Anatomical Venus
Author: Meg Schoerke
Publication Information: Word Poetry Books (January 1, 2004)
Synopsis: Meg Schoerke's Anatomical Venus is a fluid, elegant collection of poems in formal and finely-sculpted free-verse styles that ranges across of diversity of subjects and tones--poems about music, about personal relationships, about the struggles of violation, about historical figures--that are unified by the author's sonorous voice and precise eye. Anatomical Venus is a refined and mature debut for Schoerke, and establishes her as a poet whose career bears watching.
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Emissaries in Early Modern Literature and Culture: Mediation, Transmission, Traffic, 1550–1700 (Transculturalisms, 1400-1700)
Author: Gitanjali Shahani and Brinda Charry
Publication Information: Routledge; 1 edition (April 29, 2016)
Synopsis: With its emphasis on early modern emissaries and their role in England's expansionary ventures and cross-cultural encounters across the globe, this collection of essays takes the messenger figure as a focal point for the discussion of transnational exchange and intercourse in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It sees the emissary as embodying the processes of representation and communication within the world of the text, itself an 'emissary' that strives to communicate and re-present certain perceptions of the 'real.' Drawing attention to the limits and licenses of communication, the emissary is a reminder of the alien quality of foreign language and the symbolic power of performative gestures and rituals. Contributions to this collection examine different kinds of cross-cultural activities (e.g. diplomacy, trade, translation, espionage, missionary endeavors) in different world areas (e.g. Asia, the Mediterranean, the Levant, the New World) via different critical methods and approaches. They take up the literary and cultural productions and representations of ambassadors, factors, traders, translators, spies, middlemen, merchants, missionaries, and other agents, who served as complex conduits for the global transport of goods, religious ideologies, and socio-cultural practices throughout the early modern period. Authors in the collection investigate the multiple ways in which the emissary became enmeshed in emerging discourses of racial, religious, gender, and class differences. They consider how the emissary's role might have contributed to an idealized progressive vision of a borderless world or, conversely, permeated and dissolved borders and boundaries between peoples only to further specific group interests.
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Everyday Genres: Writing Assignments across the Disciplines (Studies in Writing and Rhetoric)
Author: Mary Soliday
Publication Information: Southern Illinois University Press (February 7, 2011)
Synopsis: In Everyday Genres: Writing Assignments across the Disciplines, Mary Soliday calls on genre theory- which proposes that writing cannot be separated from social situation-to analyze the common assignments given to writing students in the college classroom, and to investigate how new writers and expert readers respond to a variety of types of coursework in different fields. This in-depth study of writing pedagogy looks at many challenges facing both instructors and students in college composition classes, and offers a thorough and refreshing exploration of writing experience, ability, and rhetorical situation.
Soliday provides an overview of the contemporary theory and research in Writing across the Curriculum programs, focusing specifically on the implementation of the Writing Fellows Program at the City College of New York. Drawing on her direct observations of colleagues and students at the school, she addresses the everyday challenges that novice writers face, such as developing an appropriate "stance" in one's writing, and the intricacies of choosing and developing content.
The volume then goes on to address some of the most pressing questions being asked by teachers of composition: To what extent can writing be separated from its situation? How can rhetorical expertise be shared across fields? And to what degree is writing ability local rather than general? Soliday argues that, while writing is closely connected to situation, general rhetorical principles can still be capably applied if those situations are known. The key to improving writing instruction, she maintains, is to construct contexts that expose writers to the social actions that genres perform for readers.
Supplementing the author's case study are six appendixes, complete with concrete examples and helpful teaching tools to establish effective classroom practices and exercises in Writing across the Curriculum programs. Packed with useful information and insight, Everyday Genres is an essential volume for both students and teachers seeking to expand their understanding of the nature of writing.
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Food and Literature
Author: Gitanjali Shahani
Publication Information: Cambridge University Press
Synopsis: This volume examines food as subject, form, landscape, polemic, and aesthetic statement in literature. With essays analyzing food and race, queer food, intoxicated poets, avant-garde food writing, vegetarianism, the recipe, the supermarket, food comics, and vampiric eating, this collection brings together fascinating work from leading scholars in the field. It is the first volume to offer an overview of literary food studies and reflect on its origins, developments, and applications. Taking up maxims such as 'we are what we eat', it traces the origins of literary food studies and examines key questions in cultural texts from different global literary traditions. It charts the trajectories of the field in relation to work in critical race studies, postcolonial studies, and children's literature, positing an omnivorous method for the field at large.
