Death Education In The Writing Classroom

Death is often encountered in English courses—Hamlet’s death, celebrity death, death from the terrorist attacks on 9/11—but students rarely have the opportunity to write about their own experiences with death. In Death Education in the Writing Classroom, Jeffrey Berman shows how college students can write safely about dying, death, and bereavement. The book is based on an undergraduate course on love and loss that Berman taught at the University at Albany in 2008. Part 1, “Diaries,” is organized around Berman’s diary entries written immediately after each class. These entries provide a week-by-week glimpse of class discussions, highlighting his students’ writings and their developing bonds with classmates and teacher. Part 2, "Breakthroughs," focuses on several students’ important educational and psychological discoveries in their understanding of love and loss. The student writings touch on many aspects of death education, including disenfranchised grief. The book explores how students write about not only mourning and loss but also depression, cutting, and abortion—topics that occupy the ambiguous border of death-in-life. Death Education in the Writing Classroom is the first book to demonstrate how love and loss can be taught in a college writing class—and the first to describe the week-by-week changes in students’ cognitive and affective responses to death. This interdisciplinary book will be of interest to writing teachers, students, clinicians, and bereavement counselors.

In Death in the Classroom, Jeffrey Berman writes about Love and Loss, the course that he designed and taught two years after his wife's death, in which he explored with his students the literature of bereavement. Berman, building on his previous courses that emphasized self-disclosing writing, shows how his students wrote about their own experiences with love and loss, how their writing affected classmates and teacher alike, and how writing about death can lead to educational and psychological breakthroughs. In an age in which eighty percent of Americans die not in their homes but in institutions, and in which, consequently, the living are separated from the dying, Death in the Classroom reveals how reading, writing, and speaking about death can play a vital role in a student's education.

When Loss Gets Personal considers how secondary language arts teachers can thoughtfully teach literature in their classrooms in which personal deaths, like suicide, cancer, and accidents, are a significant aspect of the texts. Each chapter focuses on texts and provides activities that ask students to engage through writing, activities, and prompts.

Moving Beyond Personal Loss to Societal Grieving considers how secondary English language arts teachers can thoughtfully teach pieces of literature in their classrooms in which large-scale deaths are a significant aspect of the texts. Each chapter provides practical activities for students to engage with loss through writing, projects, and prompts.

Norman Holland was unquestionably the leading 20th-century American psychoanalytic literary critic. Long known as the Dean of American psychoanalytic literary critics, Holland produced an enormous body of scholarship that appeals to both neophytes in the field and advanced researchers, many of whom have been influenced by his writings. Holland was one of the first proponents of reader-response criticism, the theorist of readers' identity themes, and the author of fifteen books that have become classics in the field. Jeffrey Berman analyzes all of Holland's books, and many of his 250 scholarly articles, highlighting continuities and discontinuities in the critic's thinking over time. A controversial if not polarizing figure, Holland is discussed in relation to his closest colleagues, including Murray Schwartz, Bernard Paris, and Leslie Fiedler, as well as his fiercest critics, among them Frederick Crews, David Bleich, and Jonathan Culler, creating a dynamic and personal portrait. Insofar as this text illuminates the evolving mind of a premier literary critic, it produces a parallel profile of the American reader, the primary object of Holland's extensive work.

Writing can support our wellbeing even under the most difficult life circumstances, helping us to adapt to significant change, make sense of loss, improve our physical and emotional resilience, and foster personal growth. Numerous studies of Expressive Writing have confirmed this, and there are other established methodologies for practice. However, to date, few accounts have offered detailed descriptions showing how and why putting pen to paper can be so beneficial. This book delves deeply into the landscape of Writing-for-wellbeing and demonstrates the transformative power of writing in a wide range of contexts. Topics include personal trauma narratives within the Humanities; a participatory Writing-for-wellbeing study that demonstrates the effectiveness of writing in the context of grief and loss; surprise as the hidden mainspring of poetry's therapeutic potency; the empowerment and healing potential offered by Black women’s blogs; playwriting positioning LGBTQIA+ identities as positive through stories of belonging; how writing workshops have helped newly literate Indigenous adults and other participants in the Australian outback; and how the smuggled writings of Behrouz Boochani have enabled global witnessing of the stories of refugees held in offshore detention. This resource sets out the theory and research at the foundation of Writing-for-wellbeing in close relation to full and engaging accounts of practice. It aims to make the topic accessible and affirms its place as an effective reconstructive practice alongside other expressive arts therapies, providing a holistic and inspiring resource for anyone wishing to practice, teach, or research Writing-for-wellbeing.

The first book-length study of the psychoanalytic memoir, this book examines key examples of the genre, including Sigmund Freud's mistitled An Autobiographical Study, Helene Deutsch's Confrontations with Myself: An Epilogue, Wilfred Bion's War Memoirs 1917-1919, Masud Khan's The Long Wait, Sophie Freud's Living in the Shadow of the Freud Family, and Irvin D. Yalom and Marilyn Yalom's A Matter of Death and Life. Offering in each chapter a brief character sketch of the memoirist, the book shows how personal writing fits into their other work, often demonstrating the continuities and discontinuities in an author's life as well as discussing each author's contributions to psychoanalysis, whether positive or negative.

Many of the well-respected scholarly studies of autobiographical writing have little or nothing to say about mental illness. This book uncovers the mysterious relationship between mood disorders and creativity through the lives of seven writers, demonstrating how mental illness is sometimes the driving force behind creativity.