Approaches to Teaching Thoreau's Walden and Other Works
Editor(s): Richard J. Schneider
Pages: xi & 223 pp.
Published: 1996
ISBN: 9780873527347 (paperback)
ISBN: 9780873527330 (cloth)
"Schneider has assembled a rich set of tools for teaching Thoreau to a spectrum of students, from the engineer to the English major."
American Literature
"This volume should enable teachers, from the community college level on through graduate school, to convey to their students those factors that make Thoreau an indispensable part of America's literary heritage."
Philip F. Gura, author of The Wisdom of Words: Language, Theology, and Literature in the New England Renaissance
In a recent survey of college teachers, Walden was mentioned more frequently than any other work as a text regularly included in nineteenth-century American literature courses. Today's students are as likely to encounter Thoreau in freshman composition classes as they are in upper-level environmental literature seminars. "The challenge of teaching Thoreau, then," Richard J. Schneider says, "is how to make most effective use of his obvious appeal amid the variety of possible course structures, critical theories, and pedagogical methods."
Table of Contents
Approaches to Teaching Thoreau's Walden and Other Works
Introduction: Thoreau's Challenge to Teachers
PART 1: MATERIALS
Richard J. Schneider
Classroom Texts
Biographical Works
General Studies of Thoreau and His Times
Critical Commentary on Walden
Critical Commentary on "Civil Disobedience" and Other Works
Visual and Sound Resources
PART 2: APPROACHES
Introduction
Thoreau and Walden: Contexts
Walden and the Construction of the American Renaissance
Linck C. Johnson
Thoreau and Anglo-American Romanticism
Frederick Garber
"Extra Vagant" Education: Teaching Walden in the Context of Transcendentalism
T. S. McMillin
"Where I Lived": The Environs of Walden
William Howarth
Teaching Walden: Pedagogical and Critical Strategies
The Many Paths to and from Walden
Richard Lebeaux
Reader Responses to Walden: A Study of Undergraduate Reading Patterns
Richard Dillman
Teaching Thoreau as a Visionary Thinker
Robert Franciosi
Reading the Garden: Excursions into Walden
Frank J. McGill
Reclaiming Thoreau's Humor for the Classroom
Michael D. West
"What Are You Doing Out There?": Teaching Thoreau to College Freshmen
Stanley S. Blair
Walden and Awakening: Thoreau in a Sophomore American Literature Survey Course
Scott Slovic
Teaching Walden as Transcendental Strip Tease Art
Annette M. Woodlief
The Privileged Protester: Teaching Thoreau to Two-Year-College Students
Deborah T. Meem
"Baker Farm" and Historicism: The Rainbow's Arch
Leonard N. Neufeldt
Walden: Text, Context, Pretext
Henry Golemba
Teaching Other Thoreau Works
The Genres of A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers
Stephen Adams
"Civil Disobedience" and the Problem of Thoreau's "Peaceable Revolution"
Michael Meyer
"Civil Disobedience" (or Is It "Resistance to Civil Government"?) in a Composition Course
Laraine Fergenson
"Life without Principle" and Cape Cod as Foils to Walden
Richard J. Schneider
Thoreau's "Walking" and the Ecological Imperative
David M. Robinson
Teaching Thoreau's Journal
H. Daniel Peck
Thoreau beyond the Conventional Classroom
Thoreau in the Wilderness
David G. Fuller
"Monarch of All I Survey": Thoreau among Engineering Students
Wesley T. Mott
Sauntering after Sixty: Thoreau in the Elderhostel Program
Gordon V. Boudreau
Works Cited
Index
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