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Freud and Nabokov
Author: Geoffrey Green
Publication Information: University of Nebraska Press (March 1, 1988)
Synopsis: A scholarly examination of these two giants of twentieth century intellectual thought, and of Freud's complicated impact on Nabokov's writing.
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Generation 1.5 in College Composition: Teaching Academic Writing to U.S.-Educated Learners of ESL
Author: Mark Roberge, Meryl Siegal, Linda Harklau
Publication Information: Routledge; 1 edition (February 12, 2009)
Synopsis: Building on the work that has been done over the past decade, this volume provides theoretical frameworks for understanding debates about immigrant students, studies of students’ schooling paths and language and literacy experiences, and pedagogical approaches for working with Generation 1.5 students.
Generation 1.5 in College Composition:
- is designed to help both scholars and practitioners reconceptualize the fields of College Composition and TESOL and create a space for research, theory, and pedagogy focusing on postsecondary immigrant ESL students
- provides both important new theoretical work (which lays the underpinnings for serious pedagogical innovation) and important new pedagogical approaches.
Because of their varied and complex language and literacy profiles, Generation 1.5 students are found in developmental English courses, college ESL courses, and mainstream college writing courses. This volume is directed to preservice and inservice teachers, teacher educators, and researchers involved with educating Generation 1.5 students in these and other contexts.
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Informed Choices: A Guide for Teachers of College Writing
Author: Tara Lockhart & Mark Roberge
Publication Information: Bedford/St. Martin's; First Edition edition (February 27, 2015)
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Let There Be Laughter: A Treasury of Great Jewish Humor and What It All Means
Author: Michael Krasny
Publication Information: William Morrow (September 27, 2016)
Synopsis: From the host of NPR affiliate’s Forum with Michael Krasny, a compendium of Jewish jokes that packs the punches with hilarious riff after riff and also offers a window into Jewish culture.
Michael Krasny has been telling Jewish jokes since his bar mitzvah, and it’s been said that he knows more of them than anyone on the planet. He certainly states his case in this wise, enlightening, and hilarious book that not only collects the best of Jewish humor passed down from generation to generation, but explains the cultural expressions and anxieties behind the laughs.
"What’s Jewish Alzheimer’s?"
"You forget everything but the grudges."
"You must be so proud. Your daughter is the President of the United States!"
"Yes. But her brother is a doctor!"
"Isn’t Jewish humor masochistic?"
"No. And if I hear that one more time I am going to kill myself."
With his background as a scholar and public-radio host, Krasny delves deeply into the themes, topics, and form of Jewish humor: chauvinism undercut by irony and self-mockery, the fear of losing cultural identity through assimilation, the importance of vocal inflection in joke-telling, and calls to communal memory, including the use of Yiddish.
Borrowing from traditional humor and such Jewish comedy legends as Jackie Mason, Mel Brooks, and Joan Rivers, Larry David, Sarah Silverman, Jerry Seinfeld and Amy Schumer, Let There Be Laughter is an absolute pleasure for the chosen and goyim alike.
Literacy and Pedagogy in an Age of Misinformation and Disinformation
Edited by: Tara Lockhart, Brenda Glascott, Chris Warnick, Juli Parrish, and Justin Lewis
Publication Information: New City Community Press, 2021.
About: This collection of full-length essays and interviews explores networked literacies and their impact on information systems and literacy learning and action. Understanding the underlying structures of networked literacies is essential to help students, teachers, and society members nurture the deliberative, reflective practices and pedagogies needed in our current moment. This collection brings together voices from diverse locations within—and outside of—the academy. Literacy colleagues from sites including K-12 education, social media, activist organizations, and journalism contribute interviews and short praxis essays, resulting in a networked conversation that echoes the patterns of information ecologies themselves.
A central contention of the collection is that our literacy practices must adapt to take into account the material realities, challenges, and affordances of the technologies shaping information production, distribution, and reception. Recommitting to traditional information literacy and rhetorical pedagogies is not enough to counter problems posed by mis- and disinformation. Instead, the versions of critical reading and engagement offered in this collection forefront the need for students to approach texts warily, given that writers might aim to confuse, obscure, or trick, and that elements of a digital ecology—including algorithms, bots, trolls, and applications—might direct or boost information based on economic or political motivations. Interviews with practicing journalists and community literacy workers highlight the affective dimension of using our own emotional responses to information as critical, generative tools.
