Practicing Theory in Introductory College Literature Courses

Front Cover
James M. Cahalan, David B. Downing
National Council of Teachers of English, 1991 - Education - 385 pages
Connecting the separate worlds of literary theorists and literature teachers in higher education, this collection of essays by 20 college teachers shares their ideas about using theorists' concepts to turn undergraduates from passive receivers of information into active thinkers about meaning in literature. Following an introduction by James M. Cahalan and David B. Downing, essays in the collection are: "Reading from Inside and Outside of One's Community" (David Bleich); "Combining Personal and Textual Experience: A Reader-Response Approach to Teaching American Literature" (Patricia Prandini Buckler); "From Clinic to Classroom while Uncovering the Evil Dead in 'Dracula': A Psychoanalytic Pedagogy" (Mark S. Paris); "'Text,''Reader,''Author,' and 'History' in the Introduction to Literature Course" (John Schilb); "In Search of Our Sisters' Rhetoric: Teaching through Reception Theory" (Louise Z. Smith); "The Historical Necessity for--and Difficulties with--New Historical Analysis in Introductory Literature Courses" (Brook Thomas); "The Reader and the Text: Ideologies in Dialogue" (John Clifford); "Confrontational Pedagogy and the Introductory Literature Course" (Ronald Strickland); "The Walls We Don't See: Toward Collectivist Pedagogies as Political Struggle" (C. Mark Hurlbert); "Feminist Theory, Literary Canons, and the Construction of Textual Meanings" (Barbara Frey Waxman); "Coyote Midwife in the Classroom: Introducing Literature with Feminist Dialogics" (Patrick D. Murphy); "A Multicultural Introduction to Literature" (Phillipa Kafka); "'Who Was That Masked Man?': Literary Criticism and the Teaching of African American Literature in Introductory Courses" (Pancho Savery); "Less Is More: Coverage, Critical Diversity, and the Limits of Pluralism" (Douglas Lanier); "From Discourse in Life to Discourse in Poetry: Teaching Poems as Bakhtinian Speech Genres" (Don Bialostosky); "Teaching Deconstruction: Theory and Practice in the Undergraduate Literature Classroom" (Lois Tyson); "Reading Deconstructively in the Two-Year College Introductory Literature Classroom" (Thomas Fink); "Practicing Textual Theory and Teaching Formula Fiction" (M. H. Dunlop); "Theory as Equipment for (Postmodern) Living" (Thomas McLaughlin); "Students as Theorists: Collaborative Hypertextbooks" (James J. Sosnoski); and "Selected Further Resources for Theory and Pedagogy: A Bibliographic Essay" (James M. Cahalan and David B. Downing). A 31-page comprehensive listing of references is attached. (RS)

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Contents

Introduction
1
Reading from Inside and Outside of Ones Community
19
From Clinic to Classroom while Uncovering
47
Copyright

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