Approaching Great Ideas by Lee A. Jacobus - First Edition, 2016 from Macmillan Student Store

Approaching Great Ideas

Critical Readings for College WritersFirst Edition ©2016 Lee A. Jacobus

PACKAGE THIS TITLE WITH OUR 2016 MLA SUPPLEMENT, Documenting Sources in MLA Style (package ISBN-13: 9781319084448). Get the most recent updates on MLA citation in a convenient, 40-page resource based on The MLA Handbook, 8th Edition, with plenty of models. Browse our catalog or contact your repre...

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Approaching Great Ideas by Lee A. Jacobus - First Edition, 2016 from Macmillan Student Store

Making great ideas accessible and relevant for students

PACKAGE THIS TITLE WITH OUR 2016 MLA SUPPLEMENT, Documenting Sources in MLA Style (package ISBN-13: 9781319084448). Get the most recent updates on MLA citation in a convenient, 40-page resource based on The MLA Handbook, 8th Edition, with plenty of models. Browse our catalog or contact your representative for a full listing of updated titles and packages, or to request a custom ISBN.

From Lee Jacobus, the author of A World of Ideas—one of the bestselling composition readers of all time—comes Approaching Great Ideas, a new reader for composition courses. Concise, scaffolded instruction aims to make “big ideas” accessible and relevant for students. The text introduces important writings from classic authors such as Aristotle, Plato, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Charles Darwin, Andrew Carnegie, and Friedrich Nietzsche. Approaching Great Ideas then shows students how the ideas of these great thinkers are relevant today by presenting shorter readings on the same themes from contemporary authors such as Cornel West, Elizabeth Warren, bell hooks, Fareed Zakaria, Jennifer Ackerman, and Kwame Anthony Appiah. Two introductory chapters on critical reading and writing give students the proper, easy-to-use tools they need to approach, engage with, and respond thoughtfully to great ideas.

Features

Thirty-nine readings introduce students to great thinkers and writers from the past and present. Each thematic chapter features writing from classic authors to whom most contemporary writers look for a basic foundation, thinkers such as Lucretius, John Kenneth Galbraith, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Mary Wollstonecraft, and James Baldwin. Then, selections from more contemporary writers including Leslie T. Chang, Francis Fukuyama, Steve Jones, Michio Kaku, Amartya Sen, and others show students how these ideas are viewed from modern-day perspectives.

Five thematic chapters explore important ideas essential to our culture. Democracy and human rights, freedom and justice, science and nature, wealth and poverty, and ethics and morality have been important cultural concepts since ancient times, and they continue to shape our world today.

A guide to critical reading shows students how to engage with “big ideas.” The first chapter of the book, “Examining Ideas,” introduces students to the process of critical reading, beginning with essential prereading techniques and moving through annotating, asking good questions, reviewing, and discussing the readings with peers.

A guide to critical writing gives students the tools to put their own ideas into writing. A second introductory chapter, “Writing about Ideas,” guides students through the writing process, showing them how to generate topics for writing, how to form thesis statements, and traditional methods of development for supporting an argument. An annotated student paper then shows students what these strategies look like in action.Step-by-step editorial apparatus gives students effective methods for approaching and responding to the selections. Chapter introductions, headnotes, and useful glosses help students focus their reading and hone their understanding of the selections. Then, three sets of discussion and writing questions follow every selection:

  • "Understanding Ideas" questions help students dig into the readings by asking them to define terms, reflect on specific passages, and examine the writer's arguments, providing starting points for class discussion.
  • "Responding to Ideas" writing prompts give students the chance to demonstrate their grasp of the ideas in the text by producing their own critical writing. Every one of these questions has a rhetorical label (Definition, Comparison, Example, Cause and Effect, Testimony, Research, Response, or Analysis of Circumstances question-all methods that are discussed in the "Writing about Ideas" chapter) that help give students a sense of how to start responding to a reading and how to develop their own ideas.
  • "Comparing Ideas" questions ask students to find the connections and key differences among different authors, which fosters comparative critical thinking.

"Seeing Ideas" shows students how ideas are enacted in the world around them. Every chapter introduction features two images that help illustrate how the ideas of the chapter have played out-historically and more recently-in the real world.

