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Table of Contents

Contents

Resources for Reading and Writing about Literature 

Preface for Instructors 

Introduction 
The Nature of Literature 
Emily Dickinson, “A narrow Fellow in the Grass” 
The Value of Literature 
The Changing Literary Canon 

Fiction  
The Elements of Fiction  
1. Reading Fiction  
Reading Fiction Responsively 
Kate Chopin, “The Story of an Hour”
A Sample Close Reading: Annotated Section of “The Story of an Hour”
A Sample Paper: Differences in Responses to Kate Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour” 
Explorations and Formulas 
A Comparison of Two Stories 
*Grace Paley, “Wants” 
*Judith Ortiz Cofer, “Volar” 

2. Plot  
*T.C. Boyle, “The Hit Man” 
Alice Walker, “The Flowers” 
William Faulkner, “A Rose for Emily”
PERSPECTIVE: William Faulkner, On “A Rose for Emily” 
A SAMPLE CLOSE READING: An Annotated Section of “A Rose for Emily” 
A SAMPLE STUDENT RESPONSE: Conflict in the Plot of William Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily” 
Andre Dubus, “Killings” 
A.L. Bader, “Nothing Happens in Modern Short Stories” 

3. Character  
*Tobias Wolff, “Powder”  
Jamaica Kincaid, “Girl”  
Xu Xi, “Famine”  
*James Baldwin, “Sonny’s Blues” 

4. Setting  
Ernest Hemingway, “Soldier’s Home” 
PERSPECTIVE: Ernest Hemingway, “On What Every Writer Needs”
*Ursula LeGuin, “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” 
*Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “The Yellow Wallpaper” 

5. Point of View  
Third-Person and First-Person Narrators 
     John Updike, “A & P” 
     *Manuel Muñoz, “Zigzagger” 
     Maggie Mitchell, “It Would Be Different If” 

6. Symbolism  
*Louise Erdrich, “The Red Convertible”  
*Ralph Ellison, “King of the Bingo Game” 
*Cynthia Ozick, “The Shawl”  
A SAMPLE STUDENT RESPONSE: On Cynthia Ozick’s “The Shawl”
*Ann Beattie, “Janus” 

7. Theme  
*Shirley Jackson, “The Lottery” 
Katherine Mansfield, “Miss Brill” 
*Zora Neale Hurston, “Sweat” 

8. Style, Tone, and Irony  
Style 
Tone 
Irony 
Raymond Carver, “Popular Mechanics”  
PERSPECTIVE: John Barth, “On Minimalist Fiction” 
A SAMPLE STUDENT RESPONSE: The Minimalist Style of Raymond Carver’s “Popular Mechanics” 
Susan Minot, “Lust” 
*Jim Shepard, “Reach for the Sky” 

Approaches to Fiction 

9. A Study of Nathaniel Hawthorne  
A Brief Biography and Introduction 
      Nathaniel Hawthorne, *“The Minister’s Black Veil” 
         “Young Goodman Brown” 
         “The Birthmark”  
PERSPECTIVES
      Nathaniel Hawthorne, “On Solitude” 
          “On the Power of the Writer’s
Imagination” 
          “On His Short Stories” 
      Herman Melville, “On Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Tragic Vision” 
      Gaylord Brewer, “The Joys of Secret Sin” 

10. A Study of Flannery O’Connor  
A Brief Biography and Introduction 
     Flannery O’Connor, “A Good Man is Hard to Find” 
       “Good Country People” 
       “Revelation” 
PERSPECTIVES
      Flannery O’Connor, “On the Use of Exaggeration and Distortion” 
      Josephine Hendin, “On O’Connor’s Refusal to ‘Do Pretty’” 
      Claire Katz, “The Function of Violence in O’Connor’s Fiction” 
      Edward Kessler, “On O’Connor’s Use of History” 
      TIME Magazine, “On A Good Man is Hard to Find and Other Stories” 

11. A Cultural Case Study: James Joyce’s “Eveline”  
A Brief Biography and Introduction 
      James Joyce, “Eveline” 
DOCUMENTS 
      The Alliance Temperance Almanack, “On the Resources of Ireland” 
      Bridget Burke, “A Letter Home From an Irish Emigrant” 
      -- “A Plot Synopsis of The Bohemian Girl” 

