Emergent U.S. Literaturesintroduces readers to the foundational writers and texts produced by four literary traditions associated with late-twentieth-century US multiculturalism. Examining writing by ...Native Americans, Hispanic Americans, Asian Americans, and gay and lesbian Americans after 1968, Cyrus R. K. Patell compares and historicizes what might be characterized as the minority literatures within "U.S. minority literature."
Drawing on recent theories of cosmopolitanism, Patell presents methods for mapping the overlapping concerns of the texts and authors of these literatures during the late twentieth century. He discusses the ways in which literary marginalization and cultural hybridity combine to create the grounds for literature that is truly "emergent" in Raymond Williams's sense of the term-literature that produces "new meanings and values, new practices, new relationships and kinds of relationships" in tension with the dominant, mainstream culture of the United States. By enabling us to see the American literary canon through the prism of hybrid identities and cultures, these texts require us to reevaluate what it means to write (and read) in the American grain.Emergent U.S. Literaturesgives readers a sense of how these foundational texts work as aesthetic objects--rather than merely as sociological documents--crafted in dialogue with the canonical tradition of so-called "American Literature," as it existed in the late twentieth century, as well as in dialogue with each other.
The purpose of this book is to make it easier for teachers and librarians to infuse curricula with multiethnic literature. The list of recommended titles, for grades 5-8, is organized by curricular ...area.
This two-volume collection of folktales represents some of the finest examples of American oral tradition. Drawn from the largest archive of American folk culture, the American Folklife Center at the ...Library of Congress, this set comprises magic tales, legends, jokes, tall tales and personal narratives, many of which have never been transcribed before, much less published, in a sweeping survey. Eminent folklorist and award-winning author Carl Lindahl selected and transcribed over 200 recording sessions - many from the 1920s and 1930s - that span the 20th century, including recent material drawn from the September 11 Project. Included in this varied collection are over 200 tales organized in chapters by storyteller, tale type or region, and representing diverse American cultures, from Appalachia and the Midwest to Native American and Latino traditions. Each chapter begins by discussing the storytellers and their oral traditions before presenting and introducing each tale, making this collection accessible to high school students, general readers or scholars.
Introduction - A Note on the Recordings and How The Are Transcribed American Folktales: Their Stuff and Styles; 1. The First Face of American Folktale-tellers: The Hickses and the Harmons; 2. Sara Cleveland, Brant Lake, New York; 3. J.D. Suggs: Itinerant Master; 4. Joshua Alley, Jonesport, Maine; 5. Will Gillie Gilchrist: Tales of Injustice in the Urban South; 6. Jane Mancy Fugate; 7. First Family of American Collectors - John and Alan Lomax; 8. Legendary America; 9. Tall Tale America; 10. Jokes; 11. Passing It On: Stories for Children; 12. Hard Times: Personal, Regional, and National Struggles; 13. Folktales in the Making - The September 11 Project; Notes on the Tales; Index of Storytellers; Index of Regions, States and Locales of the Storytellers; List of Tales from this Book Available Online or in Other Audio Forms; Major Folktale Collectors and Collections; Tale Type Index; Motif Index
As multicultural education is becoming integral to the core curriculum, teachers often implement this aspect into their courses through literature. However, standards and criteria to teach and ...promote active discussion about this literature are sparse.
Cultural Journeys
introduces pre-service and experienced teachers to the use of literature to promote active discussions that lead students to think about racial diversity. More than just an annotated list of books for children, Pamela S. Gates and Dianne L. Hall Mark provide systematic guidelines that teachers can use throughout their careers to evaluate multicultural literature for students in grades K-8. At the same time, the text leads the reader to a deeper understanding of how to use multicultural literature throughout the entire curriculum and not just during specially designated months or time periods. With the example unit plans and extensive annotated bibliography, this book is a valuable resource that pre-service teachers will utilize when they begin teaching and in-service teachers will reference repeatedly during their planning periods.
