Literature for Composition: Essays, Fiction, Poetry, and Drama

Alternate Contents by Genre.

List of Illustrations.

Preface to Instructors.

Letter to Students

I. GETTING STARTED: FROM RESPONSE TO ARGUMENT.

1. The Writer as Reader.
Reading and Responding.
Kate Chopin Ripe Figs 3.
Your Turn: A Writing Assignment.

2. The Reader as Writer.
Developing a Thesis, Drafting and Writing an Argument.
Kate Chopin The Story of an Hour.
Drafting Your Argument.
A Sample Draft by a Student: "Ironies in an Hour."
Writing with a Word Processor.
Your Turn: A Third Story by Kate Chopin: “Désirée's Baby.
Note About Literary Evaluations.

3. Reading Literature Closely: Explication.
What is Literature?
Robert Frost, “The Span of Life.”
Reading in Slow Motion.
Explication.
A Sample Explication: Langston Hughes, ' “Harlem.”
Why Write? Purpose and Audience.
Your Turn: Poems for Explication.
William Shakespeare, Sonnet 73 ("That time of year thou mayst in me behold").
Ben Johnson, “On My First Son.”
William Blake,, “London.”
Emily Brontë, “Spellbound.”
Li-Young Lee, “I Ask My Mother to Sing.”
*Alfred, Lord Tennyson, “Ulysses.”

4. Reading Literature Closely: Analysis.
Analysis.
Analyzing a Story from the Hebrew Bible: The Judgment of Solomon.
Analyzing a Story from the New Testament: The Parable of the Prodigal Son.
Comparison: An Analytic Tool.
Sample Essay by a Student: "Two New Women".
Evaluation in Explication and Analysis.
Choosing a Topic and Developing a Thesis in an Analytic Paper.
Analyzing a Story.
James Thurber, “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.”
Developing an Argument.
Review: Writing an Analysis.
Aphra Benn, “Song: Love Armed.”
Final Version of Essay by a Student: "The Double Nature of Love."
Your Turn: Short Stories and Poems for Analysis.
*Edgar Allen Poe, “The Fall of the House of Usher.”
*Virginia Woolf, “A Haunted House.”
*Guy de Maupassant, “The Necklace.”
*Jose Armas, “El Tonto del Barrio.”
Lelie Marmon Silko, “The Man to Send Rain Clouds.”
Elizabeth Bishop, “Filling Station.”
Elizabeth Bishop, “The Fish.”
*Elizabeth Bishop, “One Art.”

5. Other Kinds of Writing About Literature.
Summary.
Paraphrase.
Literary Response.
A Story by a Student: "The Ticket (A Different View of 'The Story of an Hour')."
William Blake,, “The Tyger.”
X.J. Kennedy, “For Allen Ginsberg.”
Rewriting a Poem (SB?).
*William Butler Yeats, , “Annunciation.”
*William Butler Yeats, , “Leda and the Swan” 1924.
*William Butler Yeats, , “Leda and the Swan” 1933.
*Mona Van Duyn, “Leda.”
Parody 141.
*Wiliam Carlos Williams, “This Is Just to Say.”
*Kenneth Koch, “Variations on a Theme by William Carlos Williams, .”
Reviewing a Dramatic Production 142.
Sample Review by a Student: "An Effective Macbeth."

6. Reading and Writing about Visual Culture.
*The Language of Pictures.
*Analyzing a Picture: Navajo Dancers Entertaining a Tourist Train.
*Thinking about Dorothea Lange's Migrant Mother, Nipomo, California.
*Photographers on Photography.
*Lou Jacobs Jr. “What Qualities Does a Good Photograph Have?”
*An American Picture Album: Ten Images.