12. A Study of Dagoberto Gilb: The Author Reflects on Three Stories  
Introduction 
A Brief Biography 
      Dagoberto Gilb, “How Books Bounce” (Introduction) 
      Dagoberto Gilb, “Love in L.A.” (Story)  
      Dagoberto Gilb, “On Writing ‘Love in L.A.’” (Essay) 
      Dagoberto Gilb, “Shout” (Story) 
      Dagoberto Gilb, “On Writing ‘Shout’” (Essay) 
      Dagoberto Gilb, “Uncle Rock” (Story) 
      Dagoberto Gilb, “On Writing ‘Uncle Rock’” (Essay) 
PERSPECTIVES  
      Dagoberto Gilb, “On Physical Labor” 
           “On Distortions of Mexican American Culture” 
           “Michael Meyer Interviews Dagoberto Gilb” 
FACSIMILES: Dagoberto Gilb, Two Draft Manuscript Pages  

13. Thematic Case Study: War and Its Aftermath 
Tim O’Brien, “How to Tell a True War Story” 
*Kurt Vonnegut, “Happy Birthday, 1951” 
*Edwidge Danticat, “The Missing Peace” 
    
14. Thematic Case Study: Humor and Satire  
Annie Proulx, “55 Miles to the Gas Pump” 
*George Saunders, “I Can Speak ™” 
Ron Hansen, “My Kid’s Dog” 
Mark Twain, “The Story of the Good Little Boy” 

15. Thematic Case Study: Privacy  
*Oscar Wilde, “The Sphinx Without a Secret” 
*David Long, “Morphine” 
*ZZ Packer, “Drinking Coffee Elsewhere” 
*John Cheever, “The Enormous Radio” 

16. Stories For Further Reading 
*Washington Irving, “Rip Van Winkle” 
*Jhumpa Lahiri, “Sexy” 
*Alecia McKenzie, “Private School” 
*Joyce Carol Oates, “Tick” 
Edgar Allan Poe, “The Cask of Amontillado” 
*Carol Shields, “Mrs. Turner Cutting the Grass”  
*John Edgar Wideman, “All Stories are True” 

Poetry 
The Elements of Poetry  

17. Reading Poetry  
Reading Poetry Responsively  
Lisa Parker, “Snapping Beans”  
Robert Hayden, “Those Winter Sundays”  
John Updike, “Dog’s Death”  
The Pleasure of Words  
*Gregory Corso: “I am 25”  
Robert Francis, “Catch”  
A SAMPLE STUDENT ANALYSIS: Tossing Metaphors in Robert Francis’s “Catch”  
Philip Larkin, “A Study of Reading Habits”  
Robert Morgan, “Mountain Graveyard”  
e.e. Cummings, “l(a”  
Anonymous, “Western Wind”  
Regina Barreca, “Nighttime Fires”  
Poetic Definitions of Poetry 
*Marianne Moore, “Poetry”  
Billy Collins, “Introduction to Poetry”  
Ruth Forman, “Poetry Should Ride the Bus”  
*Charles Bukowski, “A Poem is a City”  
Recurrent Poetic Figures: Five Ways of Looking at Roses 
Robert Burns, “A Red, Red Rose”  
Edmund Waller, “Go, Lovely Rose”  
*William Blake, “The Sick Rose”  
*Dorothy Parker, “One Perfect Rose”  
*H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), “Sea Rose”  
Poems for Further Study 
Mary Oliver, “The Poet with His Face in His Hands”  
Jim Tilley, “The Big Questions”  
Alberto Ríos, “Seniors”  
Alfred, Lord Tennyson, “The Eagle”  
Edgar Allan Poe, “Sonnet – To Science”  
Cornelius Eady, “The Supremes”  
Encountering Poetry:  Images of Poetry in Popular Culture  
Dorothy Parker, “Unfortunate Coincidence” (Poster)  
Carl Sandberg, “Window” (Photo)  
Roz Chast, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Crew” (Cartoon)  
Tim Taylor, “I Shake the Delicate Apparatus” (Photo)  
Eric Dunn and Mike Wigton, “National Poetry Slam” (Poster)  
Kevin Fleming, 560 (Photo)  
Ted Kooser, “American Life in Poetry” (Web Screen)  
Michael McFee, “Spitwads” (Poem in Newspaper)  

18. Word Choice, Word Order, and Tone  
Word choice 
Diction 
Denotations and Connotations 
Randall Jarrell, “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner”  
Word Order 
Tone 
Marilyn Nelson, “How I Discovered Poetry”  
Katharyn Howd Machan, “Hazel Tells LaVerne”  
A SAMPLE STUDENT RESPONSE: Tone in Katharyn Howd Machan’s “Hazel Tells Laverne”  
Martin Espada, “Latin Night at the Pawnshop”  
*Jonathan Swift, “The Character of Sir Robert Walpole”  
Diction and Tone in Four Love Poems 
Robert Herrick, “To the Virgins, To Make Much of Time”  
Andrew Marvell, “To His Coy Mistress”  
Ann Lauinger, “Marvell Noir”  
Poems for Further Study 
Walt Whitman, “The Dalliance of the Eagles”  
*Kwame Dawes, “History Lesson at Eight a.m.”  
Cathy Song, “The Youngest Daughter”  
John Keats, “Ode on a Grecian Urn”  
Alice Jones, “The Lungs”  
Louis Simpson, “In the Suburbs”  
A Note on Reading Translations 
Three Translations of a Poem by Sappho 
Sappho, “Immortal Aphrodite of the Broidered Throne” (trans. Henry T. Wharton)  
Sappho, “Beautiful-Throned, Immortal Aphrodite” (trans. Thomas Wentworth Higgins)  
Sappho, “Pray to My Lady of Paphos” (trans. Mary Barnard)  

