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Start giftingLiterature and the New Culture Wars
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Learn moreCan 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.
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.
Cathi Colas is a professional audiobook narrator, coach, and voice actress. She has trained with highly acclaimed narrators, such as January LaVoy, Robin Miles, and Jeffrey Kafer. Her voice is warm, gritty, flexible, seasoned, and authentic. Cathi currently has over seventy audiobooks on Audible that includes everything from self-help to horror. Some of her voice-over credits include 2021 NFL on Fox-NFC Wild Card Pre-game Intro, the video games Empire of Sin and The Amazing American Circus, political ads, and documentaries.