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Modernism and the Politics of Poverty: Teaching Lola Ridge, Jacob Riis, and Social Justice

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Communal Modernisms

Abstract

As students increasingly demand to know the relevance of their liberal arts education to the job market and their lives beyond the classroom, I have responded by introducing them to texts that address social injustice. Such texts demonstrate writers’ engagement with the socio-political issues of their times, allowing students to examine historical context, to make comparisons to existing social injustices today, and, therefore, to think of literature as participating in society, or maybe even “making something happen”.1

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© 2013 Kirsten Bartholomew Ortega

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Ortega, K.B. (2013). Modernism and the Politics of Poverty: Teaching Lola Ridge, Jacob Riis, and Social Justice. In: Hinnov, E.M., Harris, L., Rosenblum, L.M. (eds) Communal Modernisms. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137274915_5

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