Making Arguments About Literature: A Compact Guide and Anthology Book

Preface for Instructors

PART I. MAKING ARGUMENTS

1. What Is Literature: What Is Argument?
How Have People Defined Literature?
Why Read Literature?
What is Argument?
SUMMING UP

2. Developing Arguments about Literature
Responding to Four Poems about Work
William Blake, The Chimney Sweeper
Stephen Dunn, Hard Work
Dorianne Laux, What I Wouldn't Do
Maura Stanton, Shoplifters
The Elements of Argument
Issues / Claims / Persuasion /Audience / Evidence / Warrants
Literature as Argument
John Milton, When I Consider How My Light Is Spent
Investigating Topics of Literary Criticism
Lynda Hull, Night Waitress
SUMMING UP

3. Writing an Argument
William Wordsworth, The Solitary Reaper
Exploring Planning Composing Title / Style / Introduction / Development / Emphasis / Conclusion /
Further Suggestions for Developing an Argument about a Work of Literature Sample Student Paper: First Draft
Abby Hazelton, The Passage of Time in "The Solitary Reaper"
Revising Recognizing and Avoiding Fallacies / Logic / Organization / Clarity /
Emphasis / Style / Grammar / Physical Appearance Sample Student Paper: Revised Draft
Abby Hazelton, The Passage of Time in "The Solitary Reaper"
Writing a Comparative Paper
Ted Kooser, Four Secretaries Sample Comparative Paper
Marla Tracy, When Singing Is Not Singing SUMMING UP

4. Making Arguments about Stories
Eudora Welty, A Visit of Charity
William Carlos Williams, The Use of Force
Rebecca Brown, The Gift of Sweat Students' Personal Responses to the Stories The Elements of Short Fiction
Plot and Structure / Point of View / Characters / Setting / Imagery / Language / Theme
Sample Student Paper: Final Draft
Alison Caldwell, Forms of Blindness in "The Use of Force"
SUMMING UP

5. Making Arguments about Poems
Rosanna Warren, In Creve Couer, Missouri
Charles Fort, We Did Not Fear the Father
Philip Levine, What Work Is
Edwin Arlington Robinson, The Mill
Yusef Komunyakaa, Blackberries
Mary Oliver, Singapore A Student's Personal Responses to the Poems Sample Student Paper: First Draft
Michaela Fiorruci, Boundaries in Robinson, Komunyakaa, and Oliver
The Elements of Poetry Speaker and Tone / Diction and Syntax / Figures of Speech / Sound/ /Rhythm and Meter / Theme Revised Student Draft
Michaela Fiorruci, Negotiating Boundaries SUMMING UP

6. Making Arguments about Plays
August Strindberg, The Stronger
Susan Glaspell, Trifles
A Student's Personal Response to the Plays The Elements of Drama
Plot and Structure/ Characters/ Stage Directions and Setting/ Imagery / Language / Theme
Writing Sample Student Paper
Trish Carlisle, "Which Is the Stronger Actress in Strindberg's Play?"
SUMMING UP

7. Making Arguments about Essays
June Jordan, Many Rivers to Cross
Alice Walker, In Search of Our Mother's Gardens
A Student's Personal Response The Elements of Essays
Voice / Style / Structure / Ideas /
Sample Student Paper
Isla Bravo, Resisting Women's Roles
SUMMING UP

8. Writing a Research Paper
Identifying an Issue and a Tentative Claim Finding and Using Secondary Sources
Finding Sources in the Library
Evaluating Sources
Finding Sources with a Computer
Taking Notes: Summarizing, Paraphrasing, Quoting, and Avoiding Plagiarism Writing the Paper: Integrating Sources Documenting Sources: MLA Format
MLA In-Text Citation
MLA Works Cited
Books / Short Works from Collections and Anthologies/ Works in Periodicals / CD-ROMs / The Internet / Personal Communication / Multiple Works by the Same Author
Sample Student Research Paper
Rebecca Stanley, Racial Disharmony and "Désirée's Baby"
Using a Literary Work as a Springboard for Examining Social Issues Sample Student Research Paper
Jason Fisk, "Effectively 'Managing' Grief"
SUMMING UP

PART II. THEMATIC CLUSTERS OF LITERATURE

Story Clusters
Mothers and Daughters
Tillie Olsen, I Stand Here Ironing
Amy Tan, Two Kinds
Alice Walker, Everyday Use
Romantic Dreams
Leslie Marmon Silko, Yellow Woman
James Joyce, Araby
John Updike, A & P
Revenge
Edgar Allan Poe, The Cask of Amontillado
Louise Erdrich, Fleur
Andre Dubus, Killings
Losing Innocence: Re-Visions of Little Red Riding Hood
Charles Perrault, Little Red Riding Hood
Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm, Little Red Cap
Angela Carter, The Company of Wolves

