The Conscious Reader Book

Contents

** indicates new to this edition

Preface

I. READING IMAGES

Scott McCloud: The Language of Comics

E. M. Forster: Art for Art’s Sake

Susan Sontag: Regarding the Pain of Others

**David Wall: It is and It Isn’t: Stereotypes, Advertising, and Narrative

Peggy Orenstein: What’s Wrong With Cinderella?

**Chris Sullentrop: Transformers

**Margaret Atwood: Pornography

Color Art Portfolio

II. CONSCIOUS READING, INTELLIGENT WRITING

Notebook

Stephen King: On Writing

Malcolm X: A Homemade Education

Flannery O’Connor: The Teaching of Literature

Personal Writing

Virginia Woolf: The Angel in the House

Essays

Joseph Williams and Greg Colomb: Argument, Critical Thinking, and Rationality

Patricia Kubis and Robert M. Howland: How to Develop a Good Style

**Martha Brockenbrough: Does IM Make U Dum?

**Katie Hafner: Seeing Corporate Fingerprints in Wikipedia Edits

**Julie J.C.H. Ryan: Student Plagiarism in an Online World

Fiction

**Henry David Thoreau: Reading

Poetry

**Taylor Mali: The The Impotence of Proofreading

III. PERSONAL VALUES AND RELATIONSHIPS

Notebook

**Dan Quayle: Restoring Basic Values

Constance Matthiessen: Harry Potter and Divorce Among the Muggles

Personal Writing

Colin Powell: The Good Soldier

Judith Ortiz Cofer: Casa: A Partial Remembrance of a Puerto Rican Childhood

Mohandas K. Gandhi: My Faith in Nonviolence

Jhumpa Lahiri: My Hyphenated Identity

Nancy Mairs: On Being a Cripple

Alfred Lubrano: Blue-Collar Roots, White-Collar Dreams

Essays

Benoit Denizet-Lewis: Friends, “Friends with Benefits,” and the Benefits of the Local Mall

Carson McCullers: Loneliness … an American Malady

Fiction

Kate Chopin: A Respectable Woman

Poetry

**Rudyard Kipling: If

T. S. Eliot: The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

Anne Sexton, Her Kind

William Shakespeare: Sonnet 29, Sonnet 116

IV. EDUCATION

Notebook

**Samuel G. Freedman: New Class(room) War: Teacher versus Technology

**Maggie Jackson: Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age

Personal Writing

**Katha Pollitt: Summers of Our Discontent

Essays

**Plato: The Allegory of the Cave

**Earl Shorris: Education as a Weapon in the Hands of the Restless Poor

**Drew Gilpin Faust: The University’s Crisis of Purpose

Lewis Thomas: The Humanities and Science

Bruno Bettelheim: The Child’s Need for Magic

Fiction

Anton Chekov: The Bet

Poetry

Langston Hughes: Theme for English B

V. POPULAR CULTURE

Notebook

**Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan: Why Vampires Never Die

**Christine Seifert: Bite Me! (Or Don’t!): Twilight as Abstinence Porn

Personal Writing

**Michael Albernethy: Male-Bashing on TV

**Gloria Steinem: Wonder Woman

Essays

Steven Levy: Facebook Grows Up

**Jay Weiner: How to Take Back Sports

**Sherry Turkle: Cuddling Up to Cyborg Babies

Joe Woodard: Pumped, Pierced, Painted, and Pagan

Eric Schlosser: Fast Food Nation

Fiction

Steven Moffat: “What I Did on My Christmas Holidays” By Sally Sparrow

Poetry

John Lennon: Working Class Hero

VI. ART AND SOCIETY

Notebook

Melissa Etheridge: Music as a Safe Haven

Marilyn Manson: Columbine: Who’s Fault is It?

**Charles Taylor: The Morality Police

Personal Writing

**Ludwig von Beethoven: The Helligenstadt Testament

Glenn Kurtz: Practicing

Essays

**Andrea Frasier: Why I Would Rather Have a Day Job

**George Orwell: Politics and the English Language

Roger Ebert: Great Movies

**Roger Rosenblatt: What’s That to Us?

Pete Rojas: Bootleg Culture

Fiction

Willa Cather:The Sculptor’s Funeral

Poetry

Sonia Sanchez: A Poem for Ella Fitzgerald

Walt Whitman: Poets to Come

VII. SCIENCE AND CIVILIZATION

Notebook

**David Smith: 2050, and Immortality is Within Our Grasp

Paul Davies: How to Build a Time Machine

Personal Writing

**Tom Wolfe: One Giant Leap to Nowhere

Essays

Stephen Jay Gould: Sex, Drugs, Disasters, and the Extinction of the Dinosaurs

David Quammen: Was Darwin Wrong?

Nicholas Kristof: Warm, Warmer, Warmest

**James Howard Kunstler: The Long Emergency

Steve D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner: Freakenomics: The Hidden Side of Everything

Fiction

Alan Lightman: A Place Where Time Stands Still

Poetry

**Affonso Romano De’Sant Anna:Letter to the Dead

VIII. FREEDOM AND HUMAN DIGNITY

Notebook

Anya Kamenetz: Generation Debt

**Barbara Ehrenreich: Selling in Minnesota

Personal Writing

**Martin Luther King, Jr.: Letter from Birmingham Jail

Essays

Thomas Jefferson: The Declaration of Independence

The Declaration of the Rights of Man

Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Coffin Mott: Seneca Falls Convention

Abraham Lincoln: The Gettysburg Address

William Faulkner: Nobel Prize Award Speech

Chief Seattle: Speech on the Signing of the Treaty of Port Elliott, 1855

Cornel West: On Affirmative Action

**Andrew Sullivan: A Conservative Case for Gay Marriage

**Mary Gordon: A Moral Choice

Fiction

Edwidge Danticat: Breath, Eyes, Memory

Poetry

Reynolds Price: Tom, Dying of AIDS

Matthew Arnold: Dover Beach

Taha Muhammad Ali: Revenge

IX. GLOBALISM, NATIONALISM, AND CULTURAL IDENTITY

Notebook

**Barack Obama: A Lasting Peace

Anthony Shadid: Legacy of the Prophet

Wesley Clark: The Next War

Howard Gardner: Leading Beyond the Nation-State

Personal Writing

Chris Hedges: The Ten Commandments in America

**Salman Rushdie: Imagine There’s No Heaven

Essays

**Peggy Noonan: The Case for Getting Off Base

Niccolo Machiavelli: Of Cruelty and Clemency, and

Whether It Is Better to Be Loved or Feared

Aung San Suu Kyi: Freedom from Fear

**Oscar Wilde: The Soul of Man Under Socialism

Anna Quindlen: Immigration: Newcomers by Numbers

Fiction

Sherman Alexie: What You Pawn I Will Redeem

Poetry

Sarah Littlecrow-Russell: Apology to the Wasps

Wilfred Owen: Dulce et Decorum Est