19. Images 
Poetry’s Appeal to the Senses 
William Carlos Williams, “Poem”  
Walt Whitman, “Cavalry Crossing a Ford”  
David Solway, “Windsurfing”  
Matthew Arnold, “Dover Beach”  
Poems for Further Study 
Adelaide Crapsey, “November Night”  
Ruth Fainlight, “Crocuses”  
Mary Robinson, “London’s Summer Morning”  
William Blake, “London”  
A SAMPLE STUDENT RESPONSE: Imagery in William Blake’s “London” and Mary Robinson’s “London’s Summer Morning”  
*Kwame Dawes, “The Habits of Love”  
Charles Simic, “Fork”  
Sally Croft, “Home-Baked Bread”  
*John Keats, “To Autumn”  
PERSPECTIVE: T. E. Hulme, “On the Differences between Poetry and Prose”  

20. Figures of Speech 
William Shakespeare, From Macbeth  
Simile and Metaphor 
Langston Hughes, “Harlem”  
*Jane Kenyon, “The Socks”  
Anne Bradstreet, “The Author to her Book”  
Other Figures 
Edmund Conti, “Pragmatist”  
Dylan Thomas, “The Hand that Signed the Paper”  
Janice Townley Moore, “To a Wasp”  
Tajana Kovics, “Text Message”  
Poems for Further Study
William Carlos Williams, “To Waken an Old Lady”  
Ernest Slyman, “Lightning Bugs”  
Martin Espada, “The Mexican Cabdriver’s Poem for his Wife, Who Has Left Him”  
Judy Page Heitzman, “The Schoolroom on the Second Floor of the Knitting Mill”  
*Robert Pinsky, “Icicles”  
Jim Stevens, “Schizophrenia”  
Lucille Clifton, “Come Home from the Movies”  
Kay Ryan, “Learning”  
Ronald Wallace, “Building an Outhouse”  
Elaine Magarrell, “The Joy of Cooking”  
PERSPECTIVE: John R. Searle, “Figuring Out Metaphors”  

21. Symbol, Allegory, and Irony  
Symbol 
Robert Frost, “Acquainted With the Night”  
Allegory 
*James Baldwin, “Guilt, Desire, and Love”  
Irony 
Edwin Arlington Robinson, “Richard Cory”  
A SAMPLE STUDENT RESPONSE: Irony in Edwin Arlington Robinson’s “Richard Cory”  
Kenneth Fearing, “Ad”  
e.e. cummings, “Next To Of Course God America I”  
Stephen Crane, “A Man Said to the Universe”  
Poems for Further Study 
*Christina Rossetti, “Goblin Market”  
*Jane Kenyon, “The Thimble”  
Kevin Pierce, “Proof of Origin”  
Carl Sandburg, “A Fence”  
Julio Marzán, “Ethnic Poetry”  
Mark Halliday, “Graded Paper”  
Robert Browning, “My Last Duchess”  
William Blake, “A Poison Tree”  
PERSPECTIVE: Ezra Pound, “On Symbols”  

22. Sounds  
Listening to Poetry 
Anonymous, “Scarborough Fair”  
John Updike, “Player Piano”  
Emily Dickinson, “A Bird Came Down the Walk –”  
A SAMPLE STUDENT RESPONSE: Sound in Emily Dickinson’s “A Bird came down to walk—” 
Rhyme 
Richard Armour, “Going to Extremes”  
Robert Southey, from “The Cataract of Lodore”  
PERSPECTIVE: David Lenson, “On the Contemporary Use of Rhyme”
Sound and Meaning 
Gerard Manley Hopkins, “God’s Grandeur”  
Poems for Further Study 
Lewis Carroll, “Jabberwocky”  
William Heyen, “The Trains”  
*Alfred, Lord Tennyson, “Break, Break, Break”  
John Donne, “Song”  
Kay Ryan, “Dew”  
Andrew Hudgins, “The Ice-Cream Truck”  
Robert Francis, “The Pitcher”  
Helen Chasin, “The Word Plum”  
Richard Wakefield, “The Bell Rope”  
Jean Toomer, “Unsuspecting”  
John Keats, “Ode to a Nightingale”  
Howard Nemerov, “Because You Asked About the Line Between Prose and Poetry”  
*Major Jackson, “Autumn Landscape”  

