Exploring Our Countrys History: Linking Fiction to Nonfiction (Literature Bridges to Social Studies)

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Accompanied by artwork by the poet and artist Peter Sacks, the cahier is an attempt to translate private experiences into something with public meaning. In a city dense with story, the unnamed narrator moves through a mosaic of life, hoping to find inspiration for his own. Along the way, the man reconnects with old friends, a former girlfriend, and extended family, taps into the energies of Lagos life—creative, malevolent, ambiguous—and slowly begins to reconcile the profound changes that have taken place in his country and the truth about himself. America, as Gates shows us, is a nation of many historical threads, interwoven and united in the present moment.

In this compelling book, Gates demonstrates that where we come from profoundly and fundamentally informs who we are today. Conjuring an array of voices and perspectives—from bots, to the holy shroud, to the ocean floor, to a medium transmitting from beyond the grave—these poems give urgent form to the ever-increasing pace of transformation of our planet and ourselves.

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She spends her days working the graveyard shift at a grocery store outside Boston and nursing an addiction to cough syrup, an attempt to suppress her troubled past. But when a sickness that begins with memory loss and ends with death sweeps the country, Joy, for the first time in her life, seems to have an advantage: There she submits to peculiar treatments and follows seemingly arbitrary rules, forming cautious bonds with other patients—including her roommate, whom she turns to in the night for comfort, and twin boys who are digging a secret tunnel.

As Douglass and Lincoln reinvented themselves and ultimately became friends, they transformed America. Fourteen-year-old Ellis lives with his mom in suburban Tucson, Arizona. Goat Man is, for lack of a better definition, their pool man. In his talk, Bhabha evokes the spirit of Hegel in an attempt to understand contemporary issues of ethical witness, historical memory and the rights and representations of minorities in the cultural sphere. How do we define a successful metaphor? When do we recognize a brilliant use of detail in fiction?

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What is point of view, and how does it work? What is imaginative sympathy? Why does fiction move us? Niles, University of Wisconsin-Madison. Daniel Donoghue shows how the earliest readers of Old English poems deployed a unique set of skills that enabled them to navigate a daunting task with apparent ease. Supplementing close readings with a sensitive reconstruction of how Victorians thought and felt about books, Price offers a new model for integrating literary theory with cultural history.

Treading back across the paths of her ancestors, she travels from Baltimore to the Baltic to London in order to find and understand an immigrant world profoundly affected by modern German culture, from the Enlightenment through the Holocaust. Rather than lament the fact that Austen today shares the headlines with her readers, the contributors to this collection inquire into why this is the case, ask what Janeites do, and explore the myriad appropriations of Austen—adaptations, reviews, rewritings, and appreciations—that have been produced since her lifetime.

However, it survives in three versions in more than twenty copies from across Europe, few of which indicate doubt as to its orthodoxy. Swift concealed aspects of himself and his relationships, and other people in his life helped to keep his secrets. On page after page, deploying prose dense with beauty and ideas, he finds fresh and potent ways to interpret art, people, and historical moments. This book investigates who Lady Godiva was, how the story of her naked horseback ride through Coventry arose, and how the whole Godiva legend has evolved from the thirteenth century through to the present day.

Helen Vendler examines the ways in which five great modern American poets, writing their final books, try to find a style that does justice to life and death alike. With traditional religious consolations no longer available to them, these poets must invent new ways to express the crisis of death, as well as the paradoxical coexistence of a declining body and an undiminished consciousness. Life Upon These Shores focuses on defining events, debates, and controversies, as well as the signal achievements of people famous and obscure. Gates takes us from the sixteenth century through the ordeal of slavery, from the Civil War and Reconstruction through the Jim Crow era and the Great Migration; from the civil rights and black nationalist movements through the age of hip-hop to the Joshua generation.

Topics range from copyright law to voice recognition software, from New Women to haunted typewriters and from the history of technology to the future of information management. Together, the essays will provide literary critics with a new angle on current debates about gender, labour, and the material text, as well as a window into the prehistory of our information age.

And while the most obvious response is that, no, actually the profession of literary studies does acknowledge and address personal attachments to literature, that answer risks obscuring a more fundamental question: While Milton is recognized as one of the most learned English poets in history, his Latin poetry is less well known. The idea for the Bloomfield Lectures was. The contents of the present volume show to what extent the lectures reflect this range; doubtless those lectures to come will reflect even more of the areas of study that Morton pursued.

