Literature: The Human Experience: Reading and Writing Book

Preface for Instructors

INTRODUCTIONResponding to Literature          Emily Dickinson, There Is No Frigate Like A BookWhy We Read LiteratureReading Actively and CriticallyReading Fiction     The Methods of Fiction          Tone          Plot          Characterization          Setting          Point of View          Irony          Theme     Questions for Exploring FictionReading Poetry          Walt Whitman, When I Heard the Learn'd AstronomeWord ChoiceFigurative Language          Metaphor          Simile          Personification          Allusion          Symbols     The Music of Poetry     Questions for Exploring PoetryReading Drama     Stages and Staging     The Elements of Drama          Characters          Dramatic Irony          Plot and Conflict     Questions for Exploring DramaReading Nonfiction     Types of Nonfiction          Narrative Nonfiction          Descriptive Nonfiction          Expository Nonfiction          Argumentative Nonfiction     Analyzing Nonfiction          The Thesis          Structure and Detail          Style and Tone     Questions for Exploring NonfictionWriting about LiteratureResponding to Your Reading     Annotating While You Read          William Shakespeare, Sonnet 29     Freewriting     Keeping a Journal     Exploring and Planning          Asking Good Questions          Establishing a Working Thesis          Gathering Information          Organizing InformationDrafting the Essay     Refining Your Opening     Supporting Your ThesisRevising the Essay     Editing Your Draft          Selecting Strong Verbs          Eliminating Unnecessary Modifiers          Grammatical Connections     Proofreading Your DraftSome Common Writing Assignments     Explication     Analysis     Comparison and ContrastThe Research PaperAn Annotated Student Research PaperSome Matters of Form and Documentation     Titles     Quotations          Brackets and Ellipses          Quotation Marks and Other PunctuationDocumentation          Documenting Online SourcesA Checklist for Writing about Literature INNOCENCE AND EXPERIENCEQuestions for Thinking and WritingFiction     Nathaniel Hawthorne, Young Goodman Brown     John Updike, A & P     Toni Cade Bambara, The Lesson     Jamaica Kincaid, Girl     *Daniel Orozco, Orientation     Hari Kunzru, Raj, Bohemian*CONNECTING STORIES: Crushes     James Joyce, Araby     *Rivka Galchen, Wild Berry Blue*CASE STUDY: Flannery O'Connor in a Critical Context     Flannery O'Connor, A Good Man Is Hard to Find     *Flannery O'Connor, from Mystery & Manners     *Rebecca R. Butler, What's So Funny about Flannery O'Connor?     *Hallman B. Bryant, Reading the Map in "A Good Man Is Hard to Find"     *Robert H. Brinkmeyer, Flannery O'Connor and Her Readers     *Joseph O'Neil, Touched by EvilPoetry     William Blake, The Chimney Sweeper     William Blake, The Lamb     William Blake, The Garden of Love      William Blake, London     William Blake, The Tyger     Robert Browning, My Last Duchess     Emily Dickinson, I felt a Funeral, in my Brain     Thomas Hardy, The Ruined Maid     Gerard Manley Hopkins, Spring and Fall     A.E. Housman, Terence, This Is Stupid Stuff      A.E. Housman, When I Was One-and-Twenty     William Butler Yeats, Leda and the Swan     Robert Frost, The Road Not Taken      Robert Frost, Birches     e.e. cummings, In Just —     Stevie Smith, Not Waving but Drowning      Stevie Smith, To Carry the Child     Countee Cullen, Incident     Dylan Thomas, Fern Hill     Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Constantly Risking Absurdity     Philip Larkin, A Study of Reading Habits      Philip Larkin, This Be the Verse     *Anthony Hecht, After the Rain     Audra Lorde, Hanging Fire     *Jean Nordhaus, A Dandelion for My Mother     Louise Gluck, The School Children     *Alan Feldman, My Century     Hanan Mikha'il 'Ashrawi, From the Diary of an Almost-Four-Year-Old     Katherine McAlpine, Plus C'est la Meme Chose     Sandra Cisneros, My Wicked Wicked Ways     *Sandra Castillo, Christmas, 1970     *Spencer Reese, The Manhattan Project      *Carrie Fountain, Experience     Evelyn Lau, SolipsismCONNECTING POEMS: Revisiting Fairy Tales     Anne Sexton, Cinderella     Bruce Bennett, The True Story of Snow White      Marilyn Hacker, Conte     Katharyn Howd Machan, Hazel Tells LaVerneCONNECTING