Teaching Particulars: Literary Conversations in Grades 6-12

Helaine Smith engages her students, grammar school through twelfth grade – and any avid reader – in the questions that great literature evokes. Included are chapters on Homer and Genesis; plays by Sophocles, Shakespeare, and Beckett; poems by Jonson, Donne, Coleridge, Browning, Hopkins, Yeats, Bishop, Hecht, Dove, and Lowell; essays by Baldwin, Lamb, and White; and fiction by Flannery O'Connor, Dickens, Joyce, Poe, Tolstoy, Mann, and Kafka. Whether Helaine Smith is talking to young or older students, she shows how any devoted reader can uncover all sorts of subtle beauty and meaning by reading closely and by assuming that virtually every word and phrase of a great text is deliberate. The question-and-answer form of these jargon-free dialogues creates the feeling of a vibrant classroom where learning and delight are the watchwords.