23. Patterns of Rhythm  
Some Principles of Meter 
Walt Whitman, from “Song of the Open Road”  
William Wordsworth, “My Heart Leaps Up”  
Suggestions for Scanning a Poem 
Timothy Steele, “Waiting for the Storm”  
A SAMPLE STUDENT RESPONSE: The Rhythm of Anticipation in Timothy Steele’s “Waiting for the Storm”  
William Butler Yeats, “That the Night Come”  
Poems for Further Study 
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “Mnemonic”  
John Maloney, “Good!”  
Alice Jones, “The Foot”  
A.E. Housman, “When I was One-and-Twenty”  
Robert Herrick, “Delight in Disorder”  
Ben Jonson, “Still to Be Neat”  
e.e. cummings, “O Sweet Spontaneous”  
William Blake, “The Lamb”  
William Blake, “The Tyger”  
Carl Sandburg, “Chicago”  
PERSPECTIVE: Louise Bogan, “On Formal Poetry”  

24. Poetic Forms  
Some Common Poetic Forms 
A.E. Housman, “Loveliest of Trees, the Cherry Now”  
Robert Herrick, “Upon Julia’s Clothes”  
Sonnet 
John Keats, “On First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer”  
William Wordsworth, “The World Is Too Much With Us”  
William Shakespeare, “Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer’s Day?”
William Shakespeare, “My Mistress’ Eyes are Nothing Like the Sun”
*Edna St. Vincent Millay, “I Will Put Chaos Into Fourteen Lines”  
*Mark Jarman, “Unholy Sonnet”  
R.S. Gwynn, “Shakespearean Sonnet”  
Villanelle 
Dylan Thomas, “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night”  
Edwin Arlington Robinson, “The House on the Hill”  
Sestina 
Algernon Charles Swinburne, “Sestina”  
Florence Cassen Mayers, “All-American Sestina”  
*Julia Alvarez, “Bilingual Sestina”  
Epigram 
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “What Is an Epigram?”  
David McCord, “Epitaph on a Waiter”  
Paul Laurence Dunbar, “Theology”  
Limerick 
Arthur Henry Reginald Buller, “There was a Young Lady Named Bright”
Laurence Perrine, “The Limerick’s Never Averse”  
Haiku 
Matsuo Basho, “Under Cherry Trees”  
Carolyn Kizer, “After Basho”  
Amy Lowell, “Last Night It Rained”  
Gary Snyder, “A Dent in a Bucket”  
Ghazal 
*Mirza Asadullah Khan Ghalib, “Ghazal 4”  
*Patricia Smith, “Hip Hop Ghazal”  
Elegy 
Ben Jonson, “On My First Son”  
*Thomas Gray, “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard”  
*Kate Hanson Foster, “Elegy of Color”  
Ode 
Alexander Pope, “Ode on Solitude”  
Parody  
Blanche Farley, “The Lover Not Taken”  
Gwendolyn Brooks, “We Real Cool”  
Joan Murray, “We Old Dudes”  
Picture Poem 
Michael McFee, “In Medias Res”  
PERSPECTIVE: Elaine Mitchell, “Form”  

25. Open Form    
Walt Whitman, from “I Sing the Body Electric”  
PERSPECTIVE: Walt Whitman, “On Rhyme and Meter”  
A SAMPLE STUDENT RESPONSE: The Power of Walt Whitman’s Open Form Poem “I Sing the Body Electric”  
David Shumate, “Shooting the Horse”  
*Reginald Shepherd, “Self Portrait Surviving Spring”  
*Major Jackson, “The Chase”  
Michael Ryan, “I”  
e.e. cummings, “Old Age Sticks”  
Natasha Trethewey, “On Captivity”  
Julio Marzán, “The Translator at the Reception for Latin American Writers”  
Charles Harper Webb, “Descent”  
Kevin Young, “Eddie Priest’s Barbershop and Notary”  
Anonymous, “The Frog”  
David Hernandez, “All-American”  
FOUND POEM   
Donald Justice, “Order in the Streets”  

