The Compact Bedford Introduction to Literature helps you become a lifelong reader, better writer, and more critical thinker with a mix of classic and contemporary works drawn from diverse periods and cultures.
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Contents
*New to the 13th Edition
Resources for Reading and Writing about Literature
Preface for Instructors
Introduction: Reading Imaginative Literature
The Nature of Literature
*Danusha Laméris, “Feeding the Worms”
The Value of Literature
The Changing Literary Canon
*Approaching Sensitive Subjects
Fiction
The Elements of Fiction
1. Reading Fiction
Reading Fiction Responsively
Kate Chopin, “The Story of an Hour”
A SAMPLE CLOSE READING: An 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
Ann Beattie, “Janus”
2. Plot
T.C. Boyle, “The Hit Man”
*Joy Harjo, “The Reckoning”
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”
3. Character
Tobias Wolff, “Powder”
*Zadie Smith, “Martha, Martha”
James Baldwin, “Sonny’s Blues”
4. Setting
Ernest Hemingway, “Soldier’s Home”
Ursula LeGuin, “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas”
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “The Yellow Wallpaper”
5. Point of View
Third-Person Narrator (Nonparticipant)
First-Person Narrator (Participant) John Updike, “A & P”
Jamaica Kincaid, “Girl”
Manuel Muñoz, “Zigzagger”
*Lorrie Moore, “How to Become a Writer”
6. Symbolism
Louise Erdrich, “The Red Convertible”
Ralph Ellison, “King of the Bingo Game”
Cynthia Ozick, “The Shawl”
A SAMPLE STUDENT RESPONSE: Layers of Symbol in Cynthia Ozick’s “The Shawl”
7. Theme
*Adrian Tomine, “Intruders” (graphic short story)
*A SAMPLE STUDENT RESPONSE: Danger among Us: Distilling the Theme in “Intruders”
Nathaniel Hawthorne, “The Minister’s Black Veil”
*Carmen Maria Machado, “Eight Bites”
8. Style, Tone, and Irony
Style
Tone
Irony
Shirley Jackson, “The Lottery”
Mark Twain, “The Story of the Good Little Boy”
*Virginia Woolf, “The Man Who Loved His Kind”
PERSPECTIVE: Virginia Woolf, “On Conventions in Writing”
Approaches to Fiction
Thematic Approaches
9. 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”
10. Thematic Case Study: Privacy
Oscar Wilde, “The Sphinx without a Secret: An Etching”
David Long, “Morphine”
ZZ Packer, “Drinking Coffee Elsewhere”
John Cheever, “The Enormous Radio”
Genre Studies
11. Genre Case Study: Speculative Fiction
*Peter Ho Davies, “Minotaur”
*N. K. Jemisin, “Sinners, Saints, Dragons, and Haints, in the City beneath the Still Waters”
*Mariana Enriquez, “Back When We Talked to the Dead”
*Philip K. Dick, “To Serve the Master”
Authors in Depth
12. *A Study of Alice Munro
An Introduction
A Brief Biography
Alice Munro:
*“Walker Brothers Cowboy”
*“The Moons of Jupiter” *“Silence”
PERSPECTIVES:
*Alice Munro, “In Her Own Words” (Nobel Lecture in absentia)
*Margaret Atwood, “Alice Munro: An Appreciation”
*Beverly Rasporich, “Dance of the Sexes: Art and Gender in the
Fiction of Alice Munro”
*W.R. Martin and Warren U. Ober, “Alice Munro as Small-Town
Historian: ‘Spaceships Have Landed’”
SUGGESTIONS FOR TOPICS FOR LONGER PAPERS: Alice Munro
13. A Study of Flannery O’Connor
A Brief Biography and Introduction
Flannery O’Connor:
“A Good Man is Hard to Find”
“Good Country People”
*“The Life You Save May Be Your Own”
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”
14. A Study of Dagoberto Gilb: The Author Reflects on Three Stories
An Introduction
A Brief Biography
Dagoberto Gilb:
“How Books Bounce” (Introduction)
“Love in L.A.” (Story)
“On Writing ‘Love in L.A.’” (Essay)
“Shout” (Story)
“On Writing ‘Shout’” (Essay)
“Uncle Rock” (Story)
“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
Further Reading
15. Stories for Further Reading
Judith Ortiz Cofer, “Volar”
Zora Neale Hurston, “Sweat”
James Joyce, “Eveline”
*Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi, “Let’s Tell This Story Properly”
Joyce Carol Oates, “Tick”