An Ethics of Reading considers how writers of contemporary American fiction represent collective identities by producing literature that bears witness to cultural traumas. With chapters focused on ...important American novelists including Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Sherman Alexie, Edwidge Danticat and Junot Díaz, the book works to situate novels that explore ethnic identity in conversation with one another. From those intertextual conversations, it draws conclusions about how fiction functions as testimony and the ways that readers might work to ethically respond to the testimonial features of the prose. The book's investigations of distinct cultural traumas are broad, ranging from analyses of African American novels that treat slavery to Native American novels that portray land and child theft to Dominican and Haitian American accounts of US-backed hegemony in the Caribbean diaspora. Ultimately, the central claim of the book - that some works of contemporary American fiction function both didactically and aesthetically as cultural markers around which ethnic identities might be negotiated by writers and readers - becomes a kind of call to action for literary studies in the early 21st century, encouraging an ideological and pragmatic shift in how contemporary literature is read, analysed and discussed. By suggesting specific strategies for considering ethnicity in a radically diasporic American context, the book calls for critical engagement that is also concerned with the ethics of interpretive praxis, which, it suggests, might be a mechanism for building coalitions for social justice within, around, and through literature.
"Washington writes supple and thoughtful prose and creatively integrates African and African-derived terminology, which never distract the reader. I consider Our Mothers, Our Powers, Our Texts not ...only a brilliant study, but also a model to be emulated." -- Ousseynou B. Traore, William Patterson UniversityÀjé is a Yoruba word that signifies a spiritual power of vast potential, as well as the human beings who exercise that power. Although both men and women can have Àjé, its owners and controllers are women, the literal and cosmic Mothers who are revered as the gods of society. Because of its association with female power, its invisibility and profundity, Àjé is often misconstrued as witchcraft. However, as Teresa N. Washington points out in Our Mothers, Our Powers, Our Texts, Àjé is central to the Yoruba ethos and cosmology. Not only does it underpin the concepts of creation and creativity, but as a force of justice and retribution, Àjé is essential to social harmony and balance. As Africans were forced into exile and enslavement, they took Àjé with them and continued its work of creating, destroying, harming, and healing in the New World.Washington seeks out Àjé's subversive power of creation and re-creation in a diverse range of Africana texts, from both men and women, from both oral and contemporary literature, and across space and time. She guides readers to an understanding of the symbolic, methodological, and spiritual issues that are central to important works by Africana writers but are rarely elucidated by Western criticism. She begins with an examination of the ancient forms of Àjé in Yoruba culture, which creates a framework for innovative readings of important works by Africana writers, including Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, Ben Okri, Wole Soyinka, Jamaica Kincaid, and Ntozake Shange. This rich analysis will appeal to readers of
Africana literature, African religion and philosophy, feminist studies, and comparative literature.
The Anglia Book Series (ANGB) offers a selection of high quality work on all areas and aspects of English philology. It publishes book-length studies and essay collections on English language and ...linguistics, on English and American literature and culture from the Middle Ages to the present, on the new English literatures, as well as on general and comparative literary studies, including aspects of cultural and literary theory.
This article traces George Eliot’s use of translation and foreign words to make “impressions” on her readers. This keyword, which recurs in her narratives and in the title of her final work, is used ...to refer to the repeated reinterpretations of translated quotes that undergird each work’s central narrative. The moral transformation of the central characters, especially Daniel and Gwendolen in Eliot’s last novel,Daniel Deronda(1876), initiates them into the practices of the “good translator” as she defines them in her early writing on translation. Meanwhile, the increasingly frequent confrontation with foreign words prompts readers toward a more sophisticated understanding of the networks linking textual histories across cultures and nations. In the infrequently studied essay collectionImpressions of Theophrastus Such(1879), Eliot takes this strategy further by shifting the burden of her argument about national belonging from the novel’s plot to the paratextual space of epigraphs and footnotes. The essays interweave multiple textual traditions and use translation to enact for readers a recognition of the shared impressions left as texts and languages change.
Bridging the chasm : a survey of U.S. and Chinese multiculturalisms -- How not to be an empire : on conciliatory multiculturalism -- Toward a comparative critique : metaphor and dissenting ...nationalism in Alex Kuo -- A new politics of faith : Zhang Chengzhi's Xinling shi and Rabih Alameddine's Koolaids: the art of war -- Impersonal intimacy : Yan Geling's Fusang and its English translation.
PDF
