Fields of Reading : Motives for Writing

by Comley, Nancy R.; Hamilton, David; Klaus, Carl H.; Scholes, Robert; Sommers, Nancy; Tougaw, Jason

• ISBN13: 9780312553746
• ISBN10: 0312553749
• Edition: 9th
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2009-11-16
• Publisher: Bedford/St. Martin's

Summary

Fields of Readingdraws on the major divisions of the curriculum arts and humanities, social sciences and public affairs, and sciences to present well-crafted and high-quality writing from these fields. Chosen by six editors who are all distinguished teachers and writers, the selections progress from individual essays to paired texts to casebooks that contain multiple readings on an engaging topic. Students are thus exposed to important readings and conversations by key voices in contemporary intellectual life and asked to engage in the kind of reading, writing, and cross-curricular thinking they encounter in college. An additional emphasis on rhetorical purpose (reflecting, reporting, explaining, and arguing), helps students understand how subject, intent, and audience influence the form and style of their own writing.

Author Biography

NANCY R. COMLEY is Professor and Chair of the English Department at Queens College, City University of New York.  In addition to Fields, she has co-edited The Practice of Writing and Text Book for Bedford/St. Martin's, and is co-author with Robert Scholes of Hemingway's Genders (Yale UP). She has also directed the writing program at the University of Oklahoma.

DAVID HAMILTON is a Professor of English at the University of Iowa where he has directed the MFA program in literary nonfiction and edited The Iowa Review. His essays have been published in numerous journals, including the Connecticut Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, and College English; his books are Ossabaw (Salt Publishing) and Deep River: A Memoir of a Missouri Farm (University of Missouri Press).

CARL H. KLAUS, Professor Emeritus at the University of Iowa and founding director of Iowa’s Nonfiction Writing Program, currently serves as co-editor (with Patricia Hampl) of Sightline Books: the University of Iowa Press Series in Literary Nonfiction. Essayist, diarist, and memoirist, Klaus is the author of My Vegetable Love: A Journal of a Growing Season (Houghton Mifflin); Weathering Winter: A Gardener’s Daybook (University Of Iowa Press); Taking Retirement: A Beginner’s Diary (Beacon Press); and Letters to Kate: Life after Life (University of Iowa Press). He is also the co-author or co-editor of several textbooks on writing.

ROBERT SCHOLES, professor of modern culture and media at Brown University, is a distinguished teacher and a scholar in literary studies. He has published many influential books and articles, including The Rise and Fall of English: Reconstructing English as a Discipline (1998); Protocols of Reading (1989); and Textual Power: Literary Theory and the Teaching of English (1985), which won the Mina P. Shaughnessy Prize of the Modern Language Association in 1986 and the David H. Russell Research Award from NCTE in 1988. Scholes is a contributor of numerous articles and book reviews to learned journals, literary magazines, and weekly reviews.

Well-known for her research and publications on student writing, Dr. NANCY SOMMERS led the Expository Writing Program at Harvard University for 21 years, and now teaches writing and mentors new teachers at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education. She has co-authored six textbooks, including A Writer’s Reference (Bedford/St.Martin’s), and has received numerous awards for her teaching, research, and writing, including the prestigious Braddock Award, which she has received twice. Dr. Sommers’ most recent work involves a longitudinal study of 400 students from the Harvard Class of 2001 to understand the role writing plays in undergraduate education.

JASON TOUGAW is Assistant Professor of English and Director of the Writing Across the Curriculum program at Queens College. He is author of Strange Cases: The Medical Case History and the British Novel (Routledge, 2006) and co-editor, with Nancy K. Miller, of Extremities: Trauma, Testimony, and Community (University of Illinois Press). Currently, his writing focuses on connections between neurobiology and the arts, new media pedagogies, and creative nonfiction. He has published essays and creative nonfiction in JAC, Computers & Composition, a/b: Auto/biography Studies, and the anthology Boys to Men: Gay Men Write about Growing Up.

Table of Contents

Preface

Thematic Contents

Introduction

    From Reading to Writing: The Conversation

    Writing and Thinking: The Rhetorical Modes

    Writing and Thinking: The Process

    Reading to Write

    Exploratory Writing

    Drafting

    Revising

    Editing

    Your Process

    Writing Across the Curriculum

    Reflecting, Reporting, Explaining, Arguing:

     The Motives Explained

 

 

Part One: Arts and Humanities

 

Lucy Grealy, Mirrors (Reflecting)

Frederick Douglass, Learning to Read and Write (Reflecting)

*Junot Díaz, Homecoming with Turtle (Reflecting)

Amanda Coyne, The Long Goodbye: Mother’s Day in

  a Federal Prison (Reporting)

Christina Boufis, Teaching Literature at the County

  Jail (Reporting)

Jan Harold Brunvand, Urban Legends: "The Boyfriend’s

  Death" (Explaining)

Steven Johnson, Watching TV Makes You Smarter (Arguing)

George Orwell, Politics and the English Language (Arguing)

James Baldwin, If Black English Isn’t a Language,

  Then Tell Me, What Is? (Arguing)

 