Edgar Allan Poe, “The Cask of Amontillado”
George Saunders, “I Can Speak ™”
Alice Walker, “The Flowers”
John Edgar Wideman, “All Stories are True”
Poetry
The Elements of Poetry
16. Reading Poetry
Reading Poetry Responsively
Lisa Parker, “Snapping Beans”
*Linda Pastan, “Jump Cabling”
John Updike, “Dog’s Death”
The Pleasure of Words
Gregory Corso: “I am 25”
A SAMPLE CLOSE READING: An Annotated Version of “I am 25”
Robert Francis, “Catch”
A SAMPLE STUDENT ANALYSIS: Tossing Metaphors in Robert Francis’s “Catch”
*Jane Hirshfield, “This Morning, I Wanted Four Legs”
Robert Morgan, “Mountain Graveyard”
E. E. Cummings, “l(a”
Anonymous, “Western Wind”
Regina Barreca, “Nighttime Fires”
Suggestions for Approaching Poetry
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”
*Ada Limón, “The End of Poetry”
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”
17. Word Choice, Word Order, and Tone
Word Choice
Randall Jarrell, “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner”
Allusion
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”
Martín Espada, “Latin Night at the Pawnshop”
*Joy Harjo, “Granddaughters”
Diction and Tone in Four Love Poems
*Shamim Azad, “First Love”
*Elizabeth Barrett Browning, “Sonnet XLIII”
*John Frederick Nims, “Love Poem”
*Pablo Neruda, “Drunk as drunk on turpentine”
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
Sappho, “Immortal Aphrodite of the broidered throne” (trans. Henry T. Wharton)
Sappho, “Beautiful-throned, immortal aphrodite” (trans. Thomas Wentworth Higginson)
Sappho, “Pray to my lady of Paphos” (trans. Mary Barnard)
18. Images
Poetry’s Appeal to the Senses
William Carlos Williams, “Poem”
Walt Whitman, “Cavalry Crossing a Ford”
*Suji Kwock Kim, “The Korean Community Garden in Queens”
David Solway, “Windsurfing”
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, “House of Cards”
Sally Croft, “Home-Baked Bread”
John Keats, “To Autumn”
PERSPECTIVE: T. E. Hulme, “On the Differences between Poetry and Prose
19. 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”
Kay Ryan, “Learning”
Ronald Wallace, “Building an Outhouse”
Elaine Magarrell, “The Joy of Cooking”
PERSPECTIVE: John R. Searle, “Figuring Out Metaphors”
20. Symbol, Allegory, and Irony
Symbol
Robert Frost, “Acquainted with the Night”
Allegory
James Baldwin, “Guilt, Desire, and Love”
Irony
Edward Arlington Robinson, “Richard Cory”
A SAMPLE STUDENT RESPONSE: Irony in Edwin Arlington Robinson’s “Richard Cory”
*Gwendolyn Brooks, “Sadie and Maud”
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”
21. Sounds
Listening to Poetry
*Kamau Brathwaite, “Ogun”
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 the 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 (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson), “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”
22. Patterns of Rhythm
Some Principles of Meter
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”
23. 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”
*Denise Duhamel, “Please Don’t Sit Like A Frog, Sit Like A Queen”
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”
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”
*William Carlos Williams, “The Red Wheelbarrow”
Julio Marzán, “The Translator at the Reception for Latin American Writers”
Major Jackson, “The Chase”
David Hernandez, “All-American”
PERSPECTIVE: Elaine Mitchell, “Form”
Approaches to Poetry
24. *A Thematic Case Study: Poetry and Protest
*Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, “Eliza Harris”
*Claude McKay, “The Lynching”
*Tillie Lerner Olsen, “I Want You Women Up North to Know”
*Genevieve Taggard, “Ode in a Time of Crisis”
*Audre Lorde, “Power”
*June Jordan, “Poem About My Rights”
*Denise Levertov, “A Poem at Christmas, 1972, During the Terror-Bombing of North Vietnam”
*Kimberly Blaeser, “Apprenticed to Justice”
*Tato Laviera, “Latero Story”
*Claudia Rankine, “Stop-and-Frisk”
