Confronting the Text, Confronting the World – serie

William B. Thesing, James Dickey’s colleague at the University of South Carolina for twenty years, has a unique and complex perspective on the life and writing of this great twentieth-century American author. Dickey offers readers, students, and teachers a variety of energized and imaginative texts, and Thesing provides original and perceptive readings of his life and his novels as well as his most popular poems about animals in nature, man in nature, social and sexual relationships, women, and civilian and wartime death.This is the only introductory teaching/study guide available on Dickey’s poems and novels. Chapters are conveniently organized around essential thematic categories. The author employs various modern critical approaches – from feminist criticism to deconstruction – to the poems and novels. The book will be useful in college or high school courses on Southern literature, American poetry, and twentieth-century literature.

Howard Zinn is one of the most celebrated historians and social activists of our time. Raised in a working class family in Brooklyn, he was a shipyard worker and union organizer when World War II began. He served as a bombardier in the European Theatre and this experience shaped his opposition to war as an instrument of foreign policy. He became active in the civil rights movement as well as the anti-war movement from the 1950s to the 1970s. He is perhaps best known as the author of A People’s History of the United States, published in 1980. This study of Zinn’s life and work opens the door to many aspects of historical study generally untouched in traditional secondary and collegiate survey courses in United States history. To Zinn, history is not an objective account of the past to be indelibly carved into the brains of American citizens; rather, history is an ever-changing palette of events as people react to the contexts and cultures they find themselves immersed in. By considering the lives and thoughts of less politically and socially prominent individuals, students have the opportunity to re-examine their own beliefs and assumptions about contemporary American life. Students will gain insight into how history is constructed and recorded through a consideration of the life and writings of Howard Zinn.

Reading, Learning, Teaching Toni Morrison draws on contemporary scholarship and Morrison’s own commentary to explicate all of her novels published to date, including her 2008 novel A Mercy. Morrison, the 1993 Nobel Prize winner, is an unabashedly confrontational author. Her profound and complex novels address problems such as slavery, violence, poverty, and sexual abuse. Morrison’s work encompasses a project of total cultural renewal: she re-imagines and reaffirms the experience of African Americans from the earliest days of slavery up to the present, avoiding stereotypes or oversimplification. She employs African and Western literary traditions and conventions as a basis for both structure and critique, re-writing some of the «master narratives» of American culture and history. This book analyzes Morrison’s novels in the context of African American history and literature, and provides supplemental material to guide teachers and students to understand and appreciate Morrison’s novels.

This is an introduction to the literature of contemporary American writer Clyde Edgerton. A North Carolina native, Edgerton has been compared to Mark Twain for his easy, humorous style, which is based in oral tradition. Like Twain and other humorous writers, Edgerton’s work often contains both biting satire and exploration of very large questions about the human condition. The book contains an overview of each of his novels and his memoir in addition to offering critical commentary on theme, craft, and structure. Pedagogical support is offered with specific strategies that will encourage authentic engagement and learning. Teachers will find specific companion pieces of literature for introducing Edgerton’s vivid and challenging work. This book presents the case for including more of Clyde Edgerton’s work in our secondary and college English language arts classrooms as a means of revitalizing curricula and challenging the ways we traditionally think about teaching.