Poetry Clusters
Reconciling with Fathers
Lucille Clifton, forgiving my father
Robert Hayden, Those Winter Sundays
Theodore Roethke, My Papa's Waltz
Shirley Geok-lin Lim, Father from Asia
Responding to Teachers
Langston Hughes, Theme for English B
Linda Pastan, Ethics
Henry Reed, Naming of Parts
Walt Whitman, When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer
Rosemary Catacalos, David Talamantez on the Last Day of Second Grade
Gays and Lesbians in Families
Essex Hemphill, Commitments
Kitty Tsui, A Chinese Banquet
Minnie Bruce Pratt, Two Small-Sized Girls
True Love
William Shakespeare, Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Anne Bradstreet, To My Dear and Loving Husband
e. e. cummings, somewhere i have never travelled
Edna St. Vincent Millay, Love Is Not All
Poetry of the Holocaust
Pastor Martin Niemoller, "First They Came for the Jews"
Nelly Sachs, "A Dead Child Speaks"
Yevgeny Yevtuchenko, "Babii Yar"
Karen Gershon, "Race"
Anne Sexton, "After Auschwitz"
Imagining the End: A Collection of Writings by Emily Dickinson
Emily Dickinson, I like a look of Agony
I've seen a Dying Eye
I heard a Fly buzz -- when I died --
Because I could not stop for Death--
Disrespecting Death
John Donne, Death Be Not Proud
Dylan Thomas, Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night
Wyslawa Szymborska, On Death, without Exaggeration

A Drama Cluster
A Family's Dreams: Cultural Contexts for Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun
Lorraine Hansberry, A Raisin in the Sun
Cultural Contexts:
The Crisis, The Hansberrys of Chicago: They Join Business Acumen with Social Vision
Lorraine Hansberry, April 23, 1964, Letter to the New York Times
Alan Ehrenhalt, From The Lost City: Discovering the Forgotten Virtues of Community in the Chicago of the 1950s
Sidney Poitier, From The Measure of a Man: A Spiritual Autobiography

Essay Clusters
Community Justice
Scott Russell Sanders, Doing Time in the Thirteenth Chair
Joyce Carol Oates, I, the Juror
Maxine Hong Kingston, No Name Woman
Reflecting on Killing Animals
George Orwell, Shooting an Elephant
Annie Dillard, The Deer at Providencia
Bruce Weigl, Spike
Comparing School Culture with the Culture of Home: Critical Commentaries on Richard Rodriguez's "Aria"
Richard Rodriguez, Aria
Critical Commentaries:
Ramón Saldívar, From Chicano Narrative
Tomás Rivera, From "Richard Rodriguez's Hunger of Memory as Humanistic Antithesis"
Victor Villanueva Jr., From "Whose Voice Is It Anyway?"

PART III. A GALLERY OF LITERATURE

A Gallery of Stories
James Baldwin, Sonny's Blues
Toni Cade Bambara, The Lesson
Raymond Carver, What We Talk About When We Talk about Love
Kate Chopin, Desiree's Baby
Kate Chopin, The Story of an Hour
Willliam Faulkner, A Rose for Emily
Gabriel Garcia Marquez, The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Yellow Wallpaper
Nathaniel Hawthorne, Young Goodman Brown
Pam Houston, How to Talk to a Hunter
Jamaica Kincaid, Girl
Bharati Mukherjee, The Management of Grief
Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried
Flannery O'Connor, A Good Man Is Hard to Find

A Gallery of Poems
Sherman Alexie, Capital Punishment
Julia Alvarez, How I Learned to Sweep
Matthew Arnold, Dover Beach
Elizabeth Bishop, One Art
Elizabeth Bishop, The Fish
Gwendolyn Brooks, The Mother
Robert Browning, My Last Duchess
Countee Cullen, Incident
Toi Derricotte, Fears of Eighth Grade
Mark Doty, Night Ferry
Cornelius Eady, Who Am I?
T. S. Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
Carolyn Forche, The Colonel
Robert Frost, After Apple-Picking Mending Wall
Nikki Giovanni, Legacies
Louise Gluck, The School Children
Seamus Heaney, Punishment
Linda Hogan, Heritage
Gerard Manley Hopkins, Spring and Fall
A. E. Housman, Loveliest of Trees, the Cherry Now
John Keats, Ode on a Grecian Urn
Maxine Kumin, Woodchucks
D. H. Lawrence, Snake
Denise Levertov, The Ache of Marriage
Philip Levine, Among Children
Robert Lowell, To Speak of the Woe That Is Marriage
Christopher Marlowe, The Passionate Shepherd to His Love
Andrew Marvell, To His Coy Mistress
Marge Piercy, To Be of Use
Sylvia Plath, Daddy
Walter Raleigh, The Nymph's Reply to the Shepherd
Alberto Rios, Mi Abuelo
Edwin Arlington Robinson, Richard Cory
Anne Sexton, The Farmer's Wife
Percy Shelley, Ozymandias
Stevie Smith, Not Waving But Drowning
Cathy Song, The Grammar of Silk
Gary Soto, Behind Grandma's House
William Stafford, Traveling through the Dark
Wislawa Szymborska, True Love
William Carlos Williams, The Last Words of My English Grandmother
James Wright, Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy's Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota
William Butler Yeats, The Second Coming
Adam Zagajewski, Try to Praise the Mutilated World

A Gallery of Plays
Sophocles, Antigone
William Shakespeare, Hamlet

A Gallery of Essays
Diane Ackerman, The Perfect Union
bell hooks, Inspired Eccentricity
Martin Luther King, Jr., Letter from Birmingham Jail
N. Scott Momaday, The Way to Rainy Mountain
Jonathan Swift, A Modest Proposal

Appendix: Making Arguments Using Critical Approaches
Contemporary Schools of Criticism New Criticism; Feminist Criticism; Psychoanalytic Criticism; Marxist Criticism; Deconstruction; @b=Reader-Response Criticism; Postcolonial Criticism; New Historicism Working with the Critical Approaches
James Joyce, Counterparts
Ann Petry, Like a Winding Sheet
Index of Authors, Titles, and First Lines Index of Key Terms (inside back cover)