II. UP CLOSE: THINKING CRITICALLY ABOUT LITERARY WORKS AND LITERARY FORMS.

7. Critical Thinking: Asking Questions, Making Comparisons.
What is Critical Thinking?
Asking and Answering Questions.
William Notman, “Sitting Bull and Buffalo Bill.”
Comparing and Contrasting.
Analyzing and Evaluating Evidence.
Thinking Critically: Asking Questions and Comparing.
e.e. cummings, “Buffalo Bill's.”
*Emily Dickinson: Three Versions of a Poem, and More.
*Emily Dickinson, “I felt a Funeral, in my Brain.”
*Emily Dickinson, “I felt a Cleaving in my Mind.”
*Emily Dickinson, “The Dust Behind I Strove to Join.”
*Imaginative Play: Thinking about Three Poems.
*William Butler Yeats, , “The Wild Swans at Coole.”
*Gwendolyn Brooks, “We Real Cool.”
*Andrew Hudgins, “The Wild Swans Skip School.”

8. Reading and Writing about Essays.
Types of Essays.
The Essayist's Persona.
Brent Staples, “Black Men and Public Space.”
Your Turn: Essays for Analysis.
Langston Hughes, ' “Salvation.”
Louis Owens, “The American Indian Wilderness.”
*May Sarton, “The Rewards of Living a Solitary Life.”
*Anthony Lane, “This is Not a Movie.”

9. Reading and Writing About Fiction.
Stories True and False.
Grace Paley, “Samuel.”
Elements of Fiction.
Your Turn: Short Stories for Analysis.
Nathaniel Hawthorne, “Young Goodman Brown.”
Anton Chekhov, “Misery.”
Eudora Welty, “A Worn Path.”
*Isabel Allende, “If You Touched My Heart.”
Alice Elliot Dark, “In the Gloaming.”

10. Thinking and Writing Critically About Short Stories: Two Casebooks.
Case Study: Writing about Ralph Ellison's "Battle Royal."
Ralph Ellison, “Battle Royal.”
Booker T. Washington, “Atlanta Exposition Address.”
W.E.B. Du Bois, “Of Our Spiritual Strivings.”
W.E.B. Du Bois, “Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others.”
Gunnar Myrdal, “On Social Equality.”
Ralph Ellison, “On Negro Folklore.”
Ralph Ellison, “Life in Oklahoma City.”
Casebook: Writing about Flannery O'Connor.
Flannery O'Connor, “A Good Man Is Hard To Find.”
Flannery O'Connor, “Revelation.”
Remarks from Essays and Letters.
On Interpreting "A Good Man Is Hard to Find."

11. Looking at Pictures, Writing Stories.
The Impulse to Tell Stories.
*Charles Baxter, “Music for Airports.”
*A.S. Byatt, “Christ in the House of Martha and Mary.”
*Your Turn: Picture to Story.

12. Fiction into Film.
Asking Questions, Thinking Critically, and Making Comparisons.
Film as a Medium.
Film Techniques.
Comparing Filmed and Printed Stories.
Suggestions for Further Reading.
Short Story and a Student's Essay on the Filmed Version.
*Mary Wilkins Freeman, “The Revolt of _Mother_.”
Your Turn: Thinking about Filming Fiction.

13. Reading and Writing About Drama.
Types of Plays.
Elements of Drama.
Organizing an Analysis of a Character.
Your Turn: Plays for Analysis.
Sophocles, “Antigone.”
Susan Glaspell, “Trifles.”
*Luis Valdez, “Los Vendidos.”

14. Thinking Critically About Drama.
Tennessee Williams, “The Glass Menagerie.”
Tennessee Williams, “Production Notes.”

15. Reading and Writing About Poetry.
Elements of Poetry.
Emily Dickinson, “I'm Nobody! Who are you?”
Emily Dickinson, “Wild Nights-Wild Nights.”
Robert Frost, “The Telephone.”
William Blake, “The Sick Rose.”
Robert Herrick, “Upon Julia's Clothes.”
Sample Essay by a Student: "Herrick's Julia, Julia's Herrick."
The Analysis Analyzed.
Christina Rosetti, “In an Artist's Studio.”
Explication.
William Butler Yeats, “The Balloon of the Mind.”
Sample Essay by a Student: "Explication of W.B. Yeats' 'The Balloon of the Mind.'"
Rhythm and Versification: A Glossary for Reference.
Your Turn: Poems About People, Places, and Things.
Robert Browning, “My Last Duchess.”
ee. cummings, “anyone lived in a pretty how town.”
Sylvia Plath, “Daddy.”
Louisa Erdich, “Indian Boarding School: The Runaways.”
*Etheridge Knight, “For Malcolm, A Year After Places.”
Basho, “An Old Pond.”
William Butler Yeats, “Sailing to Byzantium.”
James Wright, “Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy's Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota.”
*Yusef Komunyakaa, “Facing It.”
Derek Walcott, “A Far Cry from Africa.”
William Carlos Williams, “The Red Wheelbarrow.”
Walt Whitman, “A Noiseless Patient Spider.”
Mary Oliver, “Hawk.”

