Teaching Contemporary Theory to Undergraduates

Dianne F. Sandoff is professor of English at Rutgers University. She is author of Victorian Vogue: The British Novel on Screen(2009) and coeditor of Victorian Afterlife: Contemporary Culture Rewrites the Nineteenth Century (2000). Her articles have appeared in journals such as Novel, Studies in English Literature, and Henry James Review. William E. Cain is Mary Jewett Gaiser Professor of English at Wellesley College. His scholarly interests include nineteenth- and early-twentieth century American literature, modernism in the arts, and Shakespeare. His publications include chapters on American literary and cultural criticism, 1900-1945, in The Cambridge History of American Literature, vol. 5 (2003). He is coeditor of the Norton Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism (1st ed., 2001; 2nd ed., 2010), and, with Sylvan Barnet, he has coauthored a number of books on literature and composition.

"The book's greatest strength is in its no-nonsense, this-is-how-I-do-it-in-my-class approach, as told by academics at an impressively broad range of schools: from Kenyon, Wheaton, and St. Mary's College, to the Universities of Michigan, Texas, and Southern Maine. Remarkably free of impenetrable jargon, the essays describe both the ups and downs, the successes and the failures, of many different curricular innovations and pedagogical practices." --James Deutsch, George Washington University "Theory accomplishes something that is both relatively straightforward and supremely important. It enables critics, teachers, and students to illuminate anew the structure of texts, to write literary and cultural history with greater richness and depth, and to understand social and institutional relations more intricately." --William E. Cain, Teaching Contemporary Theory to Undergraduates