Literature and the New Culture Wars, Deborah Appleman
Literature and the New Culture Wars, Deborah Appleman
List: $12.99 | Sale: $9.10
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Literature and the New Culture Wars
Triggers, Cancel Culture, and the Teacher's Dilemma

Author: Deborah Appleman

Narrator: Cathi Colas

Unabridged: 3 hr 30 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 10/18/2022


Synopsis

Can educators continue to teach troubling but worthwhile texts?

Our current "culture wars" have reshaped the politics of secondary literature instruction. Due to a variety of challenges from both the left and the right—to language or subject matter, to potentially triggering content, or to authors who have been canceled—school reading lists are rapidly shrinking. For many teachers, choosing which books to include in their curriculum has become an agonizing task with political, professional, and ethical dimensions.

In Literature and the New Culture Wars, Deborah Appleman calls for a reacknowledgment of the intellectual and affective work that literature can do, and offers ways to continue to teach troubling texts without doing harm. Rather than banishing challenged texts from our classrooms, she writes, we should be confronting and teaching the controversies they invoke. Her book is a timely and eloquent argument for a reasoned approach to determining what literature still deserves to be read and taught and discussed.

About Deborah Appleman

Deborah Appleman lives in Minnesota and is the Hollis L. Caswell Professor of Educational Studies and director of the summer writing program at Carleton College. Since 2007, she has taught language, literature, and creative writing courses at a high-security prison for men in the upper Midwest.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Sharon on June 09, 2023

This short book, Literature and the New Culture Wars: Triggers, Cancel Culture, and the Teacher's Dilemma, weighs in at 140 pages and packs a wallop with each paragraph a deep-seated thought provoker. It brought back memories to me of reading Elie Wiesel's Night and Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for......more

Goodreads review by Mallory on March 10, 2023

the chapter on "cancel culture".....its actually fine to not read a book by a terf or a pervert...........more

Goodreads review by Danielle on November 17, 2022

I found the text somewhat repetitive and some of it did not apply to me as a librarian, but more to the target audience of English teachers, I appreciated the author's take and the questions posted. It certainly got me thinking in new ways. I think it's a valuable, accessible resource for all teache......more

Goodreads review by Baldy Reads on December 06, 2023

A short but powerful book that discusses “cancel culture,” particularly literature in our classrooms. It’s hard to write a book that is unbiased (which Appleman addresses directly), but she does a good job of it. Appleman doesn’t attack either side of the argument, but points out their flaws and mak......more

Goodreads review by Juliana on April 12, 2023

This an excellent resource about what is happening on our campuses--on both sides of the political aisle and a push for why literature needs to be taught.......more