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The author of Comentarios reales and La Florida del Inca, now recognized as key foundational works of Latin American literature and historiography, Inca Garcilaso de la Vega was born in 1539 in Cuzco, the son of a Spanish conquistador and an Incan princess, and later moved to Spain. Recalling the family stories and myths he had heard from his Quechua-speaking relatives during his youth and gathering information from friends who had remained in Peru, he created works that have come to indelibly shape our understanding of Incan history and administration. He also articulated a new American identity, which he called mestizo.
This volume provides guidance on the translations of Garcilaso's writings and on the scholarly reception of his ideas. Instructors will discover ideas for teaching Garcilaso's works in relation to indigenous thought, European historiography, natural history, indigenous religion and Christianity, and Incan material culture. In essays informed by postcolonial and decolonial perspectives, scholars draw connections between Garcilaso's writings and contemporary issues like migration, multiculturalism, and indigenous rights.
In 1554, Lazarillo de Tormes, a slim, unassuming little volume, unsigned by the author, made its first published appearance in the bookstalls of several important mercantile centers in Spain and the Netherlands. Since then, as narratives of pícaros—and pícaras—continued to follow in the footsteps of Lázaro’s fictional life, picaresque literature developed into a major genre in literary studies that remains popular to this day.
Yet the genre’s definition is anything but simple, as the diversity of this volume demonstrates. Part 1, “Materials,” reviews editions and translations of Lazarillo and other picaresque works, as well as the critical and historical resources related to them. The essays in part 2, “Approaches,” explore the picaresque’s place in language and literature classrooms of all levels. Some contributors contextualize Lazarillo in the early modern Spanish culture it satirizes, investigating the role of the church and the marginalization of Muslims and Jews. Others pair Lazarillo with Alemán’s Guzmán de Alfarache or Quevedo’s Buscón to concentrate on the genre’s literary aspects. A cluster of essays focuses on teaching the picaresque (including the female picaresque) to nonspecialist students in interdisciplinary courses. The volume concludes with a section devoted to the picaresque novel’s influence on other literary traditions, from early modern autobiographies, such as Teresa of Ávila’s Libro de la vida, to post–Spanish Civil War texts to twentieth-century Latin American novels and 1950s American beat narratives.
Marguerite de Navarre—writer, reformer, patron—was a key figure of the French Renaissance. Her works, however, were critically reassessed by scholars only in the twentieth century. Today her Heptameron is widely anthologized and frequently taught in undergraduate and graduate classrooms. But teaching this collection of novellas presents challenges: the work is in Middle French, complex in its construction, and far-reaching in its use of historical context. This ninety-fifth volume in the Approaches to Teaching World Literature series aims to show teachers how to unravel the intricacies of the Heptameron for students. The first part, “Materials,” reviews editions and translations, surveys sources that are useful in the classroom, and considers audiovisual and technological resources available to instructors. The second part, “Approaches,” features twenty-seven essays that explore the Heptameron and its cultural and historical contexts; the religious and political ideas and the literary genres that influenced it; its publishing history; and its relation to other works by Marguerite. Experienced instructors share insights about how to teach this work in foreign language and survey courses; how to incorporate film and visual art in the classroom; and how to approach the subject of gender in discussing Marguerite’s writing.
Debated and discussed by countless writers and readers during the last four hundred years, Montaigne’s Essays constitutes the first example of a major new literary genre and originates the moralist tradition in France. While Montaigne has long been a staple of the French language classroom, recent scholarship on genre and gender studies, intertextuality, reader-response theory, rhetoric, and other critical perspectives has brought the Essays into an impressive array of undergraduate courses and seminars. This volume in the popular Approaches to Teaching World Literature series evaluates the abundant analytic and bibliographic material on the Essays and offers detailed strategies and suggestions for teaching the text in both French and English.
Like other books in the Approaches series, this one is divided into two parts. The first part, “Materials,” reviews French and English editions of the Essays and lists helpful reference works for students and teachers. The first two essays in part 2, “Approaches,” discuss effective ways of presenting background information on Montaigne and the Renaissance. Subsequent essays outline general, interdisciplinary, and contemporary critical approaches to the text: for example, Montaigne’s Essays and political philosophy; the ethics of the author; the book’s use of plastic arts, of other texts, of metaphors; the sociological significance of the language; “deconstructive moments” in the Essays; gender; a psychoanalytic interpretation of “Of Friendship.” The volume concludes with an in-depth look at how five of Montaigne’s essays have been taught in various undergraduate courses and contexts.
