Millions of students love “They Say / I Say� because it offers lively and practical advice they can use throughout their college career (and beyond). Now, students can learn how to connect their “I Say� to broader public conversations through a new chapter “In My Experience,� and they will engage more deeply with their assigned readings thanks to new co-author Laura Davies’s work on both a dynamic Norton Illumine Ebook and an energetic revision of the version with readings—making the Sixth Edition an even more useful tool for students throughout their college experience.

Widely considered the standard history of the profession of literary studies, "Professing Literature" unearths the long-forgotten ideas and debates that created the literature department as we know it today. In a readable and often-amusing narrative, Gerald Graff shows that the heated conflicts of our recent culture wars echo--and often recycle--controversies over how literature should be taught that began more than a century ago.
Updated with a new preface by the author that addresses many of the provocative arguments raised by its initial publication, "Professing Literature" remains an essential history of literary pedagogy and a critical classic.
"Graff's history. . . is a pathbreaking investigation showing how our institutions shape literary thought and proposing how they might be changed."-- "The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism"

Designed for "teaching the conflicts," this critical edition of Shakespeare's "The Tempest" reprints the authoritative Bevington text of the play along with 21 selections representing major critical and cultural controversies surrounding the work. The distinctive editorial material helps readers grapple not only with the play's critical issues but also with cultural debates about literature itself.

The second edition includes four new readings, revised headnotes that more helpfully contextualize the critical essays, a portfolio of visual representations of Caliban, and an appendix on writing about critical controversies and "The Tempest."

"Literature, Language, and Politics" brings together papers drawn from and inspired by the controversial, landmark symposium on "Politics and the Discipline" held at the 1987 Modern Language Association meeting in San Francisco.
During the 1980s, debates raged both within and outside academe over curriculum, with conservatives arguing for a return to an educational philosophy based on the "classics" of Western civilization and a multi-cultural coalition of liberals, leftists, and feminists seeking to preserve the diversity of educational experience fought for since the 1960s.
Engaging this crucial debate, the contributors to "Literature, Language, and Politics" argue that the conservative educational agenda imperils not only scholarship and academic freedom but the very social well-being of the nation. They call for firm resistance to any attempts to make education conform to the social agenda of one race, one gender, one language, or one ideology; for a continuation of attempts to broaden the curriculum until it reflects the experience of women and men of all classes and all cultures.
Includes essays by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Gerald Graff, Annette Kolodny, Paul Lauter, Ellen Messer-Davidow, Catharine R. Stimpson, and Ana Celia Zentella.

The National Basketball Association is a place where white fans and black players enact virtually every racial issue and tension in U.S. culture. Following the Seattle SuperSonics for an entire season, David Shields explores how, in a predominantly black sport, white fans-including especially himself-think about and talk about black heroes, black scapegoats, and black bodies. Critically acclaimed and highly controversial, Black Planet was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the PEN USA Award, and was named one of the Top Ten Nonfiction Books of 1999 by Esquire, Newsday, Los Angeles Weekly, and Amazon.com. Purchase the audio edition.

How Teaching the Conflicts Can Revitalize American Education

"Graff offers a highly readable and down-to-earth perspective on some of the most ballyhooed issues in higher education today. . . . By encouraging us to argue together, he may yet help us to reason together." —Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

Higher education should by a battleground of ideas: the real problem, Gerald Graff says, is that sudents are not getting more out of the battle. In this lively book, Graff argues that the "culture wars" now being fought over multiculturalism and policial correctness are actually a sign of the intellectual vitality of American education—but they need to be used creatively, made part of the educational process itself.

"Everyone to whom universities matter should read Beyond the Culture Wars. . . . There could be no more tactful and well-informed guide than Mr. Graff to the actualities of university life. . . . A passionate tribute to the extraordinary difficulty and worth of learning, particularly in a climate of competing demands." —Nina Auerbach, New York Times Book Review

"Engaging, hopeful, and persuasive." —Christian Science Monitor

"Graff provides a useful analysis of the widespread incoherence in university education today, and even more importantly, some practical proposals for overcoming it. His idea of learning communities, based not on artificial consensus but on engaged argument, is most promising." —Robert Bellah

"Effectively explodes a whole corpus of myths that have become the conventional media wisdom about the "crisis" in education." —Chicago Tribune

"Graff argues eloquently for a curriculum that includes political debates and multicultural texts. . . . He wisely notes that the term 'common culture' is always evolving." —Publishers Weekly

Is the academic warfare over multi-culturalism and political correctness really a sign of America's intellectual decline, as critics such as Allan Bllom and Dinesh D'Souza have suggested? Or is it in fact a welcome sign of vitality, an assertion of the desire for American cultural citizenship by women, blacks, and other groups previously excluded from the mainstream? In this response to these critics, Professor Gerald Graff argues that the conflicts over education today signal the intellectual vigour of American higher education. By teaching these differing conflicts, Graff argues that the anger and hostility over political correctness can be channelled into productive debate. Drawing on his experience and teacher, lecturer and administrator, he contends that conservative critics have over-reacted to what is actually a gradual process of change in the American curriculum.