Paired Readings: On Descriptive Writing

    Joan Didion, On Keeping a Notebook (Explaining)

    *Patricia Hampl, The Dark Art of Description (Reflecting)

 

Paired Readings: On Bilingualism

    *Gloria Anzaldúa, How to Tame a Wild Tongue (Arguing)

    Amy Tan, Mother Tongue (Reflecting)

 

Paired Readings: On Religious Belief

    *Marjane Satrapi, The Veil (Reporting)

    *Paul Bloom, Is God an Accident? (Arguing)

 

 

Part Two: Social Sciences and Public Affairs

 

Phyllis Rose, Tools of Torture: An Essay on

  Beauty and Pain (Reflecting)

*Andrew Sullivan, What’s So Bad about Hate? (Reflecting)

Barbara Ehrenreich, Nickel and Dimed: On (Not)

  Getting By in America (Reporting)

Zoë Tracy Hardy, What Did You Do in the War,

  Grandma? A Flashback to August, 1945 (Reporting)

*Olivia Judson, The Selfless Gene (Explaining)

Barbara Tuchman, "This Is the End of the World":

  The Black Death (documented essay) (Explaining)

Thomas Jefferson, The Declaration of

  Independence (Arguing)

Jonathan Swift, A Modest Proposal (Arguing)

*Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (Arguing)

 

Paired Readings: On Animal-Human Conflicts

    George Orwell, Shooting an Elephant (Reflecting)

    *Charles Siebert, An Elephant Crackup (Reporting)

 

Paired Readings: On Race Relations

    Martin Luther King, Jr., Letter from

      Birmingham Jail (Arguing)

    *Barack Obama, A More Perfect Union (Reflecting)

 

Paired Readings: On the Reality of War

    John Berger, Hiroshima (Reporting)

    *Various Authors, Soldiers’ Stories (Reflecting)

 

 

Part Three: The Natural and Physical Sciences

 

*Lewis Thomas, The Corner of the Eye (Reflecting)

*Melanie Thernstrom, My Pain, My Brain (Reflecting)

Roy Selby, A Delicate Operation (Reporting)

Jamie Shreeve, The Other Stem-Cell Debate (Reporting)

Bruno Bettelheim, Joey: A "Mechanical Boy" (Reporting)

*Greg Easterbrook, The Sky Is Falling (Explaining)

*Jonah Lehrer, Eureka Hunt (Explaining)

*Atul Gawande, The Checklist (Arguing)

*Steven Pinker, The Moral Instinct (Arguing)

 

Paired Readings: On Suffering

    Richard Selzer, A Mask on the Face of Death (Reporting)

    Abraham Verghese, Close Encounters of the 

      Human Kind (Reflecting)

 

Paired Readings: On Natural Phenomena

    Diane Ackerman, Why Leaves Turn Color in

      the Fall (Explaining)

    James Jeans, Why the Sky is Blue (Explaining)

 

Paired Readings: On Sexual Reproduction

    *Michael Pollan, Corn Sex (Explaining)

    Emily Martin, The Egg and the Sperm: How

      Science Has Constructed a Romance Based

      on Stereotypical Male-Female Roles (Arguing)

 

 

Part Four: Casebooks

 

Virtual Experience: Life Online

    *Andrew Sullivan, Why I Blog (Reflecting)

    *Clive Thompson, I’m So Totally, Digitally, Close

      to You: The Brave New World of Digital

      Intimacy (Reporting)

    *Marshall Poe, The Hive (Explaining)

    *Anthony Grafton, Future Reading (Arguing)

    *Nicholas Carr, Is Google Making Us Stupid? (Arguing)

    *Guillermo Gómez-Peña, The Virtual Barrio @

      the Other Frontier (Arguing)

 

The Classroom: Ideals, Obstacles, Solutions

    *Mike Rose, I Just Wanna be Average (Reflecting)

    *Emily Bazeldon, The Next Kind of Integration (Reporting)

    *Elizabeth Weil, Teaching to the Testosterone: The

      Gender Wars Go to School (Reporting)

    Theodore Sizer, What High School Is (Explaining)

    Garret Keizer, Why We Hate Teachers (Arguing)

    *Matt Miller, First, Kill All the School Boards (Arguing)

 

The Visual World: Sight and Insight

    *Temple Grandin, Thinking in Pictures (Reflecting)

    *Rita Carter, The Stream of Illusion (Reporting)

    Plato, The Cave (Explaining)

    Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for

      a Hat (Explaining)

    *Scott McCloud, Setting the Record Straight (Arguing)

    *John Berger, Ways of Seeing (Arguing)

 

Grey Matter: The Brain and the Self

    *Jill Bolte Taylor, Morning of the Stroke (Reflecting)

    *Patricia Hampl, Memory and Imagination (Reflecting)

    *V.S. Ramachandran, The Woman Who Died

      Laughing (Reporting)

    *Daniel Schacter, Of Time and Autobiography (Explaining)

    *Shannon Moffett, Watching the Brain (Explaining)

    Stephen Jay Gould, Women’s Brains (Arguing)

 

*Appendix A: Using Research

 

* new to this edition

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