Ultimately, this collection’s exploration of literacies (what do we need to know how to do, now?), contexts for literate action (how do we understand this moment, now?), and pedagogies/ practices (how do we work with students, now? how do understand and perform citizenship, now?) provides pathways forward, deepening both our theoretical understanding of mis/disinformation and our pedagogies in response.
Literary Criticism and the Structures of History: Erich Auerbach and Leo Spitzer
Author: Geoffrey Green
Publication Information: University of Nebraska Press; 1st edition (January 1, 1983)
Off Mike: A Memoir of Talk Radio and Literary Life
Author: Michael Krasny
Publication Information: Stanford General Books; 1 edition (February 25, 2009)
Synopsis: KQED Radio's Michael Krasny is one of the country's leading interviewers of literary luminaries, a maestro for educated listeners who prefer their discourse high and civil. He is a writer's interviewer.
But it didn't start out that way.
In Off Mike, Krasny, host of one of public radio's most popular and intellectually compelling programs, talks of his strong desire to become a novelist in the footsteps of Bellow and Philip Roth, and then discovering his real talent as a communicator—a deft ability to draw others out as an interlocutor.
In a mix of memoir and reportage, Krasny takes readers inside his world. He gives an account of the polarizing transformation of talk radio, from his early days at KGO commercial radio, through to his current role at NPR, where he manages to keep the flow of talk in his San Francisco based show animated and politically balanced.
Forum fans and lovers of literature will be riveted by the insightful and amusing vignettes and behind the scenes accounts. They will get a taste of the sharp commentary from his encounters with panels of experts, and interviews with cultural and political personalities as well as writers.
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Politics Of Remediation: Institutional And Student Needs In Higher Education (Composition, Literacy, and Culture)
Author: Mary Soliday
Publication Information: University of Pittsburgh Press; 1 edition (September 1, 2002)
Synopsis: While some students need more writing instruction than others, The Politics of Remediation reveals how that need also pertains to the institutions themselves. Mary Soliday argues that universities may need remedial English to alleviate their own crises in admissions standards, enrollment, mission, and curriculum, and English departments may use remedial programs to mediate their crises in enrollment, electives, and relationships to the liberal arts and professional schools.
Following a brief history of remedial English and the political uses of remediation at CCNY before, during, and after the open admissions policy, Soliday questions the ways in which students’ need for remedial writing instruction has become widely associated with the need to acculturate minorities to the university. In disentangling identity politics from remediation, she challenges a powerful assumption of post-structuralist work: that a politics of language use is equivalent to the politics of access to institutions.
Politics, Persuasion, and Pragmatism: A Rhetoric of Feminist Utopian Fiction
Author: Ellen Peel
Publication Information: Ohio State University Press; 1 edition (November 1, 2002)
Rethinking Racism: Emotion, Persuasion, and Literacy Education in an All-White High School
Author: Jennifer Seibel Trainor
Publication Information: Southern Illinois University Press; 1st edition (November 4, 2008)
Synopsis: In Rethinking Racism: Emotion, Persuasion, and Literacy Education in an All-White High School, Jennifer Seibel Trainor proposes a new understanding of the roots of racism, one that is based on attention to the role of emotion and the dynamics of persuasion. This one-year ethnographic study argues against previous assumptions about racism, demonstrating instead how rhetoric and emotion, as well as the processes and culture of schools, are involved in the formation of racist beliefs.
Telling the story of a year spent in an all-white high school, Trainor suggests that contrary to prevailing opinion, racism often does not stem from ignorance, a lack of exposure to other cultures, or the desire to protect white privilege. Rather, the causes of racism are frequently found in the realms of emotion and language, as opposed to rational calculations of privilege or political ideologies. Trainor maintains that racist assertions often originate not from prejudiced attitudes or beliefs but from metaphorical connections between racist ideas and nonracist values. These values are reinforced, even promoted by schooling via "emotioned rules" in place in classrooms: in tacit, unexamined lessons, rituals, and practices that exert a powerful―though largely unacknowledged―persuasive force on student feelings and beliefs about race.
Through in-depth analysis of established anti-racist pedagogies, student behavior, and racial discourses, Trainor illustrates the manner in which racist ideas are subtly upheld through social and literacy education in the classroom―and are thus embedded in the infrastructures of schools themselves. It is the emotional and rhetorical framework of the classroom that lends racism its compelling power in the minds of students, even as teachers endeavor to address the issue of cultural discrimination. This effort is continually hindered by an incomplete understanding of the function of emotions in relation to antiracist persuasion and cannot be remedied until the root of the problem is addressed.
