This unique new thematic composition reader brings together 6 key texts from the past and multiple contemporary reverberations to engage students in some of todays most significant cultural conversations.
Introduction
1. Gender: Is One Born a Woman?
Text
Virginia Woolf, from A Room of One's Own
Context
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, from The New Generation of Women
Extract from Orlando and picture of "Orlando on her return to England"
Vanessa Bell, dustjacket for A Room of One's Own
Studio portrait of Virginia Woolf, 1925
The Four Marys (ballad)
Reviews of A Room of One's Own: Orlo Williams, Criterion; Elisabeth Woodbridge, from The Yale Review; Anonymous, from Punch; Anonymous, from The Times Literary Supplement; Arnold Bennett, from Queen of the High-Brows from Evening Standard
Contemporary Conversation
bell hooks, Feminism: A Movement to End Sexual Oppression
Audre Lorde, The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action
Patricia Williams, Owning the Self in a Disowned World
Monique Wittig, The Category of Sex and One Is Not Born a Woman
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Sex and Gender
2. African-American Identity: How Are We Shaped by Race?
Text
W. E. B. DuBois, Of Our Spiritual Strivings and Of the Sorrow Songs
Context
Portrait of W. E. B. DuBois
Langston Hughes, The Negro Speaks of Rivers
Booker T. Washington, The Atlanta Exposition Address, September 18, 1895
Marcus Garvey, Motive of the NAACP Exposed
Anna Julia Cooper, Preface: Our Raison D'Etre
Frances E. W. Harper, Ethiopia
Anonymous review of The Souls of Black Folk
W. E. B. Du Bois, from Criteria of Negro Art
"Go Down Moses"
Contemporary Conversation
Alice Walker, In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens
Glenn Loury, Free at Last: A Personal Perspective on Race and Identity in America
Hazel Carby, Lethal Weapons and City Games
Joan Morgan, From Fly-Girls to Bitches and Hos
3. Disabled Persons: How Do Individuals Form a Culture?
Text
Helen Keller, The Seeing Hand, The Five-Sensed World, Analogies in Sense Perception, and Before the Soul Dawn
Context
Charles Dickens, Remarks upon Meeting Miss Laura Bridgeman
Alexander Graham Bell, Introductory Remarks to Memoir upon the Formation of a Deaf Variety of the Human Race
Mark Twain, Letter on behalf of Helen Keller
Advertisement for The World I Live In from The New York Times Book Review
Anonymous review of The World I Live In in The New York Times Book Review
Helen Keller, from The Story of My Life
Photo of the water pump scene from William Gibson's The Miracle Worker
Photo of Helen Keller and Annie Sullivan
Photo of Helen Keller and Alexander Graham Bell
Photograph of Keller with "Winged Victory"
Photograph of Keller at twelve
Contemporary Conversation
Oliver Sacks, Protest at Gallaudet
Harlan Lane, A Different Center
Georgina Kleege, Blind Rage: An Open Letter to Helen Keller
Simi Linton, Reassigning Meaning
Slackjaw, Getting Hip to the Lights-Out Way
4. The Unconscious: How Can We Understand Ourselves?
Text
Sigmund Freud, The Clinical Picture and The Second Dream
Context
Picture of Jean-Martin Charcot
Tools and instruments used to treat hysteria before Freud
William James, from The Hidden Self
Photograph of Freud's consulting room in Vienna
Photograph of Freud in 1906
Fritz Wittels, from Veiling and Unveiling Psychotherapy
Sigmund Freud, from "Postscript" to Dora case and from Determinism and Superstition
Ernest Jones, Summary of Early Responses to Publication of Dora Case History
New York Times, Strangled Emotion
Contemporary Conversation
Michel Foucault, Scientia Sexualis
Carol Gilligan, Woman's Place in Man's Life Cycle
Carolyn Steedman, Histories
Janet Malcolm, Dora
5. Nonviolence: A Weapon of Peace?
Text
Mahatma Gandhi, The Theory and Practice of Passive Resistance, Meaning of Satyagraha, Religion of Nonviolence, The Law of Suffering and The Doctrine of the Sword I & II
Context
Matthew 5, verses 38-9, "The Sermon on the Mount"
Bhagavad Gita, from The Yoga of Renunciation
Leo Tolstoy, Letter to Gandhi
Rabindranath Tagore, Letter to Gandhi and accompanying poem
Jawarhalal Nehru, All-India Radio Speech at the Assassination of Gandhi
Photo of young westernized Gandhi
Photo of Gandhi picking up salt at Dandi
Contemporary Conversation
Martin Luther King, Letter from Birmingham Jail
Susan Griffin, Ideologies of Madness
Petra Kelly, Nonviolent Social Defense
Susanne Kappeler, Resistance and the Will to Resistance
Michael Nagler, Nonviolence and Peacemaking Today
6. The Frontier: How Do We Imagine the West?
Text
Frederick Jackson Turner, The Significance of the Frontier in American History
Context
C. W. Dana, Introduction to The Great West; or The Garden of the World
Theodore Roosevelt, from Ranch Life in the Far West
Frederick Remington, An episode in the opening of a cattle country and The midday meal
Photograph of a family in front of a soddy house
Plenty Coups Travels to Washington
"We Want to Tell You Something" from Native American Testimony
Map of Native American Diasporas
Photograph of Lendville, CO
Contemporary Conversation
Patricia Nelson Limerick, Denial and Dependence
Jane Tompkins, At the Buffalo Bill Museum, June 1988
Annette Kolodny, Unearthing Herstory
N. Scott Momaday, The American West and the Burden of Belief
Leslie Marmon Silko, America's Debt to the Indian Nations: Atoning for a Sordid Past and The Border Patrol State
Eric Gary Anderson, Unsettling Frontiers