Book Description

This book is a collection of essays designed for high school and college teachers who want to introduce non-Western and other non-canonical texts into their traditional literature courses. The essays in the book explore the kinds of visions encountered when teachers cluster Western texts with those outside the dominant Western tradition. Papers in the introductory section are: "World Literature in Context" (S. Lawall); "Facing Others, Facing Ourselves" (J. P. Hunter); and "Global Perspectives: A Thematic Approach" (S. W. Lott). Papers in the "Private Worlds" section are: "Colonial Encounters of an Autobiographical Kind: Bringing the Personal Voices of Sean O'Casey and Wole Soyinka to the Literature Classroom" (R. Ayling); "Mariama Ba's 'So Long a Letter' and Alice Walker's 'In Search of Our Mother's Gardens'" (D. Grimes); and "Private Worlds: A Bibliographic Essay" (S. Palmer). Papers in the "Hero's Quest" section are: "Heroic Visions in 'The Bhagavad Gita' and the Western Epic" (M. Foley); "Contending with the Masculinist Traditions: 'Sundiata's Sogolon and the Wife of Bath" (S. Vance); "Soseki's 'Kokoro': The Voice of the Exile in Quest of a Modern Self" (P. Anderer); and "The Hero's Quest: A Bibliographic Essay" (E. Hughes and C. Gravlee). Papers in the section on "The Individual, the Family, and Society" are: "'The World Was All before Them': Coming of Age in Ngugi wa Thiong'o's 'Weep Not, Child' and Salinger's 'The Catcher in the Rye'" (S. Latham and S. Lott); "Cooper's Indians, Erdrich's Natives Americans" (M. A. McCay); and "The Individual, the Family, and Society: A Bibliographic Essay" (E. H. Rodgers). Papers in the section on "Intertextuality and Cultural Identity" are: "Crossing Cultural Bridges in Search of Drama" (A. Parkin); "Segregation in India: Forster's 'A Passage to India' and Anand's 'Untouchable'" (U. Ahlawat); "'The King Will Come': Laye Camara's Response to Kafka's World Vision" (P. Egejuru); "Carlos Fuentes's Tribute (and Reply) to Ambrose Bierce in 'The Old Gringo'" (E. Espadas); "African American Renderings of Traditional Texts" (N. Lester); "Politics and the Poet in Baraka's 'The Slave': Turning and Turning in Yeat's Gyres" (M. S. G. Hawkins); and "Intertextuality and Cultural Identity: A Bibliographic Essay" (M. S. G. Hawkins). Papers in the section on "Approaches to Chinua Achebe's 'Things Fall Apart'" are: "Chinua Achebe: The Bicultural Novel and the Ethics of Reading" (B. Henricksen); "If the Shoe Fits: Teaching 'Beowulf' with Achebe's 'Things Fall Apart'" (L. Purdon and J. Wasserman); "An African Turnus: Heroic Response to Colonialism in Vergil's 'Aeneid' and Achebe's 'Things Fall Apart'" (N. McMillan); "The Center Holds: The Resilience of Ibo Culture in 'Things Fall Apart'" (N. Sarr); and "Approaches to 'Things Fall Apart': A Bibliographic Essay" (J. Lott and S. Lott). (RS)