The career of Guenter Grass began dramatically in 1959, with the publication of his first novel. The Tin Drum brought instant fame to the thirty-two-year-old author and led to his receiving the 1999 Nobel Prize in Literature. Translated into dozens of languages, the novel has sold over four million copies worldwide. Its status as a major text of ......
The past thirty years have witnessed a rapid growth in the number and variety of courses and programs that study life writing from literary, philosophical, psychological, and cultural perspectives. The field has evolved from the traditional approach that biographies and autobiographies were always about prominent people-historically significant ......
Widely considered one of the twentieth century's great novels, Lolita maintains an established place on the syllabus--in English departments, Russian and Slavic departments, and departments of comparative literature. Yet its particular mix of narrative strategies, ornate allusive prose, and troublesome subject matter complicates its presentation ......
Edgar Allan Poe is a popular author, and students have often read his work by the time they reach the college or university classroom. His writings have inspired film, television, and musical adaptations-sources for much of students' knowledge about Poe. Thus the challenge for teachers is to reacquaint students with Poe as a complex literary ......
A central text both in Dickens's career and in the history of the novel itself, Bleak House provides students and teachers occasion to discuss Victorian social concerns involving law, crime, family, education, and money and to learn about every stratum of English society, from the aristocracy to the homeless. But the sheer size of the novel and ......
For better or for worse, the goal of securing tenure-track assistant professorships frames the graduate school experience for most students. Yet what the graduate experience boasts in scholarly training it lacks in institutional training--that is, in guiding future faculty members to see and experience positively the wide variety of prospective ......
It is both a challenge and a pleasure to teach the works of Oscar Wilde, "the master of paradox," in the words of this volume's editor. Wilde wrote at a pivotal moment between the Victorian period and modernism, and his work is sometimes considered prescient of the postmodern age. He is now taught in a variety of university courses: in literature, ......
Manuel Puig's 1976 Kiss of the Spider Woman, translated into English in 1979 and adapted as an Academy Award-winning film, expanded the idiom of the novel (mixing cinema, fiction, romance, and song) and challenged the third-person narration that was dominant in Latin American Boom fiction. Students are drawn to the conversational style of the ......
In the aftermath of the French Revolution, three women who have fled France-the straitlaced aristocrat Emilie, her lighthearted maid Josephine, and the worldly Constance-try to make new lives for themselves in Altendorf, Germany. Their experiences, difficulties, and choices address the philosophical question, Are moral theories adequate guides to ......