Potter, an illiterate taxi chauffeur who makes his living along the roads that pass through the only towns he has ever seen and the graveyard where he will be buried. These essays probe the problems of articulating the meaning s of music; how music and language interact; how text-setting highlights meter, theme, or ironic undertone; how a composition can behave as a critique of a previous work; and how one might rehabilitate underappreciated figures by showing that the very terms of invective used against them can also be seen as an indication of what is exciting in their work.

From developing characters to building conflict, from mastering dialogue to setting the scene, Naming the World jump-starts your creativity with inspiring exercises that will have you scrambling for pen and paper. Traces the impact of the literature of New England on the development of spirituality, community, and culture in America, and includes in-depth studies of work from authors and poets such as William Bradford, Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, and Henry David Thoreau.

No Planets Strike , the debut collection of poetry by Josh Bell, reads as a playfully serious record of modernity. Subversive in their treatment of the contemporary voice, broad in their subject matter, and often delightfully funny, the poems in this collection have a brilliant ear language.

For two decades or more in the humanities, various political arguments have been put forward against beauty: In On Beauty and Being Just Elaine Scarry not only defends beauty from the political arguments against it but argues that beauty indeed presses us toward a greater concern for justice.

A haunting and widely celebrated novel about identity, dislocation, and history. Along the streets of Manhattan, a young Nigerian doctor named Julius wanders, reflecting on his relationships, his recent breakup with his girlfriend, his present, his past. He encounters people from different cultures and classes who will provide insight on his journey—which takes him to Brussels, to the Nigeria of his youth, and into the most unrecognizable facets of his own soul.

Today, as in the past, artists need the funding, approval, and friendship of patrons whether they are individuals, corporations, governments, or nonprofit foundations. Teeming with historical detail, it is filled with surprises, chief among them the fact that neither George Custer nor Walt Whitman, and not even Abraham Lincoln, was the most photographed American of that century.

In fact, it was Frederick Douglass — , the ex-slave turned leading abolitionist, eloquent orator, and seminal writer whose fiery speeches transformed him into one of the most renowned and popular agitators of his age. Many students today are puzzled by the meaning and purpose of poetry. Poems, Poets, Poetry demystifies the form and introduces students to its artistry and pleasures, using methods that Helen Vendler has successfully used herself over her long, celebrated career.

He deftly draws a detailed yet broad picture of the lived experience of a crippling disease as it makes it way into every facet of human existence. But since its birth was announced a century ago in by William James, pragmatism has played a vital role in almost every area of American intellectual and cultural life, inspiring judges, educators, politicians, poets, and social prophets. These essays show the outline of a Shakespeare rather different from the man sought by biographers from his time to our own. Did he run away?

Did he drown in the bay? Renaissance Suppliants studies supplication as a social and literary event in the long European Renaissance. It argues that scenes of supplication are defining episodes in a literary tradition stretching back to Greco-Roman antiquity, taking us to the heart of fundamental questions of politics and religion, ethics and identity, sexuality and family.

This book is a passionate call for citizen action to uphold the rule of law when government does not. Since an increasing preoccupation with money has resulted in the inversion of its role in higher education, from a practical means to an end that crowds out all others. Yet the question persists: In Sea Change, Graham brings us to the once-unimaginable threshold at which civilization as we know it becomes unsustainable.

This piercing examination of the manifold ways in which the passing of time operates on the human consciousness unfolds gracefully, and Kincaid inhabits each of her characters—a mother, a father, and their two children, living in a small village in New England—as they move, in their own minds, between the present, the past, and the future. James Wood has selected fourteen of D.

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Shakespeare lived in a world of absolutes—of claims for the absolute authority of scripture, monarch, and God, and the authority of fathers over wives and children, the old over the young, and the gentle over the baseborn. With the elegance and verve for which he is well known, Stephen Greenblatt, author of the best-selling Will in the World , shows that Shakespeare was strikingly averse to such absolutes and constantly probed the possibility of freedom from them.

Site Reading offers a new method of literary and cultural interpretation and a new theory of narrative setting by examining five sites—supermarkets, dumps, roads, ruins, and asylums—that have been crucial to American literature and visual art since the mid-twentieth century. Against the traditional understanding of setting as a static background for narrative action and character development, David Alworth argues that sites figure in novels as social agents.

Kiyoshi, the Japanese tailor for whom he works, and who has his own secrets and a past he does not speak of; Peixe, the groundskeeper at the town church; and two vagrant children named Santi and Bia, a boy and a girl, who spend their days in the alleyways and the streets of the town. Yohan longs to connect with these people, but to do so he must sift through the wreckage of his traumatic past so he might let go and move on. It is , and Benjamin is heading off to college and sixteen-year-old Vanessa is in the throes of a rocky adolescence. Sharon, a caterer for the Washington elite, ventures into a cultlike organization.

