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Often considered a writer who transcends national borders, Jorge Luis Borges also aimed to reinvent the history and traditions of his own country, Argentina. His unconventional works appeal to students, who nonetheless can find his richly intertextual prose challenging. Addressing courses in Spanish and in English, this volume offers innovative approaches that help students navigate the texts, engage with them emotionally and creatively, and understand the time and place of their production while connecting them to the present.
Part 1, “Materials,” provides detailed biographical information about Borges as well as print and digital resources. The essays in part 2, “Approaches,” offer strategies for discussing his writing process, his manuscripts, and the material history and translation of his texts. Contributors also examine Borges's influences, which include film, mythology, history, and ideas of Islam and Judaism; the author's interest in humor and games; and resonances with other literary works.
In 1527 Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca journeyed from Spain to Florida with the ill-fated Pánfilo de Narváez expedition—and ended up wandering by land for years with a small band of survivors before reaching Spanish outposts in modern-day Mexico. He later traveled to South America as an appointed provincial governor, only to be sent back to Spain in chains some years after his arrival. His written works describing his experiences provide insights into the lives of the indigenous peoples of the Americas and the attitudes of the Spanish conquistadores.
This volume provides background about the texts and discusses new ways to teach them, challenging outdated readings that erase the violence of Spanish imperialism. Essays examine the role of the enslaved African Esteban in Cabeza de Vaca's account of the North American expedition, the indigenous and Spanish women who appear in the explorer's texts, Cabeza de Vaca's performance of multiple gender roles, and the reception of these works as examples of Chicano or Latin American literature. The volume also explores connections to archaeological findings and food studies.
Known as a preeminent poet of queer male desire, C. P. Cavafy lived most of his life as part of the Greek minority community in Alexandria, Egypt. He was inspired by the possibilities offered by peripheries, whether sexual, geographic, or historical. Volumes of his poems, widely translated into English, give anglophone readers access to his distinctive mixture of irony and tenderness, directness and subtlety.
This volume will help instructors introduce students to Cavafy's works and explore them from many angles with the help of the extensive archives now available. Essays address teaching Cavafy both as a poetic historian of the Hellenistic, Roman, and Byzantine worlds and through the lens of postcoloniality. They also explore how he interpreted classical Greek works and how his work has been interpreted by composers, poets, and readers within and beyond Greece and the Greek diaspora.
The writings of Fernando Pessoa, one of Portugal's most renowned authors, stand alongside other significant works of modernist world literature and offer a view into the specific milieu of early-twentieth-century Lisbon. Writing under several identities known as heteronyms, Pessoa created works in many genres, including fragments that were assembled into his best-known text, The Book of Disquiet, only after his death.
The essays in this volume explore questions raised by Pessoa about the nature of the self, the stability of the text, and the conflict between tradition and innovation. Part 1, “Materials,” describes editions, translations, and other resources. The essays in part 2, “Approaches,” address Pessoa's works and delve into the author's historical and cultural contexts, heteronyms and multiplicity, archives and editing processes, and connections with other authors and fields of study.
This volume helps teachers contextualize Bram Stoker's Dracula in its historical and cultural moment, considering psychology, technology, gender roles, colonialism, and anxieties about the other. It also situates the novel among the kindred texts that have proliferated since its publication, from film and television to the growing genre of vampire novels.
Essays explore the novel in terms of medical humanities, contagion, and the gothic as well as ethnicity, identity, and race. Contributors analyze Dracula in the context of various ancient and modern cultural productions, including classical Indian aesthetics and African American vampire literature, and describe a broad range of classroom settings, including a technical university, a Hispanic-serving institution, and others.
This volume gathers works produced by Spanish-speaking people of Mexican descent who became US citizens by virtue of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848) and whose ancestors had resided in New Mexico, Arizona, California, Texas, and Colorado for hundreds of years prior to the Mexican-American War. The writings in this collection, drawn from various genres, were composed at a time marked by the confluence of tradition and change. In addition to facing unprecedented challenges to their rights, livelihoods, language, and religion, the writers experienced the arrival of the railroad, the telegraph, film, and radio; they fought in the American Civil War, the Spanish-American War, and World War I; and they saw Arizona and New Mexico gain statehood in 1912. This anthology of songs, poems, speeches, and journalism shows the persistence of a vibrant culture in the face of upheaval and change.
People migrate to seek opportunities, to unite with family, and to escape war, persecution, poverty, and environmental disasters. A phenomenon that has real, lived effects on individuals and communities, migration also carries symbolic, ideological significance. Its depiction in literature, film, and other media powerfully shapes worldviews, identities, attitudes toward migrants, and a political landscape that is both local and global. It is imperative, then, to connect the disciplinary and theoretical tools we have for understanding migration and to put them in conversation with students' experiences.
Featuring a wide range of classroom approaches, this volume brings together topics that are often taught separately, including tourism, slavery, drug cartels, race, whiteness, settler colonialism, the Arab Spring, assimilation, and disability. Readers are introduced to terminology and legal frameworks and to theories of migration in relation to Black studies, ethnic studies, Asian American studies, Latinx studies, border studies, postcolonial studies, and Indigenous studies.
A Troubadour Reader, a supplement to William D. Paden's Introduction to Old Occitan, provides a diverse selection of thirty medieval lyric poems in Occitan for language learners. Featuring poems by women, poems composed especially early or especially late in the language's literary use, and poems that feature Occitan in contact with other languages, the book highlights the range and wealth of medieval Occitan lyric poetry. Each poem is presented with a brief introduction, glosses on the text, and notes after each stanza. The volume also includes a section on basic Occitan grammar, a list of manuscripts, bibliographical references, and an index.
One of the most important American authors and public intellectuals of the twentieth century, Ralph Ellison had a keen and unsentimental understanding of the relationship between race, art, and activism in American life. He contended with other writers of his day in his examination of the entrenched racism in society, and his writing continues to inform national conversations in letters and culture.
The essays in Approaches to Teaching the Works of Ralph Ellison will help instructors in colleges, high schools, and prisons teach not only the indispensable Invisible Man but also Ellison's short stories, his essays, and the two editions of his second, unfinished novel, Juneteenth and Three Days before the Shooting . . . . In considering Ellison's works in relation to jazz, technology, humor, politics, queerness, and disability, this volume mirrors the breadth of Ellison's own life, which extended from the Jim Crow era through the Black Power movement.
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