Proposals are invited for a volume in the MLA’s Options for Teaching series entitled Teaching Beat Generation Literature, to be edited by Nancy M. Grace. The purpose of the volume is to highlight key issues and pedagogical strategies for teaching Beat literature. The volume will include information for specialists and nonspecialists alike who are teaching at the secondary as well as undergraduate and graduate levels. A section or sections devoted to teaching resources will include teaching with images and film; teaching with anthologies; using electronic resources; and using editions, reference guides, collections of correspondence, biographies, and single-author studies.
Possible topics include teaching the national and global contexts of Beat literature, major Beat writers, censorship and Beat literature, aesthetic lineages of Beat literature, Beats and the popular media, Beat fiction, Beat poetry, Beat drama, Beat film, Beat memoirs, gender and sex in Beat literature, race and ethnicity in Beat literature, Beat literature and the contemporary environmental movement, Beat writing and technology, the Beat road tale, the influence of music (jazz, in particular) on Beat writing, Beat composition philosophies and histories, drug use and Beat writing, spirituality and religious traditions in Beat writing, transhumanism and posthumanism in Beat writing, and the aesthetic and cultural legacies of Beat writing.
If you are interested in contributing an essay of 3,000 to 3,500 words, please send an abstract of 500 words in which you outline your approach or topic and how it might enhance the teaching of Beat literature to Nancy M. Grace (ngrace@wooster.edu) by 1 July 2016.
Please note that any quotations from student papers will require written permission from the students.