Approaches to Poetry  
26. Emily Dickinson  
A Brief Biography 
An Introduction to Her Work  
Emily Dickinson, “If I can Stop One Heart from Breaking”  
“If I Shouldn’t Be Alive”  
“The Thought Beneath So Slight a Film”  
“To Make a Prairie It Takes a Clover and One Bee”  
“Success is Counted Sweetest”  
“Water, is Taught by Thirst”  
“Papa Above!”  
“Safe in Their Alabaster Chambers” (1859 version)  
“Safe in Their Alabaster Chambers” (1861 version)  
“Portraits Are to Daily Faces”  
“Some Keep the Sabbath Going to Church”  
“I Taste a Liquor Never Brewed”  
“‘Heaven’ Is What I Cannot Reach”  
“I Like a Look of Agony”  
“Wild Nights – Wild Nights!”  
“The Soul Selects Her Own Society”  
“Much Madness Is Divinest Sense”  
“I Dwell In Possibility”  
“I Heard a Fly Buzz – When I Died”  
“Because I Could Not Stop for Death”  
“The Bustle in the House”  
“Tell All the Truth But Tell It Slant”  
“Oh Sumptuous Moment”  
“A Route of Evanescence”  
“From All the Jails the Boys and Girls”  
PERSPECTIVES ON EMILY DICKINSON  
Emily Dickinson, “A Description of Herself”  
Thomas Wentworth Higgonson, “On Meeting Dickinson for the First Time”  
Mabel Loomis Todd, “The Character of Amherst”  
Richard Wilbur, On Dickinson’s Sense of Privation”  
Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, “On Dickinson’s White Dress”
Paula Bennett, “On ‘I heard a Fly buzz—when I died—’”  
Martha Nell Smith, “On ‘Because I could not stop for Death’”  
A Sample In-Depth Study  
Emily Dickinson, “‘Faith’ is a fine invention”  
   “I know that He exists”  
   “I never saw a Moor”  
   “Apparently with no surprise”  
A SAMPLE STUDENT PAPER: Religious Faith in Four Poems by Emily Dickinson 
SUGGESTED TOPICS FOR LONGER PAPERS 

27. Robert Frost  
A Brief Biography 
An Introduction to His Work 
Robert Frost, “The Road Not Taken”  
    “The Pasture”  
    “Mowing”  
    “Mending Wall”  
    “Birches”  
    “Out, Out”  
    “Fire and Ice”  
    “Dust of Snow”  
    “Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening”  
    “The Need of Being Versed in Country Things”  
    “Nothing Gold Can Stay”  
    “Once by the Pacific”  
    “Neither Out Far Nor In Deep”  
    “Design”  
    *“Desert Places”  
    “The Gift Outright”  
PERSPECTIVES ON ROBERT FROST 
 Robert Frost, “‘In White’: An Early Version of ‘Design’”  
 Robert Frost, “On Living Part of a Poem”  
 Amy Lowell, “On Frost’s Realistic Technique”  
 Herbert R. Coursen Jr. “A Parodic Interpretation of ‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening’”  
SUGGESTED TOPICS FOR LONGER PAPERS  

28. A Study of Billy Collins: The Author Reflects on Five Poems 
A Brief Biography and Introduction to His Work 
Billy Collins, “How Do Poems Travel?” (Introduction)  
Billy Collins, “Osso Buco” (Poem)  
Billy Collins, “On Writing ‘Osso Buco’” (Essay)  
Billy Collins, “Nostalgia” (Poem)  
Billy Collins, “On Writing ‘Nostalgia’” (Essay)  
 Billy Collins, “Questions About Angels” (Poem)  
 Billy Collins, “On Writing ‘Questions About Angels’” (Essay)  
Billy Collins, “Litany” (Poem)  
Billy Collins, “On Writing ‘Litany’” (Essay)  
Billy Collins, “Building With Its Face Blown Off” (Poem)  
PERSPECTIVE: Billy Collins, “On ‘Building with Its Face Blown Off’: Michael Meyer Interviews Billy Collins”  
FACSIMILES: Billy Collins, Three Draft Manuscript Pages 

29. A Study of Julia Alvarez: The Author Reflects on Five Poems  
A Brief Biography and Introduction to Her Work 
Julia Alvarez, “Queens, 1963” (Poem)  
Julia Alvarez, “On Writing ‘Queens, 1963’” (Essay)  
Julia Alvarez, “Housekeeping Cages” (Poem)  
Julia Alvarez, “On Writing ‘Housekeeping Cages’ and Her Housekeeping Poems” (Essay)  
Julia Alvarez, “Dusting” (Poem)  
Julia Alvarez, “On Writing ‘Dusting’” (Essay)  
Julia Alvarez, “Ironing Their Clothes” (Poem)  
Julia Alvarez, “On Writing ‘Ironing Their Clothes’” (Essay)  
Julia Alvarez, “Sometimes the Words Are So Close” (Poem)  
Julia Alvarez, “On Writing ‘Sometimes the Words Are So Close’” (Essay) FACSIMILES: Julia Alvarez, Four Manuscript Pages: “Sometimes the Words Are So Close”  
PERSPECTIVES:  
Marny Requa, “From an Interview with Julia Alvarez”  
Kelli Lyon Johnson, “Mapping an Identity”  

