Teaching Literature A Companion

by Agathocleous, Tanya; Dean, Ann C.

• ISBN13: 9780333987933
• ISBN10: 0333987934
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2003-03-19
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

Literature departments enter the twenty-first century with a deepening sense of crisis and growing need to defend the value of their work in the face of understaffing and poor job prospects for graduate students. Teaching Literature offers a practical guide to teaching literature, with accounts of how daily experiences in the classroom grow out of engagement with dynamic fields of study. By uniting the theoretical and the practical consideration of what it means to teach literature, this book widens the current conversation about pedagogy just beginning to take place in the field. Until recently, teaching has played second fiddle to literary research as a mode of knowledge and a sign of academic prestige. Now, literature departments are beginning to realize the importance of articulating what it is we do in the classroom. Book jacket.

Author Biography

Tanya Agathocleous is a graduate student at Rutgers University. Ann C. Dean is Assistant Professor of English and Director of College Writing, University of Southern Maine.

Table of Contents

Foreword	vii
George Levine
Acknowledgements	xiii
Notes on the Contributors	xiv
Introduction	1	(10)
Tanya Agathocleous
Ann Dean
Part I: Fields of Study in the Twenty-First Century Classroom
Teaching Autobiography	11	(20)
Carolyn Williams
Queer Chaucer in the Classroom	31	(10)
Glenn Burger
Steven F. Kruger
Grub Street: the Literary and the Literatory in Eighteenth-Century Britain	41	(8)
John O'Brien
Teaching the Victorians Today	49	(9)
Nancy Henry
Towards Desegregating Syllabuses: Teaching American Literary Realism and Racial Uplift Fiction	58	(13)
Michele Birnbaum
Teaching Literature and Ethics: the Particular and the General	71	(9)
Suzy Anger
Taking Lyrics Literally: Teaching Poetry in a Prose Culture	80	(25)
Charles Altieri
Part II: Classroom Rituals, Old and New
Re-writing Texts, Re-constructing the Subject: Work as Play on the Critical-Creative Interface	105	(20)
Rob Pope
Schooling Misery: the Ominous Threat and the Eminent Promise of the Popular Reader	125	(14)
Richard E. Miller
The River and the Chestnut Tree: When Students Already Know the Answers	139	(10)
Ann Dean
The Place of the Implicit in Literary Discovery: Creating New Courses	149	(14)
Philip Davis
From Teaching in Class to Teaching Online: Preserving Community and Communication	163	(8)
Susan Jaye Dauer
`Subject: RE: I absolutely *HATED* Achebe's Things Fall Apart': Teaching World Literature on the World Wide Web	171	(15)
Tanya Agathocleous
Jillana Enteen
Appendix 1: Web Resources for Teaching Literature	186	(3)
Appendix 2: Bibliography of Resources on Teaching Literature	189	(4)
Index	193