|
Product Description
When Vladimir Nabokov was up for a chair in literature at Harvard, the linguist Roman Jakobson protested: “What’s next? Shall we appoint elephants to teach zoology?” That anecdote, with which D. G. Myers begins The Elephants Teach, perfectly frames the issues this book tackles.
Myers explores more than a century of debate over how writing should be taught and whether it can or should be taught in a classroom at all. Along the way, he incorporates insights from a host of poets and teachers, including Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Frost, John Berryman, John Dewey, Lionel Trilling, Robert Lowell, Ezra Pound, and Saul Bellow. And from his exhaustive research, Myers extracts relevant background information on nineteenth-century educational theory; shifts in technology, publishing, and marketing; the growth of critical theory in this country; and the politics of higher education. While he shows how creative writing has become a machine for creating more creative writing programs, Myers also suggests that its history supplies a precedent for something different—a way for creativity and criticism, poetry and scholarship, to join together to produce not just writing programs but good writers.
Updated with fresh commentary on what’s happened to creative writing in the academy since the first edition was published ten years ago, The Elephants Teach will be indispensable for students and teachers of writing, literature, and literary history.
Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought
- Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination
- Workshops of Empire: Stegner, Engle, and American Creative Writing during the Cold War (New American Canon)
- How to Write an Autobiographical Novel: Essays
- The Affect Theory Reader
- Barbaric Vast & Wild: A Gathering of Outside & Subterranean Poetry from Origins to Present: Poems for the Millennium (Barbaric Vast & Wild: An Assemblage of Outside & Subterranea)
- The Bloomsbury Introduction to Creative Writing
- Poems for the Millennium: The University of California Book of Modern and Postmodern Poetry, Vol. 2: From Postwar to Millennium
- Du Bois's Telegram: Literary Resistance and State Containment
- The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing
- Citizen: An American Lyric
*If this is not the "The Elephants Teach: Creative Writing Since 1880" product you were looking for, you can check the other results by clicking this link. Details were last updated on Oct 30, 2024 10:22 +08.