16. Thinking Critically About Poetry.
Case Study: Writing About Emily Dickinson.
Emily Dickinson, “I heard a Fly buzz-when I died-.”
Emily Dickinson, “The Soul selects her own Society.”
Emily Dickinson, “These are the days when Birds come back.”
Emily Dickinson, “Papa above!”
Emily Dickinson, “There's a certain Slant of light.”
Emily Dickinson, “This World is not Conclusion.”
Emily Dickinson, “I got so I could hear his name-.”
Emily Dickinson, “Because I could not stop for Death.”
Emily Dickinson, “Those-dying, then 449 Apparently with no surprise.”
Emily Dickinson, “Tell all the Truth but tell it slant.”
A Sample Essay by a Student: "Religion and Religious Imagery in Emily Dickinson."

III. STANDING BACK: ARGUING INTERPRETATIONS AND EVALUATIONS, AND UNDERSTANDING CRITICAL STRATEGIES.

17. Arguing an Interpretation.
Interpretation and Meaning.
Thinking Critically About Responses to Literature.
Two Interpretations.
Robert Frost, “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.”
Sample Essay by a Student: "Stopping by Woods--and Going On."
Sample Essay by a Student: "'Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening' as a Short Story."
Your Turn: Poems for Interpretation.
John Milton, “When I Consider How My Light Is Spent.”
Robert Frost, “Mending Wall.”
William Wordsworth, “A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal.”
T.S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Afred Prufrock.”

18. Arguing an Evaluation.
Criticism and Evaluation.
Are There Critical Standards?
Your Turn: Poems and Stories for Evaluation.
Matthew Arnold, “Dover Beach.”
Aanthony Hecht, “The Dover Bitch.”
Robert Frost, “Design.”
Ira Gershwin, “The Man That Got Away.”
Louise Bogan, “Women.”
Ambrose Bierce, “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge.”
*Katherine Mansfield, “Miss Brill.”

19. Writing About Literature: An Overview of Critical Strategies.
The Nature of Critical Writing.
Criticism as Argument: Assumptions and Evidence.
Some Critical Strategies.
Your Turn: Putting Critical Strategies to Work.
Suggestions for Further Reading.