Rethinking Racism calls for a fresh approach to understanding racism and its causes, offering crucial insight into the formative role of schooling in the perpetuation of discriminatory beliefs. In addition, this highly readable narrative draws from white students' own stories about the meanings of race in their learning and their lives. It thus provides new ways of thinking about how researchers and teachers rep- resent whiteness. Blending narrative with more traditional forms of ethnographic analysis, Rethinking Racism uncovers the ways in which constructions of racism originate in literacy research and in our classrooms―and how these constructions themselves can limit the rhetorical positions students enact.
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Sound Ideas
Author: Michael Krasny and M.E. Sokolik
Publication Information: McGraw-Hill Education; 1 edition (September 11, 2009)
Synopsis: Reading involves interpreting all types of texts: fiction, nonfiction, poetry, graphic novels, advertisements, spoken words, and more. Sound Ideas is a reader that acknowledges this – and that a wide variety of linguistic backgrounds make up today's college classrooms. Sound Ideas addresses the needs and interests of this diverse audience, while maintaining strong connections to a history of ideas.
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Spiritual Envy: An Agnostic's Quest
Author: Michael Krasny
Publication Information: New World Library (December 18, 2011)
Synopsis: As the host of one of National Public Radio’s most popular interview programs, Michael Krasny has spent decades leading conversations on every imaginable topic and discussing life’s most important questions with the foremost thinkers of our time. Now he brings his wide-ranging knowledge and perceptive intelligence to a thoughtful and thought-provoking exploration of belief; and lack of belief.
Many books and pundits advocate for a specific God, while others adamantly declare there is no God. Yet these strident viewpoints often speak right past each other, rarely convincing anyone but the already convinced. In — Spiritual Envy — Krasny helps believers and nonbelievers alike understand their own questions about faith and religion, about God and human responsibility.
Krasny challenges each of us to look closely at faith and its power, and to examine the positive and negative aspects of religion as expressed in culture, literature, and human relationships. Personal and universal, timely and timeless, this is a deeply wise yet warmly welcoming conversation, an invitation to ask one’s own questions; no matter how inconclusive the answers.
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Tasting Difference: Food, Race, and Cultural Encounters in Early Modern Literature
Author: Gitanjali G. Shahani
Publication Information: Cornell University Press (May 15, 2020)
Synopsis: Tasting Difference examines early modern discourses of racial, cultural, and religious difference that emerged in wake of contact with foreign peoples and exotic foods from across the globe. Gitanjali Shahani reimagines the contact zone between Western Europe and the Global South in culinary terms, emphasizing the gut rather than the gaze in colonial encounters.
From household manuals that instructed English housewives how to use newly inported foodstuffs, to "the spiced Indian air" of Midsummer Night's Dream, to the repurposing of Othello as an early modern pitchman for coffee in ballads, to the performance of disgust in travel narratives, Shahani shows how early modern genres negotiated the allure and danger of foreign tastes.
Turning maxims such as, "we are what we eat" on their head, Shahani asks how did we (the colonized subjects), become what you (the colonizing subjects) eat? How did we become alternately the object of fear and appetite, loathing and craving? Seeking answers to these questions, Shahani takes us back several centuries, to the process by which food came to be inscribed with racial character and the racial other came to be marked as edible, showing how the racializing of food began in an era well before chicken tikka masala and balti cuisine.Bringing into conversation critical paradigms in early modern studies, food studies, and postcolonial studies. she argues that it is in the writing on food and eating that we see among the earliest configurations of racial difference and it is experienced both as a different taste and as a taste of difference.
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Teaching Laboring-Class British Literature of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
Author: William J. Christmas and Kevin Binfield
Publication Information: The Modern Language Association of America (December 1, 2018)
Synopsis: Behind our contemporary experience of globalization, precarity, and consumerism lies a history of colonization, increasing literacy, transnational trade in goods and labor, and industrialization. Teaching British laboring-class literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries means exploring ideas of class, status, and labor in relation to the historical developments that inform our lives as workers and members of society. This volume demonstrates pedagogical techniques and provides resources for students and teachers on autobiographies, broadside ballads, Chartism and other political movements, georgics, labor studies, satire, service learning, writing by laboring-class women, and writing by laboring people of African descent.
