Fields of Reading: Motives for Writing

by Nancy R. Comley, Carl H. Klaus, David Hamilton, Nancy Sommers, Jason Tougaw

Overview

Fields of Reading draws on the major divisions of the curriculum — arts and humanities, social sciences, and sciences — to offer well-crafted and high-quality writing from these fields. Chosen with the rhetorical purposes of composition in mind by editors who are all distinguished teachers and writers, the selections progress from individual essays to paired texts to casebooks that contain multiple readings on engaging topics and compelling issues. Even more than its predecessors, the new edition emphasizes the cross-curricular reading, thinking, and writing expected in college as it exposes students to key cultural conversations that involve major voices in contemporary intellectual life. The print text is now integrated with e-Pages for Fields of Reading, designed to take advantage of what the Web can do. 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781457608919
Publisher:	Bedford/St. Martin's
Publication date:	11/26/2012
Edition description:	Tenth Edition
Pages:	752
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Nancy R. Comely is Professor and Chair of the English Department at Queens College, City University of New York.  In addition to Fields of Reading, she has coedited The Practice of Writing and Text Book for Bedford/St. Martin's, and is coauthor with Robert Scholes of Hemingway's Genders (Yale UP). She has also directed the writing program at the University of Oklahoma.
 
Carl H. Klaus, Professor Emeritus at the University of Iowa and founding director of Iowa’s Nonfiction Writing Program, currently serves as coeditor (with Patricia Hampl) of Sightline Books: the University of Iowa Press Series in Literary Nonfiction. He is coauthor or coeditor of several college textbooks, most recently Fields of Reading, Ninth Edition (Bedford/St. Martin's, 2010), and Stages of Drama (Bedford/St. Martin's, 2003). Essayist, diarist, and memoirist, Klaus is the author of My Vegetable Love: A Journal of a Growing Season (Houghton Mifflin); Weathering Winter: A Gardener’s Daybook (University Of Iowa Press); and Letters to Kate: Life after Life (University of Iowa Press).
 
Nancy Sommers, who has taught composition and directed composition programs for thirty years, now teaches writing and mentors new writing teachers at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education.  She led Harvard’s Expository Writing Program for twenty years, directing the first-year writing program and establishing Harvard’s WAC program. A two-time Braddock Award winner, Sommers is well known for her research and publications on student writing. Her articles Revision Strategies of Student and Experienced Writers and Responding to Student Writing are two of the most widely read and anthologized articles in the field of composition.  Her recent work involves a longitudinal study of college writing to understand the role writing plays in undergraduate education. Sommers is the lead author on Hacker handbooks, all published by Bedford/St. Martin’s, and is coauthor of Fields of Reading, Ninth Edition (2010).
 
Jason Tougaw is Associate Professor of English and Director of the Writing Across the Curriculum program at Queens College. He is author of Strange Cases: The Medical Case History and the British Novel (Routledge, 2006) and coeditor, with Nancy K. Miller, of Extremities: Trauma, Testimony, and Community (University of Illinois Press). Currently, his writing focuses on connections between neurobiology and the arts, new media pedagogies, and creative nonfiction. He has published essays and creative nonfiction in JAC, Computers & Composition, a/b: Auto/biography Studies, and the anthology Boys to Men: Gay Men Write about Growing Up.

Robert Scholes, professor of modern culture and media at Brown University, is a distinguished teacher and a scholar in literary studies. He has published many influential books and articles, including The Rise and Fall of English: Reconstructing English as a Discipline (1998), Protocols of Reading (1989), and Textual Power: Literary Theory and the Teaching of English (1985), which won the Mina P. Shaughnessy Prize of the Modern Language Association in 1986 and the David H. Russell Research Award from NCTE in 1988. Scholes is a contributor of numerous articles and book reviews to learned journals, literary magazines, and weekly reviews.

Table of Contents

Preface
Thematic Contents
Introduction
    From Reading to Writing: The Conversation
    Writing and Thinking: The Rhetorical Modes
    Writing and Thinking: The Process
    Reading to Write
    Exploratory Writing
    Drafting
    Revising
    Editing
    Your Process
    Writing Across the Curriculum
    Reflecting, Reporting, Explaining, Arguing:
     The Motives Explained
 
 
Part One: Arts and Humanities
 
Lucy Grealy, Mirrors (Reflecting)
Frederick Douglass, Learning to Read and Write (Reflecting)
*Junot Díaz, Homecoming with Turtle (Reflecting)
Amanda Coyne, The Long Goodbye: Mother’s Day in
  a Federal Prison (Reporting)
Christina Boufis, Teaching Literature at the County
  Jail (Reporting)
Jan Harold Brunvand, Urban Legends: "The Boyfriend’s
  Death" (Explaining)
Steven Johnson, Watching TV Makes You Smarter (Arguing)
George Orwell, Politics and the English Language (Arguing)
James Baldwin, If Black English Isn’t a Language,
  Then Tell Me, What Is? (Arguing)
 