New to This Edition

“If you are looking for a challenging yet imminently accessible freshman composition reader, look no further than Approaching Great Ideas. Boasting a wealth of student-friendly questions, prompts, and guidance, Lee Jacobus, like a wise friend, leads students and teachers through centuries of the best that has been thought and said.” –Justin Williamson, Pearl River Community College

“It’s important for college students to be exposed to some classic writing early in their college careers, not just in higher level courses. Approaching Great Ideas provides an excellent vehicle for that sort of exposure.” –Christina Lovin, Eastern Kentucky University

“Life is short, so we should read, learn, and teach the ‘great ideas’ to students who are paying good money to learn to think. If not great ideas, then what? Second-rate ideas? Sort-of-okay ideas? And if not now, in their first year of college, when? Approaching Great Ideas gives teachers and students everything they need to tackle big ideas in composition.” –David Elias, Eastern Kentucky University

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Table of Contents

Preface

PART ONE: READING AND WRITING ABOUT GREAT IDEAS

CHAPTER 1: Examining Ideas
Strategies for Critical Reading about Great Ideas
     Prereading, Titles, and Subheadings
     Looking at Opening Paragraphs
     Annotation
     Questioning
     Reviewing
     Discussion
          Sample Annotated Passage for Review and Discussion
Forming Your Own Ideas

CHAPTER 2: Writing about Ideas
Generating Topics for Writing
      Thinking Critically
Creating a Thesis Statement
      Sample Opening Paragraphs
      Supporting Your Thesis
             Development by Definition
             Development by Comparison
             Development by Example
             Development by Analysis of Cause and Effect
             Development by Analysis of Circumstances
             Development by Testimony
            Development by Rhetorical Question
     Questions for Reading and Writing
Establishing Your Argument
     Classical Argument
     Toulmin Argument
     Rogerian Argument
A Sample Student Essay  

PART TWO: THE READINGS

CHAPTER 3: How Democracy Relates to Human Rights
Plato (427–347 B.C.E.), Democracy and the Democratic Man
James Madison (1751–1836), The Bill of Rights 
Marquis de Lafayette (1757–1834) and the National Assembly of France (1789), Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen
Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797), A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–1859), The Idea of Rights in the United States
Emile Durkheim (1858–1917), The Intellectual Elite and Democracy 
Robert A. Dahl (1915–2014), Why Democracy? 
Cornel West (b. 1953), The Deep Democratic Tradition in America
Fareed Zakaria (b. 1954), Illiberal Democracy

CHAPTER 4: How Freedom Depends on Justice
Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778), Of Slavery and the Social Pact
Lucy A. Delaney (c. 1828–1890), from Struggles for Freedom 
Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1882–1945), The Four Freedoms
John Rawls (1921–2002), A Theory of Justice
James Baldwin (1924–1987), My Dungeon Shook: Letter to My Nephew on the One Hundredth Anniversary of the Emancipation
Martin Luther King Jr. (1929–1968), I Have a Dream
Amartya Sen (b. 1933), The Idea of Justice
bell hooks (b. 1952), Feminist Politics: Where We Stand

CHAPTER 5: How Science Reads the Book of Nature
Lucretius (c. 99–c. 55 B.C.E.), The Nature of Sleep
Charles Darwin (1809–1882), Of Sexual Selection and Natural Selection
Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947), Religion and Science
Oliver Sacks (b. 1933), The Mind’s Eye
Steve Jones (b. 1944), The Descent of Men
Michio Kaku (b. 1947), Physics of the Impossible
Jennifer Ackerman (b. 1959), Molecules and Genes

CHAPTER 6: How Society Regards Wealth and Poverty
Adam Smith (1723–1790), The Value of Labor
Andrew Carnegie (1835–1919), The Gospel of Wealth
Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860–1935), Women and Economics: “Cupid-in-the-Kitchen” 
John Kenneth Galbraith (1908–2006), Inequality
Jane Jacobs (1916–2006), Stagflation
Elizabeth Warren (b. 1949), The Vanishing Middle Class 
Leslie T. Chang (b. 1969), Factory Girls in Dongguan

CHAPTER 7: How Ethics and Morality Interact
Aristotle (384–322 B.C.E.), The Aim of Man
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), Good and Bad 
John Dewey (1859–1952), Education and Morality
Thomas Nagel (b. 1937), The Objective Basis of Morality
Michael Gazzaniga (b. 1939), Toward a Universal Ethics
Peter Singer (b. 1946) and Jim Mason (b. 1934), Ethics and Animals
Francis Fukuyama (b. 1952), Human Specificity and the Rights of Animals
Kwame Anthony Appiah (b. 1954), If You’re Happy and You Know It

Lee A. Jacobus

Lee A. Jacobus is professor emeritus of English at the University of Connecticut and the author/editor of popular English and drama textbooks, among them The Bedford Introduction to Drama and A World of Ideas. He has written scholarly books on Paradise Lost, on the works of John Cleveland, and on the works of Shakespeare, including Shakespeare and the Dialectic of Certainty. He is also a playwright and author of fiction. Two of his plays — Fair Warning and Long Division — were produced in New York by the American Theater of Actors, and Dance Therapy, three one-act plays, was produced in New York at Where Eagles Dare Theatre.  His book Hawaiian Tales: The Girl With Heavenly Eyes (TellMe Press 2014) is a collection of short stories set in Hawaii.

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