Handing one Another Along : : Literature and Social Reflection

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Heading out: the literary and journalistic documentary tradition of social observation: the call to venture outside of what we know, and attend the stories of others. Featured: James Agee, George Orwell, and William Carlos Williams -- When strangers meet: meeting so-called ordinary American working class men and women: courage, challenge, kindness and complexity in everyday living. Featured: the old ones of New Mexico, Raymond Carver, Edward Hopper, Tillie Olsen, and Ruby Bridges -- A storytelling humanity: ways of seeing race and identity: viewing encounters through the eyes of others and finding grace. Featured: Ralph Ellison, Flannery O'Connor, Zora Neal Hurston -- Bringing it home: intellectuals and the religious search: finding meaning in the life given to us with stories as our guide. Featured: Dorothy Day, John Cheever, Walker Percy, Simone Weil, and a potato chip truck -- Boundaries and breakthroughs: finding simple clarity amidst moral, psychological and social complexity. Featured: Paul Gauguin, Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, and George Eliot -- Afterword: a course's history -- A reading list for life: the syllabus from the Harvard course, "A literature of social reflection".
Dr. Coles shows how the work of writers, artists, and thinkers of the past two centuries can inspire our own reflections on our daily lives. He offers a compelling call to venture outside our own selves and lives and to listen, attentively and with growing humanity, to the way others get through life, and he encourages us to examine our own character, kindness, and complexity by studying the wisdom of authors from Charles Dickens to Flannery O'Connor, from James Agee to George Orwell, and many others. In this influential conversation about empathy and engagement, Coles inspires us to seek out deeper meaning in our lives and guides us toward achieving greater clarity, strength, and richness of understanding amid the moral, psychological, and social complexities of the modern world. --Publisher's description from dust cover.

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