In this bold reinterpretation of American culture, Philip Fisher describes generational life as a series of renewed acts of immigration into a new world. Along with the actual flood of immigrants, technological change brings about an immigration of objects and systems, ways of life and techniques for the distribution of ideas. Still the New World makes a persuasive argument against the reduction of literature to identity questions of race, gender, and ethnicity.

In a book that explores the phenomenon of stuttering from its practical and physical aspects to its historical profile to its existential implications, Marc Shell plumbs the depths of this murky region between will and flesh, intention and expression, idea and word. Aaron, who is widely regarded as one of the founders of American Studies, graduated from the University of Michigan, received his Ph. Few poetic forms have found more uses than the sonnet in English, and none is now more recognizable.

It is one of the longest-lived of verse forms, and one of the briefest. Xuela Claudette Richardson, the daughter of a Carib mother and a half-Scottish, half-African father, loses her mother to death the moment she is born and must find her way on her own. Thomas Bunting while neglecting his philosophy Ph.

When his father, a beloved parish priest, falls ill, Bunting returns to the village of his childhood. His hopes that this visit might enable him to talk honestly with his parents and sort out his life, are soon destroyed. He masterfully links four fundamental human desires—sweetness, beauty, intoxication, and control—with the plants that satisfy them: Ranging in subject from Jane Austen to John Updike, this collection introduced American readers to a new kind of humanist criticism. Wood is committed to judging literature through its connection with the soul, its appeal to our appetites and identities, and he examines his subjects rigorously, without ever losing sight of the mysterious human impulse that has made these works valuable to generations of readers.

Amy Hempel is a master of the short story. This celebrated volume gathers together her complete work — four short collections of stunning stories about marriages, minor disasters, and moments of revelation. With her inimitable compassion and wit, Hempel introduces characters who make choices that seem inevitable, and whose longings and misgivings evoke eternal human experience. James Engell traces the evolution of the creative imagination, from its emergence in British empirical thought through its flowering in Romantic art and literature. The notion of a creative imagination, Engell shows, was the most powerful and important development of the eighteenth century.

It grew simultaneously in literature, criticism, philosophy, psychology, religion, and science, attracting such diverse minds as Hobbes, Addison, Gerard, Goethe, Kant, and Coleridge. Most philosophy has rejected the theater, denouncing it as a place of illusion or moral decay; the theater in turn has rejected philosophy, insisting that drama deals in actions, not ideas. Challenging both views, The Drama of Ideas shows that theater and philosophy have been crucially intertwined from the start.

In this landmark book, the first in many years to take in the whole sweep of national fiction, Lawrence Buell reanimates this supposedly antiquated idea, demonstrating that its history is a key to the dynamics of national literature and national identity itself. Yet by the nineteenth century, characters had become the equals of their readers, friends with whom readers might spend time and empathize.

In twenty-three passionate, sparkling dispatches—that range over such crucial writers as Thomas Hardy, Leon Tolstoy, Edmund Wilson, and Mikhail Lermontov—Wood offers a panoramic look at the modern novel. From his earliest work of literary-historical excavation in , through his current writings on the history and science of African American genealogy, the essays collected here follow his path as historian, theorist, canon-builder, and cultural critic, revealing a thinker of uncommon breadth whose work is uniformly guided by the drive to uncover and restore a history that has for too long been buried and denied.

In twenty-three passionate, sparkling dispatches, James Wood effortlessly connects his encyclopedic, passionate understanding of the literary canon with an equally earnest and appreciative view of the most discussed authors writing today, including Franzen, Pynchon, Rushdie, DeLillo, Naipaul, David Foster Wallace, and Zadie Smith.

From a newlywed caught in an inscrutable marriage, to private eyes working a baffling case in South Florida, to a teenager who assists her magician mother and steals from the audience, the characters in these bewitching stories are at once vulnerable and dangerous, bighearted and ruthless, and they will do what it takes to survive. Basketball on the playgrounds of Coney Island is much more than a game — for many young men it is their escape from a life of crime, poverty, and despair.

What they have going for them is athletic talent, grace, and years of dedication. But working against them are woefully inadequate schooling, family circumstances that are often desperate, and the slick, brutal world of college athletic recruitment.

Is American vision implicitly possessive, as a generation of critics contends? By viewing the American poetic tradition through the prism of pragmatism, Elisa New contests this claim. The aging patriarch and matriarch of the Ghosh family preside over their household, made up of their five adult children, and grandchildren.