*Danez Smith, “not an elegy for Mike Brown”
*Aja Monet, #sayhername
SUGGESTED TOPICS FOR LONGER PAPERS
25. *A Thematic Case Study: Our Fragile Planet
*Eileen Cleary, “The Way We Fled”
*Tess Gallagher, “Choices”
*Joy Harjo, “Singing Everything”
J. Estanislao Lopez, “Meditation on Beauty”
Gail White, “Dead Armadillos”
Allen Ginsburg, “Sunflower Sutra”
Mary Oliver, “Wild Geese”
Sylvia Plath, “Pheasant”
*Teresa Mei Chuc, “Rainforest”
*Jennifer Franklin, “Memento Mori: Apple Orchard”
SUGGESTED TOPICS FOR LONGER PAPERS
26. A Case Study: Song Lyrics as Poetry
Frederic Weatherly, “Danny Boy”
*Bessie Smith and W.C. Handy, “Careless Love Blues”
*Woody Guthrie, “Pretty Boy Floyd”
Hank Williams, “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry”
Bob Dylan, “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)”
John Lennon and Paul McCartney, “I Am the Walrus”
Joni Mitchell, “Cold Blue Steel and Sweet Fire”
*Paul Simon, “Slip-Slidin’ Away”
*Ani DiFranco, “Not a Pretty Girl”
*Richard Buckner, “4 AM”
Tom Waits, “Alice”
*GZA, “Alphabets”
*Chance the Rapper, “Interlude (That’s Love)”
*Common, “Letter to the Free”
*Noname, “Don’t Forget About Me”
*Adrianne Lenker, “Not”
*Little Simz, “Introvert”
27. *A Thematic Case Study: The Poetry of Solitude
*Jim Moore, “How to Come Out of Lockdown”
Emily Dickinson, “The Soul selects her own Society—”
Robert Frost, “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”
*John Keats, “To Solitude”
*Elisa Gonzalez, “In Quarantine, I Reflect on the Death of Ophelia”
William Wordsworth, “I wandered lonely as a cloud”
Robert Lowell, “Skunk Hour”
*Galway Kinnell, “When One Has Lived a Long Time Alone”
Robert Hayden, “Those Winter Sundays”
Matthew Arnold, “Dover Beach”
*Dionisio D. Martínez, “Flood: Years of Solitude”
*Li Bai, “The Solitude of Night”
28. A Cultural Case Study: The Harlem Renaissance
Claude McKay
“The Harlem Dancer”
“If We Must Die”
“The Tropics in New York”
“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
Questions for Responsive Reading and Writing
American Gothic
Grant Wood, “American Gothic” (Painting)
John Stone, “American Gothic” (Poem)
Girl Powdering Her Neck
Cathy Song, “Girl Powdering Her Neck” (Poem)
Kiagawa Utamaro, “Girl Powdering Her Neck” (Woodblock Print)
The Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall
Yusef Komunyakaa, “Facing It” (Poem)
Maya Lin, “The Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall” (Sculpture)
Two Monkeys
Wislawa Szymborska, “Brueghel’s Two Monkeys” (Poem)
Pieter Bruegel The Elder, “Two Chained Monkeys” (Painting)
House by the Railroad
Edward Hirsch, “Edward Hopper and the House by the Railroad”
(Poem)
Edward Hopper, “House by the Railroad” (Painting)
The Milkmaid
Wislawa Szymborska, “Vermeer” (Poem)
Vermeer, “The Milkmaid” (Painting)
Four Poets in Depth
29. A Study of 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”
“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!”
“Much Madness is divinest Sense–”
“I dwell in Possibility–”
“I heard a Fly buzz–when I died–”
“Because I could not stop for Death–”
“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”
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–’”
Questions for Writing about an Author in Depth
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
30. A Study of 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”
“The Need of Being Versed in Country Things”
“Nothing Gold Can Stay”
“Neither Out Far nor In Deep”
“Design”
“Desert Places”
“The Gift Outright”
PERSPECTIVES ON ROBERT FROST:
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
31. A Study of Julia Alvarez: The Author Reflects on Five Poems
A Brief Biography
An Introduction to Her Work
Julia Alvarez:
“Queens, 1963” (Poem)
“On Writing ‘Queens, 1963’” (Essay)
“Housekeeping Cages” (Poem)
“On Writing ‘Housekeeping Cages’ and Her Housekeeping Poems” (Essay)
“Dusting” (Poem)
“On Writing ‘Dusting’” (Essay)
“Ironing Their Clothes” (Poem)
“On Writing ‘