Approaches to Teaching the Works of Charles W. Chesnutt

by Susanna Ashton (Editor), Bill Hardwig (Editor)

Overview

Growing up in Cleveland after the Civil War and during the brutal rollback of Reconstruction and the onset of Jim Crow, Charles W. Chesnutt could have passed as white but chose to identify himself as black. An intellectual and activist involved with the NAACP who engaged in debate with Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois, he wrote fiction and essays that addressed issues as various as segregation, class among both blacks and whites, Southern nostalgia, and the Wilmington coup d'état of 1898. The portrayals of race, racial violence, and stereotyping in Chesnutt's works challenge teachers and students to contend with literature as both a social and an ethical practice.

In part 1 of this volume, "Materials," the editors survey the critical reception of Chesnutt's works in his lifetime and after, along with the biographical, critical, and archival texts available to teachers and students. The essays in part 2, "Approaches," address such topics in teaching Chesnutt as his use of dialect, the role of intertextuality and genre in his writing, irony, and his treatment of race, economics, and social justice.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781603293334
Publisher:	Modern Language Association
Publication date:	12/01/2017
Series:	Approaches to Teaching World Literature , #149
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	190
File size:	899 KB

About the Author

Susanna Ashton is a Professor of English at Clemson University. She has held a teaching and research Fulbright fellowship in Ireland and in 2011 was awarded Clemson University's Provost Prize for Mentoring and Teaching with Creative Inquiry. She has authored and edited a number of books about American Literary Culture and African American writing, including "I Belong to South Carolina: South Carolina Slave Narratives (and with coeditor Rhondda R. Thomas), The South Carolina Roots of African American Thought both from the University of South Carolina Press. Her research has been published in College English, MELUS, Commonplace, Symploke, Biography, Studies in the Novel and others. Currently she is at work on A Plausible Man--a biography of fugitive slave, activist and author, John Andrew Jackson.

Bill Hardwig is an associate professor and director of undergraduate studies in the English Department at the University of Tennessee. He has won the College of Arts and Sciences Excellence in Teaching and the College of Arts and Sciences Excellence in Advising awards. His research interests include local color literature, periodical culture, and regional writers, from Mary Murfree and Charles Chesnutt to Cormac McCarthy. His book Upon Provincialism: Southern Literature and National Periodical Culture, 1870-1900 was published by the University of Virginia Press in 2013. He has also published work on the reception and publishing history of Chesnutt's fiction, as well as the teaching of his literature.

Table of Contents

Introduction 1

Part 1 Materials

Critical Reception 11

Available Editions 13

Archive Resources for Teachers 15

Chronology 16

Part 2 Approaches

The Challenge of Teaching Chesnutt: An Introduction to the Essays 21

Engaging the Dialect

Toward a Usable Dialect: Chesnutt's Language hi the Classroom Jeffrey W. Miller 26

Releasing the Linguistic Shackles: Chesnutt's Verbal and Nonverbal Discourse Mary E. Brown Zeigler 33

Teaching the Shorter Works

Visualizing the Landscape of Slavery: Architecture and the Built Environment in the Conjure Stories William Gleason 41

Teaching Chesnutt's Ghosts Janaka Lewis 49

Teaching Chesnutt's Conjure Woman through Its Publication History Kathryn S. Koo 54

The Gothic Grapevine: Chesnutt's Conjure Tales as Gothic Fiction Sarah Ingle 62

Women in Chesnutt's Short Fiction: Canons, Connections, Classrooms Jennifer Riddle Harding 68

Dumb Witnesses: Teaching Speech and Silence in the Short Fiction Sarah Wagner-McCoy 73

Teaching Chesnutt's "The Bouquet": Combining History and Fiction Ernestine Pickens Glass 80

Chesnutt as Cultural Critic Mark Sussman 85

"[T]o Remove the Disability of Color": Chesnutt in the Context of the American Eugenics Movement George Gordon-Smith 91

Teaching the Novels

The Marrow of Allusion: Ivanhoe and The House behind the Cedars Hollis Robbins 98

Teaching The House behind the Cedars in an Introductory Literary Theory Course Ryan Simmons 107

Rebooting Race: Virtuality and Embodiment in The House behind the Cedars Marisa Parham 114

Fact into Fiction: Teaching Chesnutt's The Marrow of Tradition and the 1898 Wilmington Coup d'État Margaret D. Bauer 124

Chesnutt as Political Theorist: Imagining Democracy and Social Justice in the Literature Classroom Gregory Laski 130

Persons in the Balance: The Scale of Justice in Chesnutt's The Marrow of Tradition Trinyan Paulsen Mariano 138

Teaching "The Sheriffs Children;" "The Wife of His Youth," and The Marrow of Tradition in the United States-Mexico Borderlands Brian Yothers 147

Teaching Whiteness, Folklore, and the Discourses of Race in The Colonel's Dream Shirley Moody-Turner 152

American Sentimentalism and The Colonel's Dream Katherine Adams 159

Economics, Race, and Social (In)Justice: Teaching The Colonel's Dream Francesca Sawaya 168

Notes on Contributors 175

Works Cited 179

Index 191

Editorial Reviews

"This collection goes a long way in engaging the depth and complexity of Chesnutt's oeuvre, and it focuses on the challenges and joys of teaching his work to a diverse undergraduate population." —Tess Chakkalakal, Bowdoin College

From the Publisher