Book Review Assignment for Graduate Students

Philip Nel's English 690: Children's Literature and the Left

Assignment

Write a review of a work of literary criticism, such as you might do for an academic journal. I'll post it on the web so that all your classmates can benefit from it. So, when you turn it in, please give me two copies, one hard copy and one copy on disk. For the file format, please use either Microsoft Word (.doc) Rich Text Format (.rtf) or hypertext (.html).

Some Reviews by Me

• "Metaphors and Paranoia: Two Approaches to Contemporary American Fiction." Review of Timothy Melley's Empire of Conspiracy: The Culture of Paranoia in Postwar America and Arthur Saltzman's This Mad "Instead": Governing Metaphors in Contemporary Fiction. Modern Fiction Studies 48.2 (Summer 2002): 480-85. <http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/modern_fiction_studies/v048/48.2nel.html>. This piece reviews two books. You need only review one book. So, in other words, if you were to omit the introductory paragraph and concluding paragraphs, this review would be twice as much as I'm asking you to do. However, to repeat, you only need review one.
• Review of James Carter's Talking Books. The Lion and the Unicorn 25.2 (April 2001): 328-30. <http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/lion_and_the_unicorn/v025/25.2nel.html>.
• List of other reviews (not available on-line, as far as I know).

Due Dates

• Full schedule of due dates

The reviews will be due a week before the presentations. Reviewers will choose a book that will be useful to their presentation. There are two benefits of this approach. First, if you are reviewing a book that ties in with your presentation, then one assignment will help you with the other. Second, staggering the due dates over the course of the semester gives everyone a chance to process each review and, perhaps, to consider reading or consulting the book for their term papers.

Books

Each graduate student should choose a different book to review. Choose one of the following books.

• Joyce Antler, Lucy Sprague Mitchell: The Making of a Modern Woman (Yale UP, 1987).
• Andrew Hemingway, Artists on the Left: American Artists and the Communist Movement, 1926-1956 (New Haven and London: Yale UP, 2002).
• Judy Kaplan and Linn Shapiro, eds., Red Diapers: Growing Up in the Communist Left (U of Illinois P, 1998).
• James W. Loewen, Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong (New York: The New Press, 1995)
• James W. Loewen, Lies Across America: What Our Historic Sites Get Wrong (New York: The New Press, 1999).
• Leonard S. Marcus, Margaret Wise Brown: Awakened by the Moon (1992; Quill/Morrow, 1999).
• Donnarae McCann, White Supremacy in Children's Literature: Characterizations of African Americans, 1830-1900 (Garland, 2000)
• Paul Milkman, PM: A New Deal in Journalism, 1940-1948 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1997).
• Paul C. Mishler, Raising Reds: The Young Pioneers, Radical Summer Camps, and Communist Political Culture in the United States (New York: Columbia UP, 1999).
• Alan M. Wald, Exiles from a Future Time: The Forging of the Mid-Twentieth-Century Literary Left (Chapel Hill and London: Univ. of North Carolina P, 2002).
• Rebecca Zurier, Art for the Masses: A Radical Magazine and Its Graphics, 1911-1917 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988).