Jewel Spears Brooker - Approaches to Teaching Eliot's Poetry and Plays

Approaches to Teaching Eliot's Poetry and Plays

Essays by experienced teachers on their approaches to teaching various works by Eliot. Review of Scholarly Resources. List of musical adaptations and of Eliot's work in popular culture.

PART ONE: MATERIALS

Eliot in the curriculum / Editions and Anthologies / Readings for Students /

The Instructor's Library

PART TWO: APPROACHES

GENERAL APPROACHES

Essays on the Double in Eliot's Poetry, Eliot and the Romantic Tradition,

Eliot's Gallery of Women, Eliot's Essays as a Bridge to the Poems, Eliot and Dante,

Eliot and Music, Eliot and F. H. Bradley, Eliot in Composition Courses, and

Teaching Eliot in High School

ONE POEM AS AN APPROACH TO ALL

Essays on "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock", The Hollow Men,

and Ash-Wednesday

TEACHING THE WASTE LAND

Essays: "When Love Fails"; "Descent to Underworld";

"Structural Similarities in Film"; "The Waste Land and Contemporary Art";

The Waste Land as Gothic Fantasy"; The Waste Land in Context of 1920s"

TEACHING FOUR QUARTETS

Essays on Burnt Norton; on the Quartets as Mysticism;

and on the influence of Einstein and Asia

TEACHING THE PLAYS

Essays on Religion and Comedy, Eliot in course on Modern Drama,

and on teaching Murder in the Cathedral and The Cocktail Party

SELECTED MUSICAL COMPOSITIONS

Review of English Studies (Nov 1990)

"Academics ... are bound to be stimulated by the collection of Approaches edited by Jewel Spears Brooker for the Modern Language Association. ... What is fascinating is that most of the contributors discuss how they teach Eliot in class. There is something to be learned from the specific details of each teacher's method. This book is useful and suggestive.

Yeats-Eliot Review (Fall 1990)

Joining Valerie Eliot's edition of her husband's letters, Lyndall Gordon's second biography of Eliot, and the many collections of studies in the centennial year of T. S. Eliot's birth is Jewel Spears Brooker's gathering of critical and pedagogical points of view. ... A service to Eliot scholarship, especially for those teachers who struggle to give their students an appreciation of modern poetry.

American Literary Scholarship (1988)

Brooker has done a good job in getting her contributors to focus on pedagogical rather than scholarly issues and in gathering together different approaches tio Eliot and different contexts in which he can be put. This is a volume any teacher of Eliot will learn something from.