Poisonous rivalries, destructive secrets, and the implosion of the family business threaten to unravel bonds of kinship as social unrest brews in greater Indian society. The eldest grandchild, driven by idealism, becomes dangerously involved in extremist political activism—actions which further catalyze the decay of the Ghosh home.

This is a novel of unflinching power and emotional force. Rethinking questions of identity, social agency and national affiliation, Bhabha provides a working, if controversial, theory of cultural. In The Location of Culture , he uses concepts such as mimicry, interstice, hybridity, and liminality to argue that cultural production is always most productive where it is most ambivalent.

What makes it so hard for colleges to decide which subjects are required? Why are so many academics against the concept of interdisciplinary studies? Sparking a long-overdue debate about the future of American education, The Marketplace of Ideas argues that twenty-first-century professors and students are essentially trying to function in a nineteenth-century system, and that the resulting conflict threatens to overshadow the basic pursuit of knowledge and truth. The Metaphysical Club was an informal group that met in Cambridge, Ma, in , to talk about ideas.

Its members included Oliver Well Holmes, Jr. The Club was probably in existence for about 9 months. No records were kept. The one thing we know that came out of it was an idea — an idea about ideas. This book is the story of that idea. Written for ardent Joyceans as well as novices who want to get to the heart of the greatest novel of the twentieth century, The Most Dangerous Book is a gripping examination of how the world came to say Yes to Ulysses. Though they exist in their own distinct worlds from a sanatorium in the Hudson Valley to an inn in the Russian far east they are united by the struggle to reconcile their traumatic pasts in the wake of violence, big and small, spiritual and corporeal.

As a break from their ordained labors, what might the Muses today do on their lunch hour? This collection of witty, shrewd, and imaginative essays addresses interdisciplinary topics that range widely from Shakespeare, to psychoanalysis, to the practice of higher education today. The Norton Anthology of Drama offers sixty-five major plays—including three twentieth-century plays not available in any other drama anthology—the most carefully prepared introductions, annotations, and play texts, and a convenient two-volume, one-column format for ease of reading and carrying.

Read by millions of students since its first publication, The Norton Anthology of World Literature remains the most-trusted anthology of world literature available. Guided by the advice of more than teachers of world literature and a panel of regional specialists, the editors of the Third Edition—a completely new team of scholar-teachers—have made this respected text brand-new in all the best ways. In the nineteenth century, Great Britain and the United States shared a single literary marketplace that linked the reform movements, as well as the literatures, of the two nations.

The writings of transatlantic reformers—antislavery, temperance, and suffrage activists—gave novelists a new sense of purpose and prompted them to invent new literary forms. The result was a distinctively Anglo-American realism, in which novelists, conceiving of themselves as reformers, sought to act upon their readers—and, through their readers, the world. One of our foremost commentators on poetry examines the work of a broad range of nineteenth- and twentieth-century English, Irish, and American poets. His absorbing narrative takes us from Iowa cornfields to food-science laboratories, from feedlots and fast-food restaurants to organic farms and hunting grounds, always emphasizing our dynamic coevolutionary relationship with the handful of plant and animal species we depend on.

Through close readings of major poems, this book examines why the second-generation Romantic poets — Byron, Shelley, and Keats — stage so much of their poetry in Eastern or Orientalized settings. Contemporary American poetry has plenty to offer new readers, and plenty more for those who already follow it. Yet its difficulty—and sheer variety—leaves many readers puzzled or overwhelmed.

The critic, scholar, and poet Stephen Burt sets out to help. Comprising only a few ancient verses, the story of Adam and Eve has served as a mirror in which we seem to glimpse the whole, long history of our fears and desires, as both a hymn to human responsibility and a dark fable about human wretchedness. In , after surviving the devastating Battle of Corinth, Newton Knight, a poor farmer from Mississippi, deserted the Confederate Army and began a guerrilla battle against the Confederacy. For two years he and other residents of Jones County engaged in an insurrection that would have repercussions far beyond the scope of the Civil War.

The Swerve is both an innovative work of history and a thrilling story of discovery, in which the last surviving manuscript of an ancient Roman philosophical epic On the Nature of Things by Lucretius , plucked from a thousand years of neglect, changed the course of human thought and made possible the world as we know it. Drawing on a vast array of American, German, and other sources—diaries, photographs, newspaper articles, government reports, essays, works of fiction, and film—Werner Sollors makes visceral the experiences of defeat and liberation, homelessness and repatriation, concentration camps and denazification.

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Martin's True Crime Library. Sponsored products related to this item What's this? Married couple rides out Hurricane Katrina on their rooftop. A true story of death and devastation. A chilling memoir of dark abuse, mental illness and the triumph of survival. Stripped by a Man and Hurricane Katrina. Left alone with an infant in Hurricane Katrina, Julie is stripped bare by love and loss.

A powerful true story, candid, touching, and unforgettable. Coming to Las Vegas: The tragic true story of a mother who lost one daughter t Two families, murdered under similar circumstances. The other was all but forgotten. With what can only be described as maternal courage, she challenges us to look past the simple way our culture metabolizes episodes of filicide, ridding ourselves of the burden of close inspection by making the murderer into a monster. Product details File Size: Little A July 1, Publication Date: July 1, Sold by: Related Video Shorts 0 Upload your video.

The inside account of the life and trial of one of the world's most infamous criminals, by his closest confidante and biggest traitor, his sister. Share your thoughts with other customers. Write a customer review. Read reviews that mention crime mother amanda sad subject child rommelmann follow tragedy finish tragic jason answer involved kept seemed insight telling woman facts.

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Kindle Edition Verified Purchase. I think the problem with true crime is often that reality just can't compare with fantasy. Stories don't come together neatly, as they do in fiction. The endings aren't what we want. There is often a sense of lingering unfulfillment, and questions that are never answered. I have read most of Amazon's First Reads true crime novels, and none have ever gripped me so much as this one. The story that was slowly revealed was profoundly disturbing, shocking, and not at all what I expected.

So many lies, so much abuse, narcissism, manipulation, and mental illness. And that was also the point at which I stopped trying to guess who I'd end up the most angry at, or where I'd place the most blame Mostly because with each new piece of the story, everything shifted. What a wrenching experience. I have never once thought to myself that I'd reread a true crime novel, but I'll reread at least the last half of this book again, and then maybe again. It was utterly gripping, and wove together emotion, truth, and conjecture into a story that will stick with me for a very, VERY long time! I have been enjoying read crime and true crime stories lately, which is why I decided to read this book.

I was looking forward to finding out the "why" for this crime. What drove this mother to try to murder 2 of her 3 children? Every trail Nancy Rommelmann goes down either is a dead end or a loop that shifts the blame onto someone else. There is no resolution. At least her surviving children are doing better without her- they're fed and cared for. I am fine with a book that has a sad ending.

I am not happy with a book with an incomplete ending. Now for the other main problem I had with this book: Miss Rommelmann has written many books and articles over the years, but you'd never know it. There are flashbacks which may or may not deal with this case that interrupt the main story. Half of the time when someone is speaking, there aren't quotation marks. Sometimes when she is taking with someone there are no quotation marks and it reads like a thought. Conversations and thoughts should be written differently. The timeline of things leading up to the crime is jumbled.

And half-way though the book she spends several pages talking about a completely different crime. She rewrites the story of the crime with just a teeny bit more detail at least 3 times. I stopped counting after a while. It's poorly written and I'm mad that I wasted my time on it. As a fan of true crime novels, I had hoped this book would be similar to the brilliant writings from Ann Rule. To my disappointment, thus book was rambling nonsense that did not follow a consistent time line. Character development was weak and the author felt the need to randomly insert herself into the story.

A waste of my June First Read. Many people NEED to read this book. Many, even most, will hate the basic story, but, we all need to understand the mindset here, if we are to find a way to prevent more of these sorts of horrors. Okay, there is a specific reason this tale struck home. That reason is part of the explanation as to why I am so moved. Other, even more telling reasons, concern two close relatives of mine remaining anonymous for now who wreaked horrific nightmares upon their children.

The first irony is that I recollect bits of this true story from the weeks just before my wife and I moved from our home near Portland, Oregon to North Dakota in June, That, however, is not the more chilling coincidence. Today, our church is hosting a funeral for another child murdered by his mother. The young son of a chiropractor was tossed from a hotel room in New York, and followed by his mother.

His uncle is my chiropractor here and his grandmother did a story about a bakery I once started in town. So, yes, this story comes about as close to home as any nightmare I might wish to endure. I was at work, 25 miles away, so could not attend the funeral with my wife. I guess, in a spiritual sense, I am taking part in that funeral by grieving over the facts of another murder?

I trust readers of this review will not be too put off by my introduction, but I do feel I must put this true story review into perspective. Still, the few f-words might concern a few people who might choose to read it to a child or a fellow member of the church book club. Good flow, the sort of grammar that rings true to the ear. The writer spends a good deal of effort in setting the scene. She tends to explain herself in the story. For me, it interrupts the flow of the work, much as some review readers tell me my reviews do. I pops up at about location Coming at the point it does, it tickled my funny bone.

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