Literature: The Human Experience: Reading and Writing / Edition 11

by Richard Abcarian, Marvin Klotz, Samuel Cohen

Overview

Literature: The Human Experience is based on a simple premise: All students can and will connect with literature if the works they read are engaging, exciting, and relevant. Accordingly, every edition of this classroom favorite has featured a broad range of enticing stories, poems, plays, and essays that explore timeless, ever-resonant themes: innocence and experience, conformity and rebellion, culture and identity, love and hate, life and death. The affordable new edition (a third less expensive than comparable anthologies) opens students eyes to a more contemporary selection of writing, while continuing to help them see, and write about, illuminating connections to literature past and present, lives near and far, and experiences that are enduringly human.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781457604294
Publisher:	Bedford/St. Martin's
Publication date:	09/07/2012
Edition description:	Eleventh Edition
Pages:	1472
Product dimensions:	6.30(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.40(d)

About the Author

Marvin Klotz (PhD, New York University) is a professor of English emeritus at California State University, Northridge, where he taught for thirty-three years and won Northridge's distinguished teaching award in 1983. He is also the winner of two Fulbright professorships (in Vietnam and Iran) and was a National Endowment for the Arts Summer Fellow twice. In addition to editing Literature: The Human Experience and several other textbooks, he coauthored a guide and index to the characters in Faulkner's fiction.
 
Samuel Cohen (PhD, City University of New York) is Associate Professor of English and Director of Graduate Studies at the University of Missouri. He is the author of After the End of History: American Fiction in the 1990s, co-editor (with Lee Konstantinou) of The Legacy of David Foster Wallace, Series Editor of The New American Canon: The Iowa Series in Contemporary Literature and Culture, and has published in such journals as Novel, Clio, Twentieth-Century Literature, The Journal of Basic Writing, and Dialogue: A Journal for Writing Specialists. For Bedford/St. Martin's, he　is author of　50 Essays: A Portable Anthology and coauthor of Literature: The Human Experience.

Table of Contents

Contemporary literature that's easy for students to connect with. Almost one third of the literature is new, including:

• Provocative new fiction that speaks to students — and a few classics that continue to engage them. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Birdsong and Sherman Alexie's War Dances are new, as is The Story of an Hour, Kate Chopin's classic.
• Recent poetry by poets to watch — and some old favorites that students shouldn't miss. Selections from John Donne, Allen Ginsberg, William Shakespeare, Frank O'Hara, and others are new, as are modern voices such as Carrie Fountain, Natasha Trethewey, Terrance Hayes, Daisy Fried, and Timothy Yu.
• A short contemporary play and a full-length classic. Lynn Nottage's Poof! is short and teachable, and Sophocles' Antigone is a dramatic classic.
• A fresh harvest of nonfiction — along with some great essays of less recent vintage. Lacy M. Johnson, David Sedaris, and Chang-Rae Lee's essays stand alongside classics of the genre by Jamaica Kincaid, Rachel Carson, and Katha Pollitt.

A new thematic chapter on Life and Death explores the sad, funny, and unique ways that we humans live and move toward the end of our lives as well as the ways we interact with the living, natural world around us.

New critical and cultural case studies. Flannery O'Connor's story "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" is followed by critical essays that illustrate the significance and limitations of interpreting texts, and Shakespeare's Othello is accompanied by a collection of documents that highlight the racial contexts of the play.

More support for active and critical reading. A section on responding to literature shows students the importance of learning to read actively and become truly engaged, critical readers. New "Questions for Exploring" also provide genre-specific questions to consider when reading.

Literature: A Human Experience now comes with video. Bring today's writers into your classroom  when you package with VideoCentral: Literature for free. Hear from T.C. Boyle, Ha Jin, and others, on character, voice, plot, and more. Each video comes with a brief author biography, an interview transcript, and questions to help students respond to the authors and write about literary works and elements. Watch a sample video at bedfordstmartins.com/videolit/catalog.