IV. A THEMATIC ANTHOLOGY.

20. Love and Hate.
Essays.
Sei Shonagon, “A Lover's Departure.”
Judith Ortiz Cofer, “I Fell in Love, or My Hormones Awakened.”
Louis Menand, “Love Stories.”
*Andrew Sullivan, “The Love Bloat.”
Fiction.
Ernest Hemingway Cat in the Rain.
A Sample Essay by a Student: "Hemingway's American Wife."
A Second Example: An Essay Drawing On Related Material In Chapter.
Sample Essay by a Student: "Hemingway's Unhappy Lovers."
William Faulkner, “A Rose for Emily.”
Zora Neale Hurston, “Sweat.”
*Raymond Carver, “Mine.”
*Raymnond Carver, “Little Things.”
*Raymond Carver, “What We Talk about When We Talk about Love.”
*Raymond Carver, “Cathedral.”
*Raymond Carver, “Talking about Stories.”
*Raymond Carver, “On Rewriting.”
*Michael Gerber and Jonathan Schwarz, “What We Talk about When We Talk about Doughnuts.”
Poetry.
Anonymous, “Western Wind.”
Christopher Marlowe, “Come Live with Me and Be My Love.”
Sir Walter Raleigh, “The Nymph's Reply to the Shepherd.”
John Donne, “The Bait.”
William Shakespeare, Sonnet 29 “(When, in disgrace with Fortune and men's eyes).”
William Shakespeare, Sonnet 116 “(Let me not to the marriage of true minds).”
John Donne, “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning.”
Andrew Marvell, “To His Coy Mistress.”
William Blake, “The Garden of Love.”
William Blake, “A Poison Tree.”
Robert Browning, “Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister.”
Walt Whitman, “When I Heard at the Close of the Day.”
Walt Whitman,“I Saw in Louisiana a Live-Oak Growing.”
Christina Rosetti, “A Birthday.”
Edna St. Vincent Millay, “Love Is Not All: It Is Not Meat nor Drink.”
Robert Frost, “The Silken Tent.”
Adrienne Rich, “Novella.”
Adrienne Rich, “X1.”
Robert Pack, “The Frog Prince.”
Joseph Brodsky, “Love Song.”
Ellen Bryant Voight, “Quarrel.”
Nikki Giovanni, “Love in Place.”
Carol Muske, “Chivalry.”
*Kitty Tsui, “A Chinese Banquet.”
Drama.
Wendy Wasserstein, “The Man in a Case.”

21. Gender Roles: Making Men and Women.
ESSAYS.
Katha Pollitt, “Why Boys Don't Play with Dolls.”
Scott Russell Sanders, “The Men We Carry in Our Minds ... and How They Differ from the Real Lives of Most Men.”
Fiction.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “The Yellow Wallpaper.”
Richard Wright, “The Man Who Was Almost a Man.”
Bobbie Ann Mason, “Shiloh.”
Doris Lessing, “A Woman on a Roof.”
Gloria Naylor, “The Two.”
Alice Munro, “Boys and Girls.”
Poetry.
Anonymous, “Higamus, Hogamus.”
Dorothy Parker, “General Review of the Sex Situation.”
Rita Dove, “Daystar.”
Robert Hayden, “Those Winter Sundays.”
Muriel Rukeyser, “Myth.”
Theodore Roethke, “My Papa's Waltz.”
Lucille Clifton, “Wishes for sons.”
Sharon Olds, “Rites of Passage.”
Frank O'Hara, “Homosexuality.”
Shel Silverstein, “A Boy Named Sue.”
Tess Gallagher, “I Stop Writing the Poem.”
Julia Alvarez, “Woman's Work.”
Maud Meehan, “Is There Life After Feminism.”
Marge Piercy, “A Work of Artifice.”
Drama.
HENRIK IBSEN , “A Doll's House.
*Cultural Case Study: Writing About Barbie.
*Anonymous, “Beauty and the Barbie Doll.”
*Kevin Leary, “Barbie Curtsies to Political Correctness.”
*Meg Wolitzer, “Barbie as Boy Toy.”
*Yona Zeldis McDonough, “What Barbie Really Taught Me.”
Marge Piercy, “Barbie Doll.”
*Denise Duhamel, “Buddhist Barbie.”

22. Innocence and Experience.
Essay.
Maya Angelous, “Graduation.”
Fiction.
James Joyce, “Araby.”
Langston Hughes, “One Friday Morning.”
John Updike, “A & P.”
Liliana Heker, “The Stolen Party.”
Toni Cade Barbara, “The Lesson.”
Poetry.
William Blake, “Infant Joy.”
William Blake, “Infant Sorrow.”
William Blake, “The Echoing Green.”
Garard Manley Hopkins, “Spring and Fall: To a Young Child.”
A.E. Housman, “When I Was One-and-Twenty (A Shropshire Lad # 13).”
e.e. cummings, “In just-.”
Louise Gluck, “The School Children.”
Louise Gluck, “Gretel in Darkness.”
Drama.
Case Study: Writing About Shakespeare's Hamlet.
William Shakespeare, “Hamlet.”
Ernest Jones, “Hamlet and the Oedipus Complex.”
Anne Barton, “The Promulgation of Confusion.”
Stanley Wells, “On the First Soliloquy.”
Elaine Showalter, “Representing Ophelia.”
Claire Bloom, “Playing Gertrude on Television.”
Bernice W. Kilman, “The BBC Hamlet: A Television Production.”
Stanley Kauffman, “At Elsinore.”
Will Saretta, “Branagh's Film of Hamlet.”

