Community

Description

Nancy Enright's Community: A Reader for Writers explores the theme of writing as community through a variety of readings organized around the communities out of which they arose. The selections-spanning from familial and cultural to economic and artistic-all attest to the text's underlying message that writing, when seen as an act of community, becomes essentially a dialogue, linking the writer with others who have written in the past and will write in the future.

Developed for courses in first-year writing, Community: A Reader for Writers includes an interdisciplinary mix of public, academic, and cultural reading selections. It provides students with the rhetorical knowledge and analytical strategies required to participate effectively in discussions about community.

Community: A Reader for Writers is part of a series of brief, single-topic readers from Oxford University Press designed for today's college writing courses. Each reader in this series approaches a topic of contemporary conversation from multiple perspectives.

Table of Contents

1: The First Community: The Family
Mary Cassatt, "Mother Playing with Child"
Maya Angelou, "Grandmother," I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
Elizabeth Gaskell, "Home Difficulties," The Life of Charlotte Bronte
Genesis 4:1-16
Luke 15:12-32
Hisaye Yamamoto, "The Brown House," Seventeen Syllables

2: Academic Communities
Angela Kelly, Classroom Discussion at Chrysalis
John Henry Newman, "Knowledge Viewed in Relation to Learning"
Augustine of Hippo, "Memories of School Days," Confessions
Frederick Douglass, "Sabbath School," Narrative of a Life
Jonathan Kozol, Stephen and Death at an Early Age
Fan Shen, "The Classroom and the Wider Culture: Identity as a Key to Learning English Composition"

3: Oppressed Communities and the Struggle for Freedom
Charles Moore, Police Dogs Attack Demonstrators, Birmingham, Alabama Protests, Metropolitan Museum of Art
Martin Luther King, Jr., "Letter from the Birmingham Jail"
Susan Sontag, AIDS and Its Metaphors
Oscar Romero, The Violence of Love
Perpetua of Carthage, The Passion of Saints Perpetua and Felicity, translated and edited by Thomas Heffernan

4: Creative Communities: Artists, Musicians, Writers
Dante Gabriel Rossetti, The Bower Meadow
Dinah Roe, "The Pre-Raphaelites," The British Library
Zora Neale Hurston, "Books and Things," Dust Tracks on a Road
Dorothy Wordsworth, Journal Entries, Grasmere Journals
J. R. R. Tolkien, Letters, The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien

5: Communities of Work
Eugene Atget, Ragpicker, (1899)
V.S. Naipaul, "Women's Era," India: A Million Mutinies
C. S. Lewis, "The Inner Ring," The Weight of Glory
Studs Terkel, "Babe Secoli, Supermarket Checker (282); Pat Zimmerman, Alternative School Teacher (489); Ward Quaal, TV/Radio Executive (390)," Working
Simone Weil, "The Mysticism of Work," Gravity and Grace
Paul Farmer, "If You Take the Red Pill: Reflections on the Future of Medicine," To Repair the World, Paul Farmer Speaks to the Next Generation

6 Language and the Defining of Community
Walker Evans, Man and the Movie Poster, New Orleans (1935)
Richard Rodriguez, "The Acheievement of Desire," Hunger of Memory
Julia Alvarez, "My English," Something to Declare
Mark Twain, English as She is Taught
Toni Morrison, "Black Matters," Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination

7 The Call to Community--Two Case Studies from New York City and Beyond
Dorothy Day, New York Catholic Worker Breadline on Mott Street
Dorothy Day, The Catholic Worker Movement
Matthew 5:1-48
Acts of the Apostles 2:37-47
Dorothy Day, Loaves and Fishes, excerpt
Robert Ellsberg, "A Faithful Striving," Commonweal Magazine
The Hasidic Movement
Deuteronomy 14:28-29 and 15:17-18
Genesis 28:10-22
Nehemia Polen, "Coming of Age in Kozienice: Malkah Shapiero's Memoir of Youth in the Sacred Space of a Hasidic Zaddik," Celebrating Elie Weisel, Stories, Essays, Reflections
Jerome R. Mintz, "Three Hasidic Legends," Legends of the Hasidim: An Introduction to Hasidic Culture and Oral Tradition in the New World
"Mud"
"Charity for the Widow"
"No Way Out"

8 Engaging One's Own Community
Vincent van Gogh, The Good Samaritan, (After Delacroix)
Paulo Freire, Second Letter, "Don't Let the Fear of What is Difficult Paralyze You," Teachers as Cultural Workers: Letters to Those Who Dare Teach
Jonathan Kozol, "Growing Up in the South Bronx," The Progressive
Mary McLeod Bethune, "Faith That Moved a Dump Heap (excerpt)," American Women Activists' Writings: An Anthology, 1637-2002, edited by Kathryn Cullen-DuPoint
Thomas Deans, "Writing About the Community," Writing Partnerships: Service-Learning in Composition

Appendix
Credits
Index