POEMS: Voices of Experience     Langston Hughes, Mother to Son     Peter Meinke, Advice to My Son     Robert Mezey, My Mother     Molly Peacock, Our Room     Gary Soto, Behind Grandma's House*CONNECTING POEMS: Happy Holidays     *W. S. Merwin, Thanks     *Carl Dennis, Thanksgiving Letter from Harry     *Sheila Ortiz Taylor, The Way Back     *James Welch, Christmas Comes to Moccasin Flat     *Maggie Nelson, ThanksgivingDrama     Henrik Ibsen, A Doll's House     Suzan-Lori Parks, Father Comes Home from the WarsNonfiction     Langston Hughes, Salvation     Judith Ortiz Cofer, American History     Brian Doyle, Pop ArtCONNECTING NONFICTION: Graduating     *David Sedaris, What I Learned, And What I Said at Princeton     David Foster Wallace, Commencement Speech, Kenyon CollegeFurther Questions for Thinking and Writing CONFORMITY AND REBELLIONQuestions for Thinking and WritingFiction     Herman Melville, Bartleby, the Scrivener     Franz Kafka, A Hunger Artist     Ralph Ellison, Battle Royal     Shirley Jackson, The Lottery     Ursula K. Le Guin, The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas     Amy Tan, Two Kinds      Aimee Bender, Tiger MendingCONNECTING STORIES: Superantiheroes     Harlan Ellison, "Repent, Harlequin!" Said the Ticktockman     Jonathan Lethem, Super Goat ManPoetry     *John Donne, Holy Sonnets: "If poisonous minerals, and if that tree"     *Richard Crashaw, But Men Loved Darkness rather than Light     Phyllis Wheatley, On Being Brought from Africa to America     William Wordsworth, The World Is Too Much with Us     Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Ulysses     Emily Dickinson, Much Madness is divinest Sense     Emily Dickinson, She rose to His Requirement     William Butler Yeats, Easter 1916     William Butler Yeats, The Second Coming     *Carl Sandburg, I Am the People, the Mob     Wallace Stevens, Sunday Morning     Anna Akhmatova, from Requiem     Claude McKay, If We Must Die     Langston Hughes, Harlem     W.H. Auden, The Unknown Citizen     Dudley Randall, Ballad of Birmingham      Henry Reed, Naming of Parts     Gwendolyn Brooks, We Real Cool     *Donald Davie, The Nonconformist     Philip Levine, What Work Is     Marge Piercy, The Market Economy     *Marvin Klotz, God: The Villanelle     Richard Garcia, Why I Left the Church     Carolyn Forche, The Colonel     *Natasha Tretheway, FlounderCONNECTING POEMS: Revolutionary Thinking     William Butler Yeats, The Great Day     Robert Frost, A Semi-Revolution     Oscar Williams, A Total Revolution     Nikki Giovanni, Dreams*CONNECTING POEMS: Revising America     *Walt Whitman, One Song, America, Before I Go     *Langston Hughes, I, Too     *Allen Ginsberg, A Supermarket in California    *Shirley Geok-Lin Lim, Learning to Love AmericaCONNECTING POEMS: Soldiers' Protests     Thomas Hardy, The Man He Killed     Wilfred Owen, Dulce et Decorum Est     Hanan Mikha'il 'Ashrawi, Night Patrol     Steve Earle, Rich Man's War     *Kevin C. Powers, Letter Composed During a Lull in the FightingDrama     *Sophocles, AntigoneNonfiction     Jonathan Swift, A Modest Proposal     *Jamaica Kincaid, On Seeing England for the First TimeCONNECTING NONFICTION: Weighing Belief     E.L. Doctorow, Why We Are Infidels     Salman Rushdie, "Imagine There's No Heaven"CASE STUDY: "Letter from Birmingham Jail" in Historical Context     from The U.S. Constitution, Article I, Section 2     from Dred Scott v. Sandford     Jim Crow Laws     A Call for Unity from Alabama Clergymen     The Birmingham Truce Agreement     Martin Luther King Jr., Letter from Birmingham JailFurther Questions for Thinking and Writing CULTURE AND IDENTITYQuestions for Thinking and Writing Fiction     Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Yellow Wallpaper     James Baldwin, Sonny's Blues     Alice Walker, Everyday Use     *Sherman Alexie, War Dances     Jhumpa Lahiri, Hell-Heaven     *Dagoberto Gilb, Uncle Rock     *Yiyun Li, The Science of FlightCONNECTING STORIES: Insiders and Outcasts     William Faulkner, A Rose for Emily     Ha Jin, The BridegroomPoetry     Emily Dickinson, I'm Nobody! Who Are You?     *James Weldon Johnson, A Poet to His Baby Son     Paul Laurence Dunbar, We Wear the Mask     *Georgia Douglas Johnson, Old Black Men     T.S. Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock     e.e. cummings, the Cambridge ladies who live in furnished souls     Etheridge Knight, Hard Rock Returns to Prison from the Hospital for the Criminal Insane     Yevgeny Yevtushenko, I Would Like     Wole Soyinka, Telephone Conversation     Kay Ryan, All Shall Be Restored     Juan Felipe Herrera, 187 Reasons Why Mexicans Can't Cross the Border     *Maggie Anderson, Long Story     Judith Ortiz Cofer, Latin Women Pray     Marilyn Chin, How I Got That Name     *Alexandra Teague, Adjectives of Order     Louise Erdrich, Dear John Wayne     Joshua Clover, The Nevada Glassworks     Kevin Young, Negative     *Terrance Hayes, Roots*CONNECTING POEMS: Poetic Identities     Walt Whitman, from Song of Myself     *Frank O'Hara, My Heart     *Billy Collins, Monday     *Timothy Yu, Chinese Silence No. 22     *Carl Phillips, BlueCONNECTING POEMS: Fashioning Selves     Emily Dickinson, What Soft—Cherubic Creatures—     June Jordan, Memo:     Marge Piercy, Barbie Doll     Taslima Nasrin, Things Cheaply HadCONNECTING POEMS: Working Mothers     Tess Gallagher, I Stop Writing the Poem     Julia Alvarez, Woman's Work     Rita Dove, My Mother Enters the Work Force     Deborah Garrison, Sestina for the Working MotherDrama     Lorraine Hansberry, A Raisin in the Sun     David Henry Hwang, Trying to Find ChinatownNonfiction     Virginia Woolf, What If Shakespeare Had Had a Sister?     Zora Neale Hurston, How It Feels to Be Colored Me     George Orwell, Shooting an Elephant*CONNECTING NONFICTION: Fitting In      Bharati Mukherjee, Two Ways to Belong in America     *Lacy M. Johnson, White Trash PrimerFurther Questions for Thinking and Writing LOVE AND HATEQuestions for Thinking and Writing Fiction     Kate Chopin, The Storm     *Zora Neale Hurston, Sweat     Raymond Carver, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love     Joyce Carol Oates, Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?     *Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Birdsong*CONNECTING STORIES: Having It All     Ernest Hemingway, Hills Like White Elephants     *David Foster Wallace, Good PeoplePoetry     Sappho, With His Venom     *Catullus, 85     Anonymous, Bonny Barbara Allan     William Shakespeare, Sonnet 18 "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?"     William Shakespeare, Sonnet 29 "When, in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes"     *William Shakespeare, Sonnet 64 "When I have seen by Time's fell hand defaced"     William Shakespeare, Sonnet 116, "Let me not to the marriage of true minds"     William Shakespeare, Sonnet 130 "My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun"     John Donne, The Flea     *John Donne, The Prohibition     John Donne, A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning     Ben Jonson, Song, to Celia     Lady Mary Wroth, Am I thus conquered?     Robert Herrick, To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time     Anne Bradstreet, To My Dear and Loving Husband     *Katherine Philips, Friendship's Mystery, to My Dearest Lucasia     *Ephelia, To My Rival     William Blake, A Poison Tree     Robert Burns, A Red, Red Rose      Matthew Arnold, Dover Beach     Robert Frost, Fire and Ice     Dorothy Parker, One Perfect Rose     e.e. cummings, she being Brand     Theodore Roethke, I Knew a Woman     Elizabeth Bishop, One Art     John Frederick Nims, Love Poem     Wislawa Szymborska, A Happy Love     Lisa Mueller, Happy and Unhappy Families     Carolyn Kizer, Bitch     Galway Kinnell, After Making Love We Hear Footsteps     Adrienne Rich, Living in Sin     Sylvia Plath, Daddy     Lucille Clifton, There Is a Girl Inside     Seamus Heaney, Valediction     *Robert Hass, Meditation at Lagunitas     Billy Collins, Sonnet     Sharon Olds, Sex without Love     Deborah Pope, Getting Through     Wyatt Prunty, Learning the Bicycle     *Adrian Blevins, The Case Against April     *Daisy Fried, Econo Motel, Ocean City*CONNECTING POEMS: Looking Back on Love     *Sir Thomas Wyatt, They Flee from Me     *Lady Mary Wroth, "Come darkest night, becoming sorrow best"     *Sharon Olds, My Father's Diary     *Dean Young, Winged PurposesCONNECTING POEMS: Remembering Fathers     Theodore Roethke, My Papa's Waltz     Robert Hayden, Those Winter Sundays     Molly Peacock, Say You Love Me     Li-Young Lee, Eating AloneCONNECTING POEMS: Proposals and Replies     Sir Walter Raleigh, The Nymph's Reply to the Shepherd     