T. R. Johnson – författare

The neighborhoods of New Orleans have given rise to an extraordinary outpouring of important writing. Over the last century and a half or so, these stories and songs have given the city its singular place in the human imagination. This book leads the reader along five thoroughfares that define these different parts of town - Royal, St. Claude, Esplanade, Basin, and St. Charles - to explore how the writers who have lived around them have responded in closely related ways to the environments they share. On the outskirts of New Orleans today, the city's precarious relation to its watery surroundings and the vexed legacies of race loom especially large. But the city's literature shows us that these themes have been near to hand for New Orleans writers for several generations, whether reflected through questions of masquerade, dreams of escape, the innocence of children, or the power of money or of violence or of memory.

This Cambridge Companion offers a rich range of contexts for studying the literary histories of New Orleans. Some of the essays offer a deep focus on the significance of iconic figures such as Tennessee Williams, William Faulkner, and Kate Chopin. Other essays detail long traditions of writing not widely known beyond the city but that complicate our understanding of American literary history in new ways, as in the chapters on queer writers or Mardi Gras or the Asian presence in the city's literary imagination or how deadly nineteenth-century epidemics continue to shape the ways the world has come to read the city as a capital of Gothic horror fiction. These fresh perspectives on one of the most storied cities in the world are an essential resource for those who seek to piece together their own understanding of New Orleans as an historic and living flashpoint in the global literary imagination.

This Cambridge Companion offers a rich range of contexts for studying the literary histories of New Orleans. Some of the essays offer a deep focus on the significance of iconic figures such as Tennessee Williams, William Faulkner, and Kate Chopin. Other essays detail long traditions of writing not widely known beyond the city but that complicate our understanding of American literary history in new ways, as in the chapters on queer writers or Mardi Gras or the Asian presence in the city's literary imagination or how deadly nineteenth-century epidemics continue to shape the ways the world has come to read the city as a capital of Gothic horror fiction. These fresh perspectives on one of the most storied cities in the world are an essential resource for those who seek to piece together their own understanding of New Orleans as an historic and living flashpoint in the global literary imagination.

New Orleans is an indispensable element of America's national identity. As one of the most fabled cities in the world, it figures in countless novels, short stories, poems, plays, and films, as well as in popular lore and song. This book provides detailed discussions of all of the most significant writing that this city has ever inspired - from its origins in a flood-prone swamp to the rise of a creole culture at the edges of the European empires; from its emergence as a cosmopolitan, hemispheric crossroads and a primary hub of the slave trade to the days when, in its red light district, the children and grandchildren of the enslaved conjured a new kind of music that became America's greatest gift to the world; from the mid-twentieth-century masterpieces by William Faulkner, Tennessee Williams and Walker Percy to the realms of folklore, hip hop, vampire fiction, and the Asian and Latin American archives.

New Orleans is an indispensable element of America's national identity. As one of the most fabled cities in the world, it figures in countless novels, short stories, poems, plays, and films, as well as in popular lore and song. This book provides detailed discussions of all of the most significant writing that this city has ever inspired - from its origins in a flood-prone swamp to the rise of a creole culture at the edges of the European empires; from its emergence as a cosmopolitan, hemispheric crossroads and a primary hub of the slave trade to the days when, in its red light district, the children and grandchildren of the enslaved conjured a new kind of music that became America's greatest gift to the world; from the mid-twentieth-century masterpieces by William Faulkner, Tennessee Williams and Walker Percy to the realms of folklore, hip hop, vampire fiction, and the Asian and Latin American archives.

The neighborhoods of New Orleans have given rise to an extraordinary outpouring of important writing. Over the last century and a half or so, these stories and songs have given the city its singular place in the human imagination. This book leads the reader along five thoroughfares that define these different parts of town - Royal, St. Claude, Esplanade, Basin, and St. Charles - to explore how the writers who have lived around them have responded in closely related ways to the environments they share. On the outskirts of New Orleans today, the city's precarious relation to its watery surroundings and the vexed legacies of race loom especially large. But the city's literature shows us that these themes have been near to hand for New Orleans writers for several generations, whether reflected through questions of masquerade, dreams of escape, the innocence of children, or the power of money or of violence or of memory.

Delineates Lacan's theory of the four discourses as a practical framework through which faculty can reflect on where their students are, developmentally, and where they might go.University classrooms are increasingly in crisis-though popular demands for accountability grow more insistent, no one seems to know what our teaching should seek to achieve. This book traces how we arrived at our current impasse, and it uses Lacan's theory of the four discourses to chart a path forward via an analysis of the freshman writing class. How did we forfeit a meaningful set of goals for our teaching? T. R. Johnson suggests that, by the 1960s, the work of Bergson and Piaget had led us to see student growth as a journey into more and more abstract thought, a journey that will happen naturally if the teacher knows how to stay out of the way. Since the 1960s, we've come to see development, in turn, only as a vague initiation into the academic community. This book, however, offers an alternative tradition, one rooted in Vygotsky and the feminist movement, that defines the developing student writer in terms of a complex, intersubjective ecology, and then, through these precedents, proposes a fully psychoanalytic model of student development. To illustrate his practical use of the four discourses, Johnson draws on a wide array of concepts and a colorful set of examples, including Franz Kafka, Keith Richards, David Foster Wallace, Hannah Arendt, and many others.