30. A Cultural Case Study: The Harlem Renaissance  
Claude McKay 
 “The Harlem Dancer”  
 “If We Must Die”  
 “The Tropics in New York”  
 “The Lynching”  
 “America”  
 “The White City”  
 “The Barrier”  
Georgia Douglas Johnson 
“Youth”  
“Foredoom”  
“Calling Dreams”  
“Lost Illusions”  
“Fusion”  
“Prejudice”  
Langston Hughes 
“The Negro Speaks of Rivers”  
“Jazzonia”  
*“The Weary Blues”  
“Lenox Avenue: Midnight”  
“Ballad of the Landlord”  
Countee Cullen 
“Yet Do I Marvel”  
“Incident”  
*“Heritage”  
PERSPECTIVES  
Karen Jackson Ford, “Hughes’s Aesthetics of Simplicity”  
David Chinitz, “The Romanticization of Africa in the 1920s”  
Alain Locke, “Review of Georgia Douglas Johnson’s Bronze: A Book of Verse”  
Countee Cullen, “On Racial Poetry”  
Onwuchekwa Jemie, “On Universal Poetry”  
SUGGESTED TOPICS FOR LONGER PAPERS  

Poetry and the Visual Arts 
Grant Wood, “American Gothic” (Painting)  
John Stone, “American Gothic” (Poem)  
Kiagawa Utamaro, “Girl Powdering Her Neck” (Woodblock Print)  
Cathy Song, “Girl Powdering Her Neck” (Poem)  
Maya Lin, “The Vietnam Veteran’s Memorial” (Sculpture)  
Yusef Komunyakaa, “Facing It” (Poem)  
Pieter Brueghel The Elder, “Two Chained Monkeys” (Painting)  
Wislawa Szymborska, “Brueghel’s Two Monkeys” (Poem)  
Edward Hopper, “House by the Railroad” (Painting)  
Edward Hirsch, “Edward Hopper and the House by the Railroad” (Poem)  
Vermeer, “The Milkmaid” (Painting)  
Wislawa Szymborska, “Vermeer” (Poem)  

31. A Case Study: Song Lyrics as Poetry 
*Anonymous, “Lord Randal”  
*Frederic Weatherly, “Danny Boy”  
*W.C. Handy, “Beale Street Blues”  
*Woody Guthrie, “Gypsy Davy”  
*Hank Williams, “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry”  
*Bob Dylan, “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall”  
*Bob Dylan, “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)”  
*John Lennon and Paul McCartney, “I Am the Walrus”  
*Van Morrison, “Astral Weeks”  
*Joni Mitchell, “Cold Blue Steel and Sweet Fire”  
*Bruce Springsteen, “You’re Missing”  
*Tom Waits, “Alice”  
*Janelle Monae, “Americans” 

32. A Thematic Case Study: The Natural World  
*J. Estanislao Lopez, “Meditation on Beauty”  
Jane Hirschfield, “Optimism”  
Wendell Berry, “The Peace of Wild Things”  
Gail White, “Dead Armadillos”  
Dave Lucas, “November”  
Walt McDonald, “Coming Across It”  
*Edna St. Vincent Millay, “Spring” 
Alden Nowlan, “The Bull Moose”  
Kay Ryan, “Turtle”  
*Allen Ginsburg, “Sunflower Sutra”  
Mary Oliver, “Wild Geese”  
*Sylvia Plath, “Pheasant”  
SUGGESTED TOPICS FOR LONGER PAPERS  

33. A Thematic Case Study: The World of Work  
Jan Beatty, “My Father Teaches Me to Dream”  
Michael Chitwood, “Men Throwing Bricks”  
*Walt Whitman, “I Hear America Singing”  
*Langston Hughes, “I, Too”  
*Pedro Pietri, “Puerto Rican Obituary”  
*Theodore Roethke, “Dolor”  
Marge Piercy, “To Be of Use”  
*Seamus Heaney, “Digging”  
*Rita Dove, “Daystar”  
SUGGESTED TOPICS FOR LONGER PAPERS 