Teaching U.S.-Educated Multilingual Writers: Pedagogical Practices from and for the Classroom
Author: Mark Roberge, Kay M. Losey, Margi Wald
Publication Information: University of Michigan Press ELT (June 4, 2015)
Synopsis: This volume was born to address the lack of classroom-oriented scholarship regarding U.S.-educated multilingual writers. Unlike prior volumes about U.S.-educated multilinguals, this book focuses solely on pedagogy—from classroom activities and writing assignments to course curricula and pedagogical support programs outside the immediate classroom. Unlike many pedagogical volumes that are written in the voice of an expert researcher-theorist, this volume is based on the notion of teachers sharing practices with teachers.All of the contributors are teachers who are writing about and reflecting on their own experiences and outcomes and interweaving those experiences and outcomes with current theory and research in the field. The volume thus portrays teachers as active, reflective participants engaged in critical inquiry. Contributors represent community college, college, and university contexts; academic ESL, developmental writing, and first-year composition classes; and face-to-face, hybrid, and online contexts.This book was developed primarily to meet the needs of practicing writing teachers in college-level ESL, basic writing, and college composition classrooms, but will also be useful to pre-service teachers in TESOL, Composition, and Education graduate programs.
The Lab'ring Muses: Work, Writing, and the Social Order in English Plebeian Poetry, 1730-1830
Author: William J. Christmas
Publication Information: University of Delaware Press (October 1, 2001)
Synopsis: The Lab'ring Muses is the first study to bring together a wide range of verse published by laboring-class authors between 1730 and 1830. The book examines a total of sixteen case studies that establish a specifically English tradition of laboring-class poetics.
Theater of the Word: Selfhood in the English Morality Play (ReFormations: Medieval and Early Modern)
Author: Julie Paulson
Publication Information: University of Notre Dame Press (April 30, 2019)
Synopsis: In Theater of the Word:Selfhood in the English Morality Play, Julie Paulson sheds new light on medieval constructions of the self as they emerge from within a deeply sacramental culture. The book examines the medieval morality play, a genre that explicitly addresses the question of what it means to be human and takes up the ritual traditions of confession and penance, long associated with medieval interiority, as its primary subjects.
The morality play is allegorical drama, a “theater of the word," that follows a penitential progression in which an everyman figure falls into sin and is eventually redeemed through penitential ritual. Written during an era of reform when the ritual life of the medieval Church was under scrutiny, the morality plays as a whole insist upon a self that is first and foremost performed―constructed, articulated, and known through ritual and other communal performances that were interwoven into the fabric of medieval life.
Twentieth Century American Poetry
Author: Meg Schoerke, Dana Gioia, David Mason
Publication Information: McGraw-Hill; 1 edition (December 1, 2003)
Synopsis: A landmark publication--the first anthology of 20thcentury American poetry
Written by three poetry scholars, including 2002 American Book Award winner Dana Gioia, this anthology spans the development of American poetry throughout the 20th century. The first of its kind, this anthology includes both well-known poets and poems, and the work of talented poets often neglected by the critics.
Arranged according to major movements in American poetry (Modernist Poets, Harlem Renaissance, Midcentury Poets, Confessional Poets, Surrealist Poets, Deep Image Poets, etc.), 20th Century American Poetry provides a comprehensive historical and cultural overview--a valuable resource for both literature students and poetry lovers.
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Twentieth-Century American Poetics: Poets on the Art of Poetry
Author: Meg Schoerke, Dana Gioia, David Mason
Publication Information: McGraw-Hill Education; 1 edition (December 26, 2003)
Synopsis: This comprehensive chronological anthology includes 58 essays on poetry by 53 poets. Starting with James Weldon Johnson and Robert Frost, the book offers diverse and often conflicting accounts of the nature and function of poetry. The collection includes rarely anthologized essays by Jack Spicer, Rhina Espaillat, Anne Stevenson, and Ron Silliman, as well as work by some of the finest younger critics in America, including William Logan, Alice Fulton, and Christian Wiman.
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Voices in a Mask: Stories
Author: Geoffrey Green
Publication Information: Triquarterly; 1 edition (September 4, 2008)
Synopsis: Turning on images of disguise in literature, theatre, and opera, this short-story collection explores themes of identity and subterfuge in a series of fictional fugues that range from comic to poignant.
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