Reading the World

A global perspective

A wide selection of classic Western and non-Western texts allows students to explore the development of ideas at different times and in different cultures. Nearly half the selections are from Eastern, Islamic, African, and South American sources.

Accessible to undergraduate readers

Headnotes provide necessary contextual background; study questions and writing prompts focus students’ attention on key ideas and connections between texts; unfamiliar words and allusions are carefully glossed.

Treats images as texts that convey ideas

Because ideas are not always expressed as words, Reading the World includes drawings, paintings, sculpture, and other visual texts—including a page from the Egyptian Book of the Dead, a still from Triumph of the Will, Picasso’s Guernica, and an Igbo sculpture—and treats them as texts, with headnotes and study questions.

A unique chapter on rhetoric and language

This intriguing chapter covers some of the great ideas from rhetoricians, making primary sources from writers such as Aristotle, Cicero, Kenneth Burke, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Chinua Achebe accessible to students.

A mix of long and short selections

A good balance of long and short selections in the text gives instructors the flexibility of assigning readings of different lengths and difficulty levels for use in different kinds of assignments.

100 pages of writing instruction

The text’s generous writing instruction means there’s no need to adopt a separate rhetoric: 6 chapters guide students through the writing process, from reading to generating ideas, from organizing their writing to evaluating and documenting sources.