34. An Anthology of Poems  
*Margaret Atwood, “Owl Song”  
W.H. Auden, “The Unknown Citizen”  
*Charles Baudelaire, “A Carrion”  
Aphra Behn, “Song: Love Armed”  
William Blake, “Infant Sorrow”  
*William Blake, “The Mental Traveller”  
Anne Bradstreet, “Before the Birth of One of Her Children”  
*Emily Brontë, “Stars”  
Elizabeth Barrett Browning, “How Do I Love Thee?  Let Me Count the Ways”  
*Michelle Cliff, “The Land of Look Behind”  
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “Kubla Khan: Or, A Vision in a Dream”  
*Gregory Corso, “Marriage”  
*Bei Dao, “Notes from the City of the Sun”  
John Donne, “Batter My Heart”  
*John Donne, “The Flea”  
Paul Laurence Dunbar, “Sympathy”  
T.S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”  
*T.S. Eliot, “The Hollow Men”  
*Lawrence Ferlinghetti, “Constantly Risking Absurdity”  
*Louise Glück, “Celestial Music”  
*Seamus Heaney, “Personal Helicon”  
*Gerard Manley Hopkins, “Pied Beauty”  
*Brionne Janae, “Alternative Facts”  
Ben Jonson, “To Celia”  
John Keats, “When I Have Fears That I May Cease to Be”  
John Keats, “Bright Star, Would I Were Steadfast as Thou Art”  
*Philip Larkin, “Sad Steps”  
Emma Lazarus, “The New Colossus”  
Louisa Lopez, “Junior Year Abroad”  
*Audre Lorde, “Learning to Write”  
*Robert Lowell, “Skunk Hour”  
John Milton, “When I Consider How My Light Is Spent”  
*Naomi Shihab Nye, “To Manage”  
*Edgar Allan Poe, “Annabelle Lee”  
*Adelia Prado, “Denouement”  
Edwin Arlington Robinson, “Miniver Cheevy”  
William Shakespeare, “Let Me Not To the Marriage of True Minds”
William Shakespeare, “When, In Disgrace With Fortune and Men’s Eyes”  
Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Ozymandias”  
*Stevie Smith, “Not Waving But Drowning”  
Patricia Smith, “What It’s Like To Be a Black Girl (For Those of You Who Aren’t)”  
*Tracy K. Smith, “Self Portrait as the Letter Y”  
*Wallace Stevens, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”  
Jonathan Swift, “A Description of the Morning”  
Alfred, Lord Tennyson, “Ulysses”  
*Natasha Trethewey, “Incident”  
*Phillis Wheatley, “To S.M., a young African Painter, on seeing his Works”  
Walt Whitman, “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer”  
*William Wordsworth, “I wandered lonely as a cloud”  
William Wordsworth, “The Solitary Reaper”  
William Butler Yeats, “Leda and the Swan”  
William Butler Yeats, “The Lake Isle of Innisfree”  

Drama 
The Study of Drama 

35. Reading Drama   
Reading Drama Responsively  
Susan Glaspell, Trifles 
A SAMPLE CLOSE READING: An Annotated Section of Trifles 
PERSPECTIVE: Susan Glaspell, “From the Short Story Version of Trifles”
Elements of Drama 
*Lynn Nottage, “POOF!”  

36. A Study of Sophocles  
Theatrical Conventions of Greek Drama 
Tragedy 
Sophocles, Oedipus the King (trans. by David Grene)  
PERSPECTIVES ON SOPHOCLES 
Aristotle, “On Tragic Character”  
Sigmund Freud, “On the Oedipus Complex”  
Muriel Rukeyser, “On Oedipus the King”  
David Wiles, “On Oedipus the King as a Political Play”  

37. A Study of William Shakespeare  
Shakespeare’s Theater 
The Range of Shakespeare’s Drama: History, Comedy, and Tragedy
A Note on Reading Shakespeare 
William Shakespeare, Othello, the Moor of Venice 
PERSPECTIVES ON SHAKESPEARE 
The Mayor of London (1597), “Objections to the Elizabethan Theater”
Lisa Jardine, “On Boy Actors in Female Roles”  
Samuel Johnson, “On Shakespeare’s Characters”  
Jane Adamson, “On Desdemona’s Role in Othello”  
David Bevington, “On Othello’s Heroic Struggle”  
James Kincaid, “On the Value of Comedy in the Face of Tragedy”  
SUGGESTED TOPICS FOR LONGER PAPERS 

38. Modern Drama  
Realism and Naturalism 
Experimental Drama 
Theatrical Conventions of Modern Drama 
*Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest

39. A Critical Case Study:  Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House 
Henrik Ibsen, A Doll’s House (trans. R. Farquharson Sharp)  
PERSPECTIVES:  
Ibsen, “Notes for A Doll’s House”  
-- “A Nineteenth-Century Husband’s Letter to his Wife”  
Barry Witham and John Lutterbie, “A Marxist Approach to A Doll’s House”  
Carol Strongin Tufts, “A Psychoanalytic Reading of A Doll’s House”
Joan Templeton, “Is A Doll’s House a Feminist Text?”  
Questions for Writing: Applying a Critical Strategy 
A SAMPLE STUDENT PAPER: On the Other Side of the Slammed Door in Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House 

40. Contemporary Drama  
*David Auburn, Proof 
Beyond Realism 
The Avant-Garde  
Theater of the Absurd  
Theater of Cruelty 
Musical Theater 

