume's editor. Wilde wrote at a pivotal moment between the Victorian period and modernism, and his work is sometimes considered prescient of the postmodern age. He is now taught in a variety of university courses: in literature, theater, criticism, Irish studies, cultural studies, gender studies, and gay studies. This volume, like others in the MLA series Approaches to Teaching World Litereature, is divided into two parts. The first, "Materials," suggests editions, resources, and criticism, both in print and online, that may be useful for the teacher. The second part, "Approaches," contains twenty-five essays that discuss Wilde's stories, fairy tales, poetry, plays, essays, letters, and life�from the perspective of a wide range of disciplines.

Approaches to Teaching Baraka's Dutchman

Approaches to Teaching Baraka's Dutchman PDF Author: Matthew Calihman
Publisher: Modern Language Association
ISBN: 1603293566
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 309

Get Book Here

Book Description
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.

Culturally Responsive Reading

Culturally Responsive Reading PDF Author: Durthy A. Washington
Publisher: Teachers College Press
ISBN: 080778169X
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 217

Get Book Here

Book Description
“A book that is brilliantly incisive and generative beyond words, Culturally Responsive Reading is a gift that will be welcomed in classrooms everywhere.” —Junot Díaz, author, This Is How You Lose Her Help students to explore the intertextuality of literature and to think more deeply and compassionately about the world. This book shows high school teachers and college instructors how to foreground a work’s cultural context, recognizing that every culture has its own narrative tradition of oral and written classics that inform its literature. The author introduces readers to the LIST Paradigm, a guided approach to culturally responsive reading that encourages readers to access and analyze a text by asking significant questions designed to foster close, critical reading. By combining aspects of both literary analysis (exploring the elements of fiction such as plot, setting, and character) and literary criticism (exploring works from multiple perspectives such as historical, psychological, and archetypal), the LIST Paradigm helps educators “unlock” literature with four keys to culture: Language, Identity, Space, and Time. In Culturally Responsive Reading, Washington exposes cultural myths, reveals racist and culturally biased language, dismantles stereotypes, and prevents the egregious misreading of works written by people of color. Book Features: Describes a unique approach to culturally responsive reading, including specific teaching strategies and rich classroom examples.Explores numerous texts by writers of color that are rarely included as required reading in literature courses.Provides examples and illustrations of innovative ways to incorporate multicultural texts into an introductory literature course.Incorporates epigraphs and questions that highlight each component of the LIST approach.Includes a critical essay that guides teachers through the process of teaching a complex postmodern novel (Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao).

May All Your Fences Have Gates

May All Your Fences Have Gates PDF Author: Alan Nadel
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780877454281
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 270

Get Book Here

Book Description
"This stimulating collection of essays, the first comprehensive critical examination of the work of two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright August Wilson, deals individually with his five major plays and also addresses issues crucial for the role of history, the relationship of African ritual to African American drama, gender relations in the African American community, music and cultural identity, the influence of Romare Bearden's collages, and the politics of drama. With essays by virtually all the scholars who have currently published on Wilson along with many established and newer scholars of drama and/or African American literature."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved