Full Description
This book narrates a writing-centered approach to teaching twentieth-century American literature, focusing on hope in an age of despair. It details teaching strategies, student interactions, and literary research, exploring themes of liberty and hope through American and Balkans narratives. It concludes with student and professor responses.
This nine-chapter book narrates a writing-centered approach to the teaching of literature and literary research. As the title suggests, the book also embraces a thematic approach to reading and writing about twentieth-century American literature, focusing on the grounds for hope in an age of despair.
The first five chapters explore in detail the teaching of the twentieth-century American literature course at the University of Pristina in Kosovo, where the author served as Fulbright Professor of American Literature in the spring semester of 2012. Throughout, these chapters narrate
students' in-class interactions to illustrate writing-to-learn strategies for teaching the literature.Chapter six then follows the same cohort of 22 students as they learned to ground their literary research in their own questions about American and Balkans narratives of oppression and liberty, of despair and hope.
The last three chapters document the responses of students and their professors to this American theme of liberty and hope as seen through the Balkans lenses of ethnic violence and emerging republican government. Specifically, chapter seven focuses on students' participation in a blog featuring Balkans literature that explores the same issues of liberty and justice examined in the American literature they have read. Chapter eight then celebrates student writing, the fruit of the writing-to-learn strategies narrated in earlier chapters. Finally, chapter nine narrates professors' and students' responses, gathered through surveys and interviewing, to questions about their country's violent past and the value of literary study in preparing citizens to shape a new republic.
Contents
Preface
Chapter 1. Teaching Twentieth-Century American Literature
Chapter 2. Justice, Injustice, and Places of Meaning
Chapter 3. The Call to Endure and Prevail
Chapter 4. Modernists' Views on How to Use Our Time
Chapter 5. Postmodernists' Views on the Courage Required to Live with Open Eyes
Chapter 6. Teaching Research Methods
Chapter 7. Blogging and the Parallel Universes of Literature
Chapter 8. Student Writing and Reflection
Chapter 9. Memories and Prophecies: Literacy Narratives, Literature
Chapter 10. And the Grounds for Hope
Appendix A: Model Essay: The Parents' Guilt in Pride and Prejudice
Appendix B: Guide to Evaluating Essays
Appendix C: Model Research Paper: Saved by the Bull: Grace Versus Repressiveness in O'Connor's Greenleaf
Appendix D: Model Research Proposal Memo
References
About the Author
