Preface for Instructors
INTRODUCTION
Responding to Literature
Emily Dickinson, There Is No Frigate Like A Book
Why We Read Literature
Reading Actively and Critically
Reading Fiction
The Methods of Fiction
Tone
Plot
Characterization
Setting
Point of View
Irony
Theme
Questions for Exploring Fiction
Reading Poetry
Walt Whitman, When I Heard the Learn'd Astronome
Word Choice
Figurative Language
Metaphor
Simile
Personification
Allusion
Symbols
The Music of Poetry
Questions for Exploring Poetry
Reading Drama
Stages and Staging
The Elements of Drama
Characters
Dramatic Irony
Plot and Conflict
Questions for Exploring Drama
Reading 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 Nonfiction
Writing about Literature
Responding 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 Information
Drafting the Essay
Refining Your Opening
Supporting Your Thesis
Revising the Essay
Editing Your Draft
Selecting Strong Verbs
Eliminating Unnecessary Modifiers
Grammatical Connections
Proofreading Your Draft
Some Common Writing Assignments
Explication
Analysis
Comparison and Contrast
The Research Paper
An Annotated Student Research Paper
Some Matters of Form and Documentation
Titles
Quotations
Brackets and Ellipses
Quotation Marks and Other Punctuation
Documentation
Documenting Online Sources
A Checklist for Writing about Literature
INNOCENCE AND EXPERIENCE
Questions for Thinking and Writing
Fiction
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 Evil
Poetry
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, Solipsism
CONNECTING POEMS: Revisiting Fairy Tales
Anne Sexton, Cinderella
Bruce Bennett, The True Story of Snow White
Marilyn Hacker, Conte
Katharyn Howd Machan, Hazel Tells LaVerne
CONNECTING 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, Thanksgiving
Drama
Henrik Ibsen, A Doll's House
Suzan-Lori Parks, Father Comes Home from the Wars
Nonfiction
Langston Hughes, Salvation
Judith Ortiz Cofer, American History
Brian Doyle, Pop Art
CONNECTING NONFICTION: Graduating
*David Sedaris, What I Learned, And What I Said at Princeton
David Foster Wallace, Commencement Speech, Kenyon College
Further Questions for Thinking and Writing
CONFORMITY AND REBELLION
Questions for Thinking and Writing
Fiction
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 Mending
CONNECTING STORIES: Superantiheroes
Harlan Ellison, "Repent, Harlequin!" Said the Ticktockman
Jonathan Lethem, Super Goat Man
Poetry
*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, Flounder
CONNECTING 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 America
CONNECTING 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 Fighting
Drama
*Sophocles, Antigone
Nonfiction
Jonathan Swift, A Modest Proposal
*Jamaica Kincaid, On Seeing England for the First Time
CONNECTING 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 Jail
Further Questions for Thinking and Writing
CULTURE AND IDENTITY
Questions 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 Flight
CONNECTING STORIES: Insiders and Outcasts
William Faulkner, A Rose for Emily
Ha Jin, The Bridegroom
Poetry
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, Blue
CONNECTING POEMS: Fashioning Selves
Emily Dickinson, What Soft—Cherubic Creatures—
June Jordan, Memo:
Marge Piercy, Barbie Doll
Taslima Nasrin, Things Cheaply Had
CONNECTING 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 Mother
Drama
Lorraine Hansberry, A Raisin in the Sun
David Henry Hwang, Trying to Find Chinatown
Nonfiction
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 Primer
Further Questions for Thinking and Writing
LOVE AND HATE
Questions 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 People
Poetry
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 Purposes
CONNECTING POEMS: Remembering Fathers
Theodore Roethke, My Papa's Waltz
Robert Hayden, Those Winter Sundays
Molly Peacock, Say You Love Me
Li-Young Lee, Eating Alone
CONNECTING 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 Mistress
Drama
*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 Love
Further Questions for Thinking and Writing
LIFE AND DEATH
Questions 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 & Giraffe
Poetry
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 Woman
CASE 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 House
CONNECTING 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 Flower
Drama
Woody Allen, Death Knocks
Nonfiction
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 Again
Further Questions for Thinking and Writing
Appendices
Glossary of Critical Approaches
Introduction
Deconstruction
Ethical Criticism
Feminist Criticism
Formalist Criticism
Marxist Criticism
Historical Criticism
Psychoanalytic Criticism
Postcolonial Criticism
Reader-Response Criticism
Biographical Notes on the Authors
Glossary of Literary Terms
Index of Authors and Titles
*new to this edition