Ourselves among others [antikvár]

Every year, the case for a cross-cultural composition reader becomes more eompelling. Daily papers and nightly newscasts remind us how interdependent we in the United States are with our worldwide neighbors. Look at recent upheavals in Europe, the Soviet Union, the Persian Gulf, South Africa, or Central America and you see urgent reasons for encouraging college students to become better informed about our "global village." The aims of Ourselves Among Others include giving readers in this country information to use in writing about the larger world and introducing them to the craft, imagination, and social consciousness of the best current foreign writers. Yet even to say "foreign" is to remind oneself that many students have roots, experience, or both outside the United States. For them, Ourselves Among Others offers recognition, a chance to utilize knowledge that is too often undervalued or ignored. As you'll see from the table of contents, Ourselves Among Others consists of seven thematic parts comprising essays from all rhetorical categories, a few interviews and news reports, and over a dozen short stories. (For an overview of each part s theme and components, see the introduction on its opening page.) Unlike most books featuring international writers, this one emphasizes insider accounts: pieces that depict a culture from within rather than from the "objective" viewpoint of a Western visitor. The authors are of both literary and political importance: Václav Havel, Nadine Gordimer, Nelson Mandela, Benazir Bhutto, Mikhail Gorbachev, Simoné de Beauvoir, Gábriel García Márquez. Each part alsó includes at least one selection from and about the United States, by writers representing a rangé of subcultures: Ishmael Reed, Leslie Marmon Silko, Amy Tan, John Updike. These full-length pieces augment each unit's opening section, Looking at Ourselves, a collection of shorter observations on the unit's topic by U.S. writers. iii