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DIVAn anthology of the personal/autobiographical essays of scholars who have made the life story an important part of their disciplinary research./div
These highly personal essays from a range of academic settings explore the palpable moments of discomfort, disempowerment, and/or enlightenment that emerge when we discard the fiction that the teacher has no body. Visible and/or invisible, the body can transform both the teacher's experience and classroom dynamics. When students think the teacher's body is clearly marked by ethnicity, race, disability, size, gender, sexuality, illness, age, pregnancy, class, linguistic and geographic origins, or some combination of these, both the mode and the content of education can change. Other, less visible aspects of a teacher's body, such as depression or a history of sexual assault, can have an equally powerful impact on how we teach and learn. The collection anatomizes these moments of embodied pedagogy as unexpected teaching opportunities and examines their apparent impact on teacher-student educational dynamics of power, authority, desire, friendship, open-mindedness, and resistance.
For a long time now, readers and scholars have strained against the limits of traditional literary criticism, whose precepts--above all, "objectivity"--seem to have so little to do with the highly personal and deeply felt experience of literature. The Intimate Critique marks a movement away from this tradition. With their rich spectrum of personal and passionate voices, these essays challenge and ultimately breach the boundaries between criticism and narrative, experience and expression, literature and life. Grounded in feminism and connected to the race, class, and gender paradigms in cultural studies, the twenty-six contributors to this volume--including Jane Tompkins, Henry Louis Gates, J...
This handbook provides a comprehensive guide to methods, terms, and concepts used by biblical interpreters. It offers students and non-specialists an accessible resource for understanding the complex vocabulary that accompanies serious biblical studies. Articles, arranged alphabetically, explain terminology associated with reading the Bible as literature, clarify the various methods Bible scholars use to study biblical texts, and illuminate how different interpretive approaches can contribute to our understanding. Article references and topical bibliographies point readers to resources for further study. This handbook, now updated and revised to be even more useful for students, was previously published as Interpreting the Bible: A Handbook of Terms and Methods. It is a suitable complement to any standard hermeneutics textbook.
In this newest addition to Sandra M. Gilbert’s Ad Feminam: Women and Literature series, Diane P. Freedman brings together twelve essays by critics of poetry and women’s writing for a critical reappraisal of the prolific work of Edna St. Vincent Millay. Though finding its occasion in the life of Millay—the centennial of the writer’s birth—this volume refocuses attention on Millay’s art by asking questions central to our present concerns: What in the varied body of Millay’s work speaks to us most forcefully today? Which critical perspectives most illuminate her texts? How might those approaches be challenged, extended, or reoriented? In seeking the answers to such questions, the ...
Maintaining that the memoir requires a more personal relationship with its readers and critics, Janet Mason Ellerby calls for "intimate readings." She begins this work with her own memoir, narrating a long-held secret-her pregnancy at age sixteen, her life in the Florence Crittendon Home for Unwed Mothers, and the birth and adoption of her first daughter. She goes on to tell about the aftermath of this pivotal time in and the painful consequences of keeping a secret. Included are detailed analyses of more than a dozen contemporary memoirs by American women, all of which share a common purpose: the disclosure of secrets. Ellerby describes the costs of this secrecy and explores the possibilities of breaking intractable codes of silence. It is a study that is germane to the intellectual and e~otional lives of all women. This book is the first serious exploration of a genre that has gained acceptance with an expanding audience of readers. Ellerby maintains that the efforts of memoirists to plumb their painful pasts has cultural significance and precipitates important social work. The memoir joins fiction and autobiography as an important commentary on modem life.
This is the first book to examine the precise relationship between pluralism and the production of Western literature and criticism from the eighteenth century to the present. It underscores the historical rather than exclusively epistemological reasons behind what is here called “the rise of literary pluralism.” This rise entails, on the one hand, the modern day phenomenon of an ever-increasing number of readings of both canonical and contemporary works of verbal art; and, on the other, our ever-growing body of literature written with an eye towards different types of characters, situations, forms and styles. Reviewing a wide range of authors and thinkers—from German, French and English Romantics to Anglo-American and European poststructuralist theorists—it shows how and why the current literary emphasis on difference derives from an unquestioned allegiance to the notion of cultural pluralism. While never denying the value of the latter, it seeks instead to analyze the oftentimes unquestioned implications of this historically-situated belief within the specific realm of literary studies.
"Starts off as a manifesto but becomes richer and more suggestive as it develops." The New York Sun"
Krutch’s trenchant observations about life prospering in the hostile environment of Arizona’s Sonoran Desert turn to weighty questions about humanity and the precariousness of our existence, putting lie to Western denials of mind in the “lower” forms of life: “Let us not say that this animal or even this plant has ‘become adapted’ to desert conditions. Let us say rather that they have all shown courage and ingenuity in making the best of the world as they found it. And let us remember that if to use such terms in connection with them is a fallacy then it can only be somewhat less a fallacy to use the same terms in connection with ourselves.”
More than sixty years after her death, the Pulitzer Prizewinning poet Edna St. Vincent Millay continues to captivate new generations of readers. The twentieth-century American author was catapulted to fame after the publication of Renascence, her first major work and a poem written while she was still a teenager. Millays frank attitude toward sexualityalong with immortal lines such as "My candle burns at both ends"solidified her reputation as the quintessential liberated woman of the Jazz Age. In this authoritative volume, Timothy F. Jackson has compiled and annotated a new selection that represents the full range of her published work alongside previously unpublished manuscript excerpts, poems, prose, and correspondence. The poems, appearing as they were printed in their first editions, are complemented by Jacksons extensive, illuminating notes, which draw on archival sources and help situate her work in its historical and literary context. Two introductory essaysone by Jackson and the other by Millays literary executor, Holly Peppealso help critically frame the poets work.