23. Identity in America.

Essays.
*Thomas Jefferson, “The Declaration of Independence.”
Anna Lisa Raya, “It's Hard Enough Being Me.”
Andrew Lam, “Goodbye, Saigon, Finally 1.”
Fiction.
Isaac Bashevis Singer, “The Son from America.”
Amy Tan, “Two Kinds.”
Louise Erdich, “The Red Convertible.”
*Katherine Min, “Courting a Monk.”
Poetry.
Emma Lazarus, “The New Colossus.”
Thomas Bailey Aldrich, “The Unguarded Gates.”
Joseph Bruchac III, “Ellis Island.”
Edwin Arlington Robinson, “Richard Cory.”
Aurora Levins Morales, “Child of the Americas.”
Gloria Anzaldua, “To Live in the Borderlands Means You.”
Jimmy Santiago Baca, “So Mexicans Are Taking Jobs from Americans.”
Langston Hughes, “Theme for English B.”
Pat Parker, “For the white person who wants to know how to be my friend.”
Mitsuye Yamada, “To the Lady.”
Drama.
August Wilson, “Fences.”
Case Study: Writing About American Indian Identity.”
Anonymous Arapaho, “My Children, When at First I Liked the Whites.”
Anonymous Arapaho “Father, Have Pity on Me.”
Lydia Howard Huntley Sigourney, “The Indian's Welcome to the Pilgrim Fathers.”
Robert Frost, “The Vanishing Red.”
Wendy Rose, “Three Thousand Dollar Death Song.”
Nila Northsun, “Moving Camp Too Far.”
Sherman Alexie, “On the Amtrak from Boston to New York City.”
Representations—Visual and Verbal—of Pocahontas.
John Smith, “John Smith Saved by Pocahontas.”
Miss Baker, “Last Wish of Pocahontas.”
George P. Morris, “Pocahontas.”
Moses Y. Scott, “Pocahontas.”
Paula Gunn Allen, “Pocahontas to Her English Husband, John Rolfe.”
John D'Entremont, “Review of Disney's Pocahontas.”

24. Art and Life.
A Note on Connections Between Literature and the Other Arts.
*Your Turn: Responding to the Arts.
Essays.
*Oscar Wilde, “Preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray.”
*Pablo Picasso, “Talking about Art.”
*Willa Cather, “Light on Adobe Walls.”
*Ralph Ellison, “On Bird, Bird-watching, and Jazz.”
Stories.
*B. Traven, “Assembly Line.”
*James Baldwin, “Sonny's Blues.”
Alice Walker, “Everyday Use.”
Poems.
*Edward Hirsch, “Fast Break.”
*W. F. Bolton, “Might We Too?”
*Walt Whitman, “That music always round me, unceasing, unbeginning.”
*William Wordsworth, “The Solitary Reaper.”
*John Keats, “Ode on a Grecian Urn.”
*Archibald MacLeish, “Ars Poetica.”
*Paul Laurence Dunbar, “The Quilting.”
*Nikki Giovanni, “For Saundra.”
*Louise Glck, “The Mountain.”
Case Study: Writing About Image and Word.
Thinking and Writing about Poems and Paintings.
A Sample Essay by a Student: Tina Washington, “Two Ways of Looking at a Starry Night.”
Jane Flanders, “Van Gogh's Bed.”
Vincent van Gogh “incent's Bed in Arles.”
William Carlos Williams, “The Great Figure.”
Charles Demuth, “I Saw the Figure Five in Gold.”
Adrienne Rich, “Mourning Picture.”
Edwin Romanzo Elmer, “Mourning Picture.”
Cathy Song, “Beauty and Sadness.”
Kitagawa Utamaro, “Two Women Dressing Their Hair.”
Mary Jo Salter, “The Rebirth of Venus.”
Sandro Botticelli, “The Birth of Venus.”
Anne Sexton, “The Starry Night.”
Vincent van Gogh “The Starry Night.”
W.H. Auden, “Musie des Beaux Arts.”
Pieter Bruegel the Elder, “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus.”
X.J. Kennedy, “Nude Descending a Staircase.”
Marcel Duchamp, “Nude Descending a Staircase.”
Greg Pape, “American Flamingo.”
John James, “Audubon American Flamingo.”
Carl Phillips, “Luncheon on the Grass.”
Edouard Manet, “Déjeuner sur l'herbe.”
John Updike, “Before the Mirror.”
Pablo Picasso, “Girl Before a Mirror.”

