Border Crossings by Catherine Cucinella - First Edition, 2016 from Macmillan Student Store

Border Crossings

A Bedford Spotlight ReaderFirst Edition ©2016 Catherine Cucinella

Border Crossings explores questions around the central concept of borders and border crossings: What are borders? Who are border crossers? How do borders influence the ways we speak and write? How does technology and social media change our understanding of borders? Readings by cultural schol...
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Border Crossings by Catherine Cucinella - First Edition, 2016 from Macmillan Student Store

A brief and versatile reader about borders at an affordable price.

Border Crossings explores questions around the central concept of borders and border crossings: What are borders? Who are border crossers? How do borders influence the ways we speak and write? How does technology and social media change our understanding of borders? Readings by cultural scholars, economists, novelists, poets, political theorists, travel writers, and others take up these issues and more. Questions and assignments for each selection provide a range of activities for students and the website for the Spotlight Series offers comprehensive instructor support with sample syllabi and additional teaching resources.

The Bedford Spotlight Reader Series is an exciting new line of single-theme readers, each featuring Bedford’s trademark care and quality. An Editorial Board of more than a dozen compositionists at schools focusing on specific themes assist in the development of the series. The readers in the series collect thoughtfully chosen readings sufficient for an entire writing course—about 30 selections—to allow instructors to provide carefully developed, high-quality instruction at an affordable price. Bedford Spotlight Readers are designed to help students make inquiries from multiple perspectives, opening up topics such as monsters, happiness, money, food, sustainability, and gender to critical analysis. The readers are flexibly arranged in thematic chapters, each focusing in depth on a different facet of the central topic. The Web site for the Spotlight Series offers comprehensive instructor support with sample syllabi and additional teaching resources

Features

Bedford care and quality in every volume. Each volume in the Bedford Spotlight series is developed with attention to design, pedagogy, and compelling readings that work in the classroom.

Affordable, and an ideal package option. Each Spotlight Reader offers plenty of material for a composition course while keeping the price low. Combine one of the Spotlight Readers with a handbook or rhetoric and save 20% off the combined price. Package any Spotlight Reader with Critical Thinking, Reading, and Writing: A Bedford Spotlight Rhetoric, by Jeff Ousborne, for free (a $10 value). 

Multiple perspectives on borders and their effects on individuals and society. In order to foster student engagement, five chapters, built around central questions on the subject of borders and border crossings, offer numerous entry points for inquiry and discussion. A mix of genres as well as accessible and challenging selections allows instructors to tailor their approach to each classroom. For instance:

  • Paul Theroux, in "The Country Just Over the Fence," describes his experience crossing the border that divides Nogales, Arizona, from Nogales, Mexico, where he was "instantly, unmistakably in a foreign land."

  • Gloria Anzaldúa, in "How to Tame a Wild Tongue," writes of how others view her "home tongue," Chicano Spanish, and describes other regional languages that originate in border regions.

  • Michael Clemens, in "A World without Borders Makes Economic Sense," argues for the economic benefits of eliminating "barriers to human mobility between countries."

Thoughtful support for writers and instructors. A general introduction, chapter introductions, and headnotes provide context, and prompts and assignments offer suggestions for discussion, informal writing, research; ways to connect selections; and assignments for writing. A Web site for the series offers support for teaching the themes in each volume.

New to This Edition

“As an instructor who often teaches students from multilingual backgrounds and households, I think this is a text that will literally speak to the issues students face every day in their personal and academic lives.”
--Erica Duran, California State University San Marcos

“This is excellent for first-year writing students. We are a large, diverse university, and the readings would resonate with many of them.”
--Elizabeth Kessler, University of Houston

“This is a thoughtful selection of readings on a timely issue that affects us all.”
--Jim Shimkus, University of North Georgia

“This is truly a fantastic idea for a textbook! Cucinella’s thematic approach to the topic of "Borders" is very well thought out and developed. Her focus on 21st Century writers and issues is to be commended. The text and its content certainly challenge students to contemplate the world they live in now.”
--Erin Caldwell, University of North Georgia

Digital Options

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: What Are Borders?

Robert Frost, Mending Wall

Alexander C. Diener and Joshua Hagen, A Very Bordered World

Stuart Elden, Territory without Borders

Reed Karaim, Building Walls

Mark Stein, How the States Got Their Shapes

Chapter 2: Why Do Geographical Borders Matter?

Gloria Anzaldúa, To Live in the Borderlands Means You

Norma Cantú, Living on the Border: A Wound that Will Not Heal

Paul Theroux, The Country Just over the Fence

Leslie R. Alm and Ross E. Burkhart, Canada-U.S. Border Communities: What the People Have to Say

Heewon Chang, Re-Examining the Rhetoric of the "Cultural Border"

Bill Moyers and Sherman Alexie, Sherman Alexie on Living Outside Cultural Borders

The Provincial Freeman, Mason and Dixon’s Line

Kate DeVan Filer, Our Most Famous Border

U.S. Congress, The Missouri Compromise

Chapter 3: How Do Borders Influence the Ways We Write and Speak?

Gloria Anzaldúa, How to Tame a Wild Tongue

Manuel Muñoz, Leave Your Name at the Border

Amy Tan, Mother Tongue

François Grosjean, Change of Language, Change of Personality

Steve Inskeep and Michele Norris, Living in Two Worlds, but with Just One Language

Karla D. Scott, Communication Strategies across Cultural Borders

Kristen Hawley Turner, Digitalk: A New Literacy for a Digital Generation

Chapter 4: Does Creativity Transcend Borders?

Elizabeth Bishop, The Map

Omar Akram, Can Music Bridge Cultures and Promote Peace?

John M. Eger, Art as a Universal Language

Ann Marie Leimer, Cruel Beauty, Precarious Breath: Visualizing the U.S.-Mexico Border

Gabriela Valdivia, Joseph Palis, and Matthew Reilly, Borders, Border-Crossing, and Political Art in North Carolina

David Avalos, Border Fence as Möbius Strip

Naomi Shihab Nye, Poetry Peddler

Chapter 5: Can We Rethink a World without Borders?

Gabriel Popescu, Borders in the Era of Globalization

David Kinkela, Neil Maher, and Donald Worster, Revisiting a "World without Borders": An Interview with Donald Worster

Michael A. Clemens,  A World without Borders Makes Economic Sense

Shaun Raviv, If People Could Immigrate Anywhere, Would Poverty Be Eliminated?

Stefany Anne Golberg, World without Borders

Marilyn Chin, Monologue: Grandmother Wong’s New Year Blessings

Catherine Cucinella

Catherine Cucinella is an Assistant Professor of Literature and Writing Studies at California State University San Marcos where she also directs General Education Writing. Much of her research focuses on women poet and writers, body and gender theory, and ethnic American literatures, and she has written and edited two books on these subjects: Poetics of the Body and Contemporary American Women Poets. She also teaches courses in composition studies, pedagogy, and twentieth- and twenty-first-century American literature. For Bedford/St. Martin’s, she is editor of Border Crossings.

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Sample Syllabus for Border Crossings