Paired Readings: On Descriptive Writing
    Joan Didion, On Keeping a Notebook (Explaining)
    *Patricia Hampl, The Dark Art of Description (Reflecting)
 
Paired Readings: On Bilingualism
    *Gloria Anzaldúa, How to Tame a Wild Tongue (Arguing)
    Amy Tan, Mother Tongue (Reflecting)
 
Paired Readings: On Religious Belief
    *Marjane Satrapi, The Veil (Reporting)
    *Paul Bloom, Is God an Accident? (Arguing)
 
 
Part Two: Social Sciences and Public Affairs
 
Phyllis Rose, Tools of Torture: An Essay on
  Beauty and Pain (Reflecting)
*Andrew Sullivan, What’s So Bad about Hate? (Reflecting)
Barbara Ehrenreich, Nickel and Dimed: On (Not)
  Getting By in America (Reporting)
Zoë Tracy Hardy, What Did You Do in the War,
  Grandma? A Flashback to August, 1945 (Reporting)
*Olivia Judson, The Selfless Gene (Explaining)
Barbara Tuchman, "This Is the End of the World":
  The Black Death (documented essay) (Explaining)
Thomas Jefferson, The Declaration of
  Independence (Arguing)
Jonathan Swift, A Modest Proposal (Arguing)
*Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (Arguing)
 
Paired Readings: On Animal-Human Conflicts
    George Orwell, Shooting an Elephant (Reflecting)
    *Charles Siebert, An Elephant Crackup (Reporting)
 
Paired Readings: On Race Relations
    Martin Luther King, Jr., Letter from
      Birmingham Jail (Arguing)
    *Barack Obama, A More Perfect Union (Reflecting)
 
Paired Readings: On the Reality of War
    John Berger, Hiroshima (Reporting)
    *Various Authors, Soldiers’ Stories (Reflecting)
 
 
Part Three: Sciences
 
*Lewis Thomas, The Corner of the Eye (Reflecting)
*Melanie Thernstrom, My Pain, My Brain (Reflecting)
Roy C. Selby, Jr., A Delicate Operation (Reporting)
Jamie Shreeve, The Other Stem-Cell Debate (Reporting)
Bruno Bettelheim, Joey: A "Mechanical Boy" (Reporting)
*Greg Easterbrook, The Sky Is Falling (Explaining)
*Jonah Lehrer, Eureka Hunt (Explaining)
*Atul Gawande, The Checklist (Arguing)
*Steven Pinker, The Moral Instinct (Arguing)
 
Paired Readings: On Suffering
    Richard Selzer, A Mask on the Face of Death (Reporting)
    Abraham Verghese, Close Encounters of the 
      Human Kind (Reflecting)
 
Paired Readings: On Natural Phenomena
    Diane Ackerman, Why Leaves Turn Color in
      the Fall (Explaining)
    James Jeans, Why the Sky is Blue (Explaining)
 
Paired Readings: On Sexual Reproduction
    *Michael Pollan, Corn Sex (Explaining)
    Emily Martin, The Egg and the Sperm: How
      Science Has Constructed a Romance Based
      on Stereotypical Male-Female Roles (Arguing)
 
 
Part Four: Casebooks
 
Virtual Experience: Life Online
    *Andrew Sullivan, Why I Blog (Reflecting)
    *Clive Thompson, I’m So Totally, Digitally, Close
      to You: The Brave New World of Digital
      Intimacy (Reporting)
    *Marshall Poe, The Hive (Explaining)
    *Anthony Grafton, Future Reading (Arguing)
    *Nicholas Carr, Is Google Making Us Stupid? (Arguing)
    *Guillermo Gómez-Peña, The Virtual Barrio @
      the Other Frontier (Arguing)
 
The Classroom: Ideals, Obstacles, Solutions
    *Mike Rose, I Just Wanna be Average (Reflecting)
    *Emily Bazelon, The Next Kind of Integration (Reporting)
    *Elizabeth Weil, Teaching to the Testosterone: The
      Gender Wars Go to School (Reporting)
    Theodore Sizer, What High School Is (Explaining)
    Garret Keizer, Why We Hate Teachers (Arguing)
    *Matt Miller, First, Kill All the School Boards (Arguing)
 
The Visual World: Sight and Insight
    *Temple Grandin, Thinking in Pictures (Reflecting)
    *Rita Carter, The Stream of Illusion (Reporting)
    Plato, The Cave (Explaining)
    Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for
      a Hat (Explaining)
    *Scott McCloud, Setting the Record Straight (Arguing)
    *John Berger, Ways of Seeing (Arguing)
 
Grey Matter: The Brain and the Self
    *Jill Bolte Taylor, Morning of the Stroke (Reflecting)
    *Patricia Hampl, Memory and Imagination (Reflecting)
    *V.S. Ramachandran, The Woman Who Died
      Laughing (Reporting)
    *Daniel Schacter, Of Time and Autobiography (Explaining)
    *Shannon Moffett, Watching the Brain (Explaining)
    Stephen Jay Gould, Women’s Brains (Arguing)
 
*Appendix A: Using Research
 
* new to this edition