Christopher Marlowe, The Passionate Shepherd to his Love     Andrew Marvell, To His Coy Mistress     Annie Finch, Coy MistressDrama*CASE STUDY: Cultural Contexts for Othello     William Shakespeare, Othello     *Juan Louis Vives, from Instruction of a Christian Woman     *George Best, from A True Discourse of the Late Voyages of Discovery     *Robert Burton, from Anatomy of Melancholy     *Francis Bacon, from The Essays or Counsels, Civil and Moral     Susan Glaspell, Trifles     *Lynn Nottage, Poof!Nonfiction     Paul, 1 Corinthians 13     Maxine Hong Kingston, No Name Woman     Stuart Lishan, Winter Count, 1964     Grace Talusan, My Father's Noose*CONNECTING NONFICTION: Love in the Digital Age     *Katha Pollitt, Webstalker     *Megan Daum, Virtual LoveFurther Questions for Thinking and Writing LIFE AND DEATHQuestions for Thinking and Writing Fiction     Edgar Allen Poe, The Cask of Amontillado     Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilyich     *Kate Chopin, The Story of an Hour     Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried     Leslie Marmon Silko, The Man to Send Rain Clouds     Helena Maria Viramontes, The Moths*CONNECTING STORIES: Between Life and Death     Katherine Anne Porter, The Jilting of Granny Weatherall     *Tobias Wolff, Bullet in the Brain*CONNECTING STORIES: Endangered Species     *T.C. Boyle, Admiral     *Lydia Millet, Girl & GiraffePoetry     Anonymous, Edward     William Shakespeare, Sonnet 73 "That time of year thou mayst in me behold"     William Shakespeare, Fear No More the Heat o' the Sun     John Donne, Death, Be Not Proud     Percy Bysshe Shelley, Ozymandias     John Keats, Ode on a Grecian Urn     Emily Dickinson, After great pain, a formal feeling comes     Emily Dickinson, I heard a Fly buzz—when I died     Emily Dickinson, Apparently with no surprise     Emily Dickinson, Because I could not stop for Death     *Gerard Manley Hopkins, God's Grandeur     A.E. Housman, To an Athlete Dying Young     William Butler Yeats, Sailing to Byzantium     Edwin Arlington Robinson, Richard Cory     Robert Frost, After Apple-Picking     Robert Frost, "Out, Out—"     Robert Frost, Nothing Gold Can Stay      Robert Frost, Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening     Robert Frost, Design     Pablo Neruda, The Dead WomanCASE STUDY: Poems about Paintings     W.H. Auden, Musee des Beaux Arts     Pieter Brueghal the Elder, Landscape with the Fall of Icarus     Lawrence Ferlinghetti, In Goya's Greatest Scenes     Francisco de Goya, The Third of May, 1808, Madrid     Anne Sexton, The Starry Night     Vincent van Gogh, The Starry Night     Donald Finkel, The Great Wave: Hokusai     Katsushika Hokusai, The Great Wave of Kanagawa     Dylan Thomas, Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night     Catherine Davis, After a Time     *Donald Hall, Affirmation     Mary Oliver, When Death Comes     *Alicia Ostriker, Daffodils     Seamus Heaney, Mid-term Break     Janice Mirikitani, Suicide Note     Jane Kenyon, Let Evening Come     Yusef Komunyakaa, Facing It     Victor Hernandez Cruz, Problems with Hurricanes     *Mark Halliday, Chicken Salad     *Linda Gregerson, Sweet     *Marie Howe, What The Living Do      *Mark Turpin, The Man Who Built This HouseCONNECTING POEMS: Animal Fates     Elizabeth Bishop, The Fish     William Stafford, Traveling Through the Dark     *William Greenway, Pit Pony     *Edward Hirsch, Wild Gratitude*CONNECTING POEMS: Seizing the Day     *Rainer Maria Rilke, Archaic Torso of Apollo     *James Wright, Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy's Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota     *Billy Collins, Sandhill Cranes of Nebraska     *Barbara Ras, You Can't Have It All     *Tony Hoagland, I Have News for You*CONNECTING POEMS: Into the World     *Gwendolyn Brooks, The Mother     *Lisel Mueller, Curriculum Vitae     *David Wojahn, August, 1953     *Sam Hamill, The Orchid FlowerDrama     Woody Allen, Death KnocksNonfiction     John Donne, Meditation XIV, from Devotions upon Emergent Occasions     *Rachel Carson, The Obligation to Endure     Jill Christman, The Sloth*CONNECTING NONFICTION: Closer to Death     E.B. White, Once More to the Lake     *Brian Doyle, Joyas Voladores     *Chang-Rae Lee, Coming Home AgainFurther Questions for Thinking and Writing AppendicesGlossary of Critic