Engaging Worlds

Core Texts and Cultural Contexts. Selected Proceedings from the Sixteenth Annual Conference of the Association for Core Texts and Courses

Edited by J. Scott Lee, Robert D. Anderson, Molly Brigid Flynn

Not available to order

Publication date:

15 June 2016

Length of book:

188 pages

Publisher

UPA

Engaging Worlds: Core Texts and Cultural Contexts asks what do we learn of texts, cultures, and the world’s dynamics when we read core texts, widely and deeply, in core-structured programs of the world’s colleges and universities? What books, what arts, what associations and institutions, what sciences, what religions, what cultures, what educations, what citizens, what scholars, are we preparing for the future through an education in core texts that engages our worlds? The answers offered in these selected proceedings are drawn from the widest possible spectrum of institutions and disciplines who, through core programs, offer horizon-expanding liberal educations.

Acknowledgments
Introduction
Robert D. Anderson, Molly Brigid Flynn, and J. Scott Lee
Part I. A Good Mind Is Hard to Find
Fate, Hope, and Clarity
Richard Kamber
Wrestling with the God(s)
Benjamin W. Westervelt
Teaching Frederick Douglass as a Master Rhetorician
Hollis Robbins
Teaching Arendt’s Eichmann in Jersualem as an Introduction to Philosophy
Joshua A. Shmikler
Using Fiction and Nonfiction by Barbara Kingsolver to Help Students Think across Disciplines
Heather McGovern
Part II. When Cultures Meet
Montequieu’s Persian Letters and the Uses of Comparativism
Henry C. Clark
Ishmael’s Initiation into the Revelry of Work
Emily Heyne
Engaging Cultures: Is the Melting Pot Still Cooking?
Lyndall Nairn
The Problem with Engaging Worlds: E. M. Forster’s Suspicion of Culture
Tim Mackin
Tapestry: Christian and Classical Mélange in C.S. Lewis’ Till We Have Faces and Perelandra
Charles Fisher
Part III. Modern, Postmodern, and Future Horizons
Butler among the Mechanists: Fiction and Nonfiction in the Evolution of Machines (EREWHON as a Core Text)
Dorion Sagan
Beauty’s Contexts: Symposium Then and Now
Mark Walter
Descartes’s Doubt and the Beginning of the Modern World
Neil G. Robertson
Teaching Pascal in Modern and Postmodern Contexts
Christopher Anadale
Core Values and a Historicized Reading of Franklin’s Autobiography
Vince J. Brewton
Part IV. Challenges from Core Texts
Wordsworth’s Preface to Lyrical Ballads and the Principle of Pleasure
Spencer Hall
Quantum Feline: The Prescience of Poe’s Black Cat
J. Scott Miller
“… He winces not”: The Souls of Black Folk as a Foundational Core Text
Page Laws
A Journey to Self: A Psychological Analysis of Fauset’s Plum Bun: A Novel without a Moral
Karen Y. Holmes
Silko’s Ceremony as a Core Text: Natural and Unnatural Worlds
Jean-Marie Kauth
Part V. Political Worlds and Worldly Politics
Socrates and Crito: Anxiety and the Engagement between the Empirical and Analytic (Ideal) Worlds of Athens
Kieran M. Bonner
Economics as a Force of Nature in Aristotle’s Politics: An Antireductionist View
Molly Brigid Flynn
Humanities Education and the Hidden Civic Virtue of Doubt
Mark Blackell
Toqueville and the Problem of Associational Autonomy
Thomas M.J. Bateman
Teaching about Evil and Politics Using Elie Wiesel’s Night
Tim Meinke
Part VI. Moral Images of Humankind
Using Nussbaum to Link Socrates, Tartuffe, and Raise the Red Lantern with Today’s Global Citizen
Kathleen A. Kelly
Novel Knowledge in Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons
James N. Roney
How to Illustrate Blind Ambition to a Business Student: Looking at the World through the Eyes of Dreiser’s The Financier
Vincent Rama
Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North and the Pathologies of Moral Philosophy
Irfan Khawaja