The social movements of the 1960s - still vital and challenging - seen through the author's experiences as a civil rights activist, a feminist, an antiwar organizer, and a radical teacher. Today, some fifty years after, we celebrate - or excoriate - "the Sixties." Using his wide-ranging experience as an activist and writer, Paul Lauter examines the values, the exploits, the victories, the implications, and sometimes the failings, of the "Movement" of that conflicted time. In Our Sixties, Lauter writes about movement activities from the perspective of a full-time participant: 1964 Mississippi freedom schools; Students for a Democratic Society (SDS); the Morgan community school in Washington, DC, which he headed; a variety of antiwar, antidraft actions; the New University Conference, a radical group of faculty and graduate students; The Feminist Press, which he helped found; and the United States Servicemen's Fund, an organization supporting antiwar GIs. He got fired, got busted, got published, and even got tenure. He honed his skills writing for the New York Review of Books among other magazines. As a teacher he created innovative courses ranging from "Revolutionary Literature" and "Contesting the Canon" to "The Sixties in Fiction, Poetry, and Film." He led the development of the groundbreaking Heath Anthology of American Literature and remains its general editor. Lauter's book offers both a retrospective look at the social justice struggles of the Sixties and an account of how his participation in these struggles has shaped his life. Social history as well as personal chronicle, this account is for those who recall that turbulent decade as well as for those who seek to better understand its impact on American politics and society in our current era.

This collection of essays places issues central to literary study, particularly the question of the canon, in the context of institutional practices in American colleges and universities. Lauter addresses such crucial concerns as what students should read and study, how standards of "quality" are defined and changed, the limits of theoretical discourse, and the ways race, gender, and class shape not only teaching, curricula, and research priorities, but collegiate personnel actions as well.

The book examines critically the variety of recent proposals for "reforming" higher education, and it calls into question many practices -- like employing large numbers of part-timers -- now popular with college managers. Offering concrete examples of a "comparative" method of teaching literary texts, and specific instances for "integrating" curricula, Canons and Contexts proposes realistic ideas for creating varied, spirited, and democratic classrooms and colleges.

A History of American Working-Class Literature sheds light not only on the lived experience of class but the enormously varied creativity of working-class people throughout the history of what is now the United States. By charting a chronology of working-class experience, as the conditions of work have changed over time, this volume shows how the practice of organizing, economic competition, place, and time shape opportunity and desire. The subjects range from transportation narratives and slave songs to the literature of deindustrialization and globalization. Among the literary forms discussed are memoir, journalism, film, drama, poetry, speeches, fiction, and song. Essays focus on plantation, prison, factory, and farm, as well as on labor unions, workers' theaters, and innovative publishing ventures. Chapters spotlight the intersections of class with race, gender, and place. The variety, depth, and many provocations of this History are certain to enrich the study and teaching of American literature.

"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.

Paul Lauter, an icon of American Studies who has been a primary agent in its transformation and its chief ambassador abroad, offers a wide-ranging collection of essays that demonstrate and reflect on this important and often highly politicized discipline. While American Studies was formerly seen as a wholly subsidiary academic program that loosely combined the study of American history, literature, and art, "From Walden Pond to Jurassic Park" reveals the evolution of an independent, highly interdisciplinary program with distinctive subjects, methods, and goals that are much different than the traditional academic departments that nurtured it.
With anecdote peppered discussions ranging from specific literary texts and movies to the future of higher education and the efficacy of unions, "From Walden Pond to Jurassic Park" entertains even as it offers a twenty-first century account of how and why Americanists at home and abroad now do what they do. Drawing on his forty-five years of teaching and research as well as his experience as a political activist and a cultural radical, Lauter shows how a multifaceted increase in the United States' global dominion has infused a particular political urgency into American Studies. With its military and economic influence, its cultural and linguistic reach, the United States is--for better or for worse--too formidable and potent "not" to be understood clearly and critically.

Paul Lauter, an icon of American Studies who has been a primary agent in its transformation and its chief ambassador abroad, offers a wide-ranging collection of essays that demonstrate and reflect on this important and often highly politicized discipline. While American Studies was formerly seen as a wholly subsidiary academic program that loosely combined the study of American history, literature, and art, "From Walden Pond to Jurassic Park" reveals the evolution of an independent, highly interdisciplinary program with distinctive subjects, methods, and goals that are much different than the traditional academic departments that nurtured it.
With anecdote peppered discussions ranging from specific literary texts and movies to the future of higher education and the efficacy of unions, "From Walden Pond to Jurassic Park" entertains even as it offers a twenty-first century account of how and why Americanists at home and abroad now do what they do. Drawing on his forty-five years of teaching and research as well as his experience as a political activist and a cultural radical, Lauter shows how a multifaceted increase in the United States' global dominion has infused a particular political urgency into American Studies. With its military and economic influence, its cultural and linguistic reach, the United States is--for better or for worse--too formidable and potent "not" to be understood clearly and critically.