Compositions, A Life; An Autoethnography

ISBN-13: 9781433194634 / Angielski

Shirley R. Steinberg; Judith Summerfield

Opis

A Life in Teaching: An Autoethnography is a cultural study; a narrative, it is a story in history about the life of the author. It embraces criticality: it is explicitly metatextual, as the author comment upon the choices she makes as a writer, weaving theory into practice.

Recenzje

"Judith Summerfield's latest book, Compositions, a Life: An Autoethnography, is a celebration of all the ways a story can be told: through family history both harrowing and mundane, through elegiac portraits of place, through photographs of people living and dead (and recipes in their handwriting), and above all through the act of writing stories into being. It's part folk art, part writing manual, part cultural history. This is a book to read with a pencil in your hand, because Summerfield will inspire her readers to commit their own stories to shimmering life." Crystal Benedicks, Ph.D., Department of English, Co-Chair of First-Year Experience, Coordinator of Writing Across the Curriculum

Spis treści

Acknowledgments

List of Illustrations

Introduction: How We Tell the Stories of Our Lives

Prologue: Points of Departure--The Potato Poem

Part I: Where I Come From: Time and Place, Family and History

1: Primary Lessons, Foundations, Building Blocks

2: Family: Language, Grammar, Story as History

3: Getting the Words on the Page

4: The Wider World

Part II: College Life

5: Cathedrals of Learning

6: Starting Out, As a Teacher

Part III: New York, New York

7: Balancing Acts

8. On Keeping a Notebook

9: Landings: Queens College and The Writing Movement

Part IV: CUNY: The Public University

10. You Have the Grammar

11: You Have the Story

12: Intersections

Part V: Transformative Spaces

13. Building Community

14: Ways of Telling, Reading, Writing

15: Bridging the Gaps

16. Epilogue: Odds and Ends

O autorze

Judith Pearl Summerfield, Professor of English, Emerita, Queens College, The City University of New York. B.A., English and History, M.A., English, University of Pittsburgh. Ph.D., English Education, New York University. Author or editor of 10 books, and recipient of major grants and awards from Modern Language Association, Carnegie Foundation, and US Department of Education, among others.