Arguably the most important work of premodern Japanese literature, Murasaki Shikibu’s The Tale of Genji is a fictional narrative of courtly life in ancient Japan. This thousand-year-old text is now being taught with increasing frequency in college courses and seminars on comparative literature, women’s studies, world literature, Asian studies, and medieval studies. Approaches to Teaching Murasaki Shikibu’s The Tale of Genji brings together seventeen essays on teaching the work, primarily in translation, in different settings.
Like other books in the MLA’s Approaches to Teaching World Literature series, this one is divided into two parts. The first part, “Materials,” discusses the texts, translations, reference works, critical studies, and other materials most commonly used and recommended by teachers of Genji. In the second part, “Approaches,” experienced teachers describe methods of presentation that they have found effective for enlivening classroom discussion and enhancing students’ appreciation of the text. Their essays outline the challenges posed by The Tale of Genji and its translations; suggest ways to incorporate it in courses in other disciplines, such as religion or art; evaluate problems of interpretation and cultural difference; and provide examples of teaching the text alongside other works of literature.
The works of François Rabelais—Gargantua, Pantagruel, the Tiers livre, and the Quart livre—embody the Renaissance spirit of discovery and are crucial to the development of early modern prose and to the birth of the novel. Rabelais’s exuberant satire deals not only with the major cultural and intellectual issues of his time but also with issues of interest to students today.
This volume, in the MLA series Approaches to Teaching World Literature, suggests the materials that can be used in teaching Rabelais: editions, translations, criticism, Web sites, music, artwork, and films. Thirty-four essays present strategies for the classroom, discussing the classical and biblical allusions; the context of humanism and evangelical reform; various themes (giants, monsters, war); both feminism and masculinity as vexing subjects; Rabelais’s erudition; and the challenges of teaching his inventive language, his ambiguity, and his scatology.
By the time they encounter Romeo and Juliet in the classroom, many students have already been exposed to various, and sometimes incongruous, manifestations of Shakespeare's work. This volume makes a virtue of students' familiarity with the preconceptions, anachronisms, and appropriations that shape experiences of the work, finding innovative pedagogical possibilities in the play's adaptations and in new technologies that spark students' creative responses.
The essays cover a wide area of concerns, such as marriage, gender, queer perspectives, and girlhood, and contributors embrace different ways of understanding the play, such as through dance, editing, and acting. The final essays focus on decolonizing the text by foregrounding both the role of race and economic inequality in the play and the remarkable confluence of Romeo and Juliet and Hispanic culture.
Taught widely in high school and college, Romeo and Juliet may be Shakespeare’s most accessible work. Teenagers and young adults identify with the play’s interfamilial conflict, the love story, and the defiance of parental authority. Nevertheless, readers of all ages are often perplexed by the Bard’s poetic language, the “unrealism” of the characters’ eloquence, and the embedded sonnets. Essays in this book address these challenges and others and offer instructors imaginative strategies for dealing with them.
The first part, “Materials,” reviews the most widely used anthologies of Shakespeare’s plays and the many available editions of Romeo and Juliet, as well as background materials for the instructor and recommendations for student reading. The second part, “Approaches,” presents practical ideas for the classroom. A final section describes scenarios for teaching the play through dramatic technique and for using Romeo and Juliet’s many adaptations, including the popular Zeffirelli and Luhrmann films.
“The Faerie Queene,“ according to Alexander Dunlop (coeditor of the present volume), “may be the most undervalued classic in the canon of English poetry.” The epic poem’s archaic language, formal structure, historical references, and literary allusions all present special challenges to both student and teacher—challenges that the contributors to this book believe can be overcome with creativity and wit. Designed for beginning instructors as well as for specialists still looking for the lesson plan of their dreams, Approaches to Teaching Spenser’s Faerie Queene offers a thorough discussion of recent work on Spenser and on the social and cultural milieu of Elizabethan England.
This Approaches volume, like others in the series, is divided into two parts. Part 1, “Materials,” surveys resources useful for classroom instruction (such as editions, anthologies, and student readings), reviews background studies and critical scholarship, and reprints eight illustrations related to the poem. Part 2, “Approaches,” presents six essays suggesting methods for introducing The Faerie Queene to students and nine essays describing advanced classroom strategies incorporating a variety of topics, including the visual arts, feminism, and colonialism.
This bibliography supplements the New Variorum Edition of 1936 and the supplement of 1956.
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