41. A Collection of Contemporary Plays   
*Harold Pinter, The Birthday Party  
*Paula Vogel, How I Learned to Drive 
August Wilson, Fences 
PERSPECTIVE: David Savran, “An Interview with August Wilson”  

Strategies for Reading and Writing 

42. Critical Strategies for Reading  
Critical Thinking 
Formalist Strategies
Biographical Strategies
Psychological Strategies
Historical Strategies
Marxist Criticism
New Historicist Criticism
Cultural Criticism
Gender Strategies
Feminist Criticism
LGBTQ+ Criticism
Mythological Strategies
Reader-Response Strategies
Deconstructionist Strategies

43. Writing about Literature 
Why Am I Being Asked to Do This?
From Reading and Discussion to Writing
Prewriting
Annotating the Text and Journal Note Taking 
Choosing a Topic 
More Focused Prewriting
Arguing about Literature  
Writing
Writing a Draft 
Textual Evidence: Using Quotations, Summarizing, and Paraphrasing
Writing the Introduction and Conclusion
Revising and Editing 
Questions for Writing: A Revision ChecklistTypes of Writing Assignments
Explication
A SAMPLE STUDENT EXPLICATION: A Reading of Emily Dickinson’s “There’s a certain Slant of light”
Analysis
A SAMPLE STUDENT ANALYSIS: Memory in Elizabeth Bishop’s “Manners”
Comparison and Contrast
A SAMPLE STUDENT COMPARISON: The Struggle for Women’s Self-Definition in Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House and James Joyce’s “Eveline”Writing about Fiction, Poetry, And Drama
Writing about Fiction
Questions for Responsive Reading and Writing about Fiction
A SAMPLE STUDENT ESSAY:  John Updike’s A & P as a State of Mind
Writing about Poetry
Questions for Responsive Reading and Writing about Poetry
The Elements Together
John Donne, Death Be Not Proud
A SAMPLE CLOSE READING:  An Annotated Version of “Death Be Not Proud”
A Sample First Response
Organizing Your Thoughts
A Sample Informal Outline
The Elements and Theme
A SAMPLE EXPLICATION: The Use of Conventional Metaphors for Death in John Donne’s “Death Be Not Proud”
Writing about Drama 
Questions for Responsive Reading and Writing about Drama
A SAMPLE STUDENT PAPER: The Feminist Evidence in Susan Glaspell’s Trifles

44. The Literary Research Paper  
Choosing a Topic 
Finding Sources 
Evaluating Sources and Taking Notes 
Developing a Thesis and Organizing the Paper 
Revising 
Documenting Sources and Avoiding Plagiarism
The List of Works Cited
Parenthetical References 
A SAMPLE STUDENT PAPER: How William Faulkner’s Narrator Cultivates a Rose for Emily

Authors

Michael Meyer

Michael Meyer, Emeritus Professor of English, taught writing and literature courses for more than thirty years — since 1981 at the University of Connecticut, and before that at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and the College of William and Mary. In addition to being an experienced teacher, Meyer is a highly regarded literary scholar. His scholarly articles have appeared in distinguished journals such as American Literature, Studies in the American Renaissance, and Virginia Quarterly Review. An internationally recognized authority on Henry David Thoreau, Meyer is a former president of the Thoreau Society and coauthor (with Walter Harding) of The New Thoreau Handbook, a standard reference source. His first book, Several More Lives to Live: Thoreau’s Political Reputation in America, was awarded the Ralph Henry Gabriel Prize by the American Studies Association. He is also the editor of Frederick Douglass: The Narrative and Selected Writings. He has lectured on a variety of American literary topics from Cambridge University to Peking University. His other books for Bedford/St. Martin’s include The Bedford Introduction to Literature, Literature to Go, Thinking and Writing about Poetry, Poetry: An Introduction, and Thinking and Writing about Literature.

D. Quentin Miller

D. Quentin Miller, Professor of English, has taught literature and writing at Suffolk University in Boston since 2000. Prior to that he taught at Gustavus Adolphus College in Minnesota, at the University of Connecticut (where he wrote his dissertation under the direction of Michael Meyer), and in a variety of other settings, including prisons. Miller is the author, editor, or co-editor of a dozen books and over two dozen critical essays in collections and in scholarly journals such as American Literature, African American Review, and The James Baldwin Review. He is an internationally renowned scholar on the works of James Baldwin and has also published reviews in such publications as TLS and original fiction. His most recent books are The Routledge Introduction to the American Novel (2024), James Baldwin in Context (2019), Understanding John Edgar Wideman (2018), American Literature in Transition: 1980-1990 (2018), and The Routledge Introduction to African American Literature (2016).

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