25. Law and Disorder.
Essays.
*Henry David Thoreau, from “Civil Disobedience.”
*George Orwell, “A Hanging.”
*Martin Luther King, Jr. “Letter from Birmingham Jail.”
*Casebook: Writing about The Sacco-Vanzetti Trial.
*Columbia Encylopedia, “Sacco-Vanzetti Case.”
*Bartolomeo Vanzetti, “Remarks to a Reporter.”
*Ben Shahn, “Drawing with Vanzetti's Words.”
*Bartolomeo Vanzetti (adapted by Selden Rodman), “Last Speech to the Court.”
*Katherine Anne Porter, “Afterward.”
*Countee Cullen, “ot Sacco and Vanzetti.”
*Edna St. Vincent Millay, “Justice Denied in Massachusetts.”
Stories.
*Aesop, “A Lion and Other Animals Go Hunting.”
*John (?), “The Woman Taken in Adultery.”
*Anonymous, “Three Hasidic Tales.”
*Franz Kafka, “Before the Law.”
*Elizabeth Bishop, “The Hanging of the Mouse.”
*Ursula Le Guin, “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas.”
*Case Study: Writing about Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery."
*Shirley Jackson, “The Lottery.”
*Gus Lobrano, “Letter.”
*Shirley Jackson, “Biography of a Story.”
*Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Scapegoat.”
Poems.
*Anonymous, “Birmingham Jail.”
*A.E. Housman, “The Carpenter's Son.”
*A.E. Housman, “Eight O'Clock.”
*A.E. Housman, “Oh who is that young sinner with the handcuffs on his wrists?”
*A.E. Housman. “The laws of god, the laws of man.”
*Edgar Lee Masters. “Judge Selah Lively.”
*Claude McKay. “If We Must Die.”
*Jimmy Santiago. “Baca Cloudy Day.”

Appendix A: Remarks About Manuscript Form.
Basic Manuscript Form.
Corrections in the Final Copy.
Quotations and Quotation Marks.

Appendix B: Writing a Research Paper.
What Research is Not, and What Research is.
Primary and Secondary Materials.
Taking Notes.
Drafting The Paper.
Focus On Primary Sources.
Documentation.

Appendix C: New Approaches to the Research Paper: Literature, History, and the World Wide Web.
Case Study on Literature and History: The Internment of Japanese Americans.
Literary Texts.
Mitsuye Yamada, “The Question of Loyalty.”
David Mura, “An Argument: On 1942.”
Historical Sources.
Electronic Sources.
Evaluating Sources On The World Wide Web.
Documentation: Citing A Www Source.
Additional Print And Electronic Sources.

Appendix D: Literary Research: Print and Electronic Resources.
Literature--Print Reference Sources.
Literature--Electronic Sources.
History--Reference and Bibliography Sources.
Www Sites for History.
Periodicals: Print and Electronic Sources.
For General Bibliography in the Humanities.
For Evaluating the Point of View, the Content, and the Intended.
Audience of Sources.
Other Resources.
What Does Your Own Institution Offer?

Appendix E: Glossary of Literary Terms.
Literary Credits.
Photo Credits.
Index of Terms.
Index of Authors, Titles, and First Lines of Poems.

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