Literature, Language, and Politics
download cover image ►

Literature, Language, and Politics

Edited by Betty Jean Craige

Title Details

Pages: 128

Trim size: 6.000in x 9.000in

Formats

Paperback

Pub Date: 03/01/2011

ISBN: 9-780-8203-3807-1

List Price: $23.95

Literature, Language, and Politics

Edited by Betty Jean Craige

Skip to

  • Description
  • Reviews
  • Contributors

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.

Together the contributors have earned so much standing and have joined so centrally in the ongoing debate that there’s no better place to get posted on its basic issues and texts.

American Literature

Henry Gates

Annette Kolodny

Paul Lauter

Gerald Graff

Ellen Messer-Davidow

Catharine R. Stimpson

Ana Celia Zentella

About the Author/Editor

BETTY JEAN CRAIGE was the University Professor of Comparative Literature and director of the Center for Humanities and Arts at the University of Georgia. She is the author of several books on the subject of holism, including Reconnection: Dualism to Holism in Literary Study, Laying the Ladder Down: The Emergence of Cultural Holism, and American Patriotism in a Global Society.