The social movements of the 1960s - still vital and challenging - seen through the author's experiences as a civil rights activist, a feminist, an antiwar organizer, and a radical teacher.
The essays in this volume represent the author's effort to reconstruct American literature by establishing a theory of "canonical criticism", which aims to open up the canon of American literature to the works of women, minorities and working-class writers.
Paul Lauter, an icon of American Studies who has been a primary agent in its transformation and its chief ambassador abroad, offers a wide-ranging collection of essays that demonstrate and reflect on this important and often highly politicized discipline. While American Studies was formerly seen as a wholly subsidiary academic program that loosely combined the study of American history, literature, and art, From Walden Pond to Jurassic Park reveals the evolution of an independent, highly interdisciplinary program with distinctive subjects, methods, and goals that are much different than the traditional academic departments that nurtured it. With anecdote peppered discussions ranging from specific literary texts and movies to the future of higher education and the efficacy of unions, From Walden Pond to Jurassic Park entertains even as it offers a twenty-first century account of how and why Americanists at home and abroad now do what they do. Drawing on his forty-five years of teaching and research as well as his experience as a political activist and a cultural radical, Lauter shows how a multifaceted increase in the United States’ global dominion has infused a particular political urgency into American Studies. With its military and economic influence, its cultural and linguistic reach, the United States is—for better or for worse—too formidable and potent not to be understood clearly and critically.
THE CONCISE HEATH ANTHOLOGY OF AMERICAN LITERATURE, Volume 1: BEGINNINGS TO 1865, Second Edition, brings the expansive, inclusive approach of Volumes A and B of THE HEATH ANTHOLOGY to a single-volume format. While other one-volume editions anthologize primarily familiar canonical works, the new CONCISE HEATH, Volume 1, offers a fresh perspective on American literature by showcasing the extraordinary diversity of literature written between the beginnings of the cultures of the "Americas" and 1865.
Unrivaled diversity and teachability have made The Heath Anthology a best-selling text. In presenting a more inclusive canon of American literature, The Heath Anthology changed the way American literature is taught. The Sixth Edition continues to balance the traditional, leading names in American literature with lesser-known writers and have built upon the anthology's other strengths: its apparatus and its ancillaries.
The extensive selection of poetry by Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson that appears in Volume B is reprinted in this free supplement. Available for packaging with Volume C or the Volume C, D, and E package.
This supplement includes Volume 1's extensive offering of Whitman and Dickinson selections and is available for packaging with The Heath Anthology, 4/e, Volume 2.
Literature, Language, and Politics brings together papers drawn from and inspired by the controversial, landmark symposium on “Politics and the Discipline” held at the 1987 Modern Language Association meeting in San Francisco. During the 1980s, debates raged both within and outside academe over curriculum, with conservatives arguing for a return to an educational philosophy based on the “classics” of Western civilization and a multi-cultural coalition of liberals, leftists, and feminists seeking to preserve the diversity of educational experience fought for since the 1960s. Engaging this crucial debate, the contributors to Literature, Language, and Politics argue that the conservative educational agenda imperils not only scholarship and academic freedom but the very social well-being of the nation. They call for firm resistance to any attempts to make education conform to the social agenda of one race, one gender, one language, or one ideology; for a continuation of attempts to broaden the curriculum until it reflects the experience of women and men of all classes and all cultures. Includes essays by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Gerald Graff, Annette Kolodny, Paul Lauter, Ellen Messer-Davidow, Catharine R. Stimpson, and Ana Celia Zentella.
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