Encountering Cultures: Reading and Writing in a Changing World Book

PART I. ENCOUNTERING LANGUAGE AND CULTURE.

1. Language and Gender.

Brief Encounters:

Rosalie Maggio, Sexist Language. Cyra McFadden, In Defense of Gender. Robin Lakoff, Women's Language and Men's Language.

Main Selections:

Alleen Pace Nilsen, Sexism in English: A l990s Update; Eugene R. August, Real Men Don't: Anti-Male Bias in English; Deborah Tannen, Sex, Lies, and Conversation: Why Is It So Hard for Men and Women to Talk to Each Other?;Joanna Russ, When It Changed.

2. Language and Stereotypes.

Brief Encounters:

Paul Greenberg, 'Redneck' Is Not a Dirty Word; Art Carey, White Guys; William Raspberry, Black and White; Haig A. Bosmajian, The Dehumanization of the Indian.

Main Selections:

Ward Churchill, The Indian Chant and the Tomahawk Chop; Charles F. Berlitz, The Etymoloy of the International Insult; Nancy Masterson Sakamoto, Conversational Ballgames; Amy Tan, The Language of Discretion; Valerie Matsumoto, Two Deserts.

3. Language and Social Power.

Brief Encounters:

John Simon, Good English; Michelle Cliff, No Reggae Spoken Here; Raymond Williams, Dialect; Claude Levi-Strauss, The Primary Function of Writing.

Main Selections:

Barbara Mellix, From Outside, In; June Jordan, Nobody Mean More to Me than You and the Future Life of Willie Jordan; Michael Ventura, Talkin' American 2. Kit Yuen Quan, The Girl Who Wouldn't Sing; Grace Paley, The Loudest Voice.

4. Language and Bicultural Identity.

Brief Encounters:

Richard W. Bailey, English in the Next Decade; Jane Miller, Bilingual Advantages; Simon J. Ortiz, Acoma and English; Sandra Cisneros, My Name.

Main Selections:

Jose Antonio Burciaga, Chief Wachuseh; Richard Rodriguez, Public and Private Language; Gloria Anzaldua, How to Tame a Wild Tongue; Arturo Islas, Thanksgiving Border Crossing (fiction); Nicholasa Mohr, The English Lesson.

PART II. ENCOUNTERING DIVERSITY AT HOME.

5. Coming to America.

Brief Encounters:

Gary Snyder, Turtle Island; Alexis de Tocqueville, The Founding of New England; Henry David Thoreau, The Yankee and the Red Man; Charles Kuralt, Different Drummers.

Main Selections:

Ishmael Reed, America: The Multinational Society; Maxine Hong Kingston, The Wild Man of the Green Swamp; Kevin Mullen, The Irish Cop; Juan Cadena, It's My Country Too; Tahira Naqvi, Thank God for the Jews (fiction); Robert Olen Butler, The Trip Back.

6. Ethnicity and Identity.

Brief Encounters:

Malgorzata Niezabitowska, Lewellen, Nebraska; Ernesto Galarza, Colonia Mexicana; Robert Claiborne, The WASP Stereotype; Raymond Williams, Ethnic.

Main Selections:

Arturo Islas, Thanksgiving Border Crossing; Hal Glatzer, What We Can Learn from Hawaii; Alexandra Tantranon-Saur, What's Behind the 'Asian Mask'?; Barbara Ehrenreich, Cultural Baggage; Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Cult of Ethnicity;

7. Privilege, Poverty, and Mainstream Values.

Brief Encounters:

Kate Simon, Workers' Utopia, The Bronx; Gretel Ehrlich, The Western Code; Rose Del Castillo Guilbault, Huppies.

Main Selections:

Phyllis McGinley, Suburbia, of Thee I Sing; Julia Gilden, Warehouse Tribes: Living in the Cracks of Civilization; James Baldwin, Fifth Avenue, Uptown: A Letter from Harlem; Shelby Steele, On Being Black and Middle Class; Holly Sklar, The Upper Class and Mothers N the Hood; Louise Erdrich, American Horse.

8. Sexual Orientation and Diversity.

Brief Encounters:

Alice Walker, Definition of Womanist; Susan Brownmiler, Feminists; Robert Bly, The Soft Male; Gary Kinsman, Masculinity and the Men's Movement.

Main Selections:

Richard Rodriguez, Family Values; Edmund White, Sexual Culture; Amanda Kovattana, Ten Good Reasons to Be a Lesbian; Jan Clausen, My Interesting Condition; David Leavitt, Territory.

PART III. ENCOUNTERING GLOBAL DIVERSITY.

9. Leaving Home.

Brief Encounters:

Alice Bloom, The Natives in the Posters; Claude Levi-Strauss, The Traveler's Dilemma; P. L. Pearce, Fifteen Types of Travelers.

Main Selections:

Chitra Divakaruni, Tourists. Nora Reza, The Errand; Mary Morris, Traveling Alone in Mexico; John Updike, Venezuela for Visitors; Walker Percy, Sightseer.

10. Encountering Stereotypes.

Brief Encounters:

Gary Althen, Stereotypes of Americans; Margaret Atwood, Over the Fence in Canada; Judith Stone, Stereotypes in Orbit.

Main Selections:

Stanley Meisler, Are the French Really Rude?; Herbert Gold, Land without Jews; Margaret K. Nydell, Beliefs and Values in the Arab World; Lucia Berlin, Good and Bad.

11. Meeting the Third World.

Brief Encounters:

Raymond Williams, Native; Charles Darwin, Natives of Tierra del Fuego; Renato Rosaldo, The Lone Ethnographer; Peter S. Adler, Five Stages of Culture Shock.

Main Selections:

Maya Angelou, All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes; Alex Haley, Return to the Land of Roots; Sarah Streed, A Moroccan Memoir; Paul Bowles, A Distant Episode; George P. Elliott, Among the Dangs.

12. Americans in the New World Order.

Brief Encounters:

Raymond Williams, Western; Amira Nowaira, American Foreign Aid; Paul Bowles, Alcohol and Cannabis

Main Selections:

B. Traven, Assembly Line (fiction); R. K. Narayan, God and the Cobbler; Pico Iyer, Tour of the City: Encounters between East and West; Patrick Glynn, The Age of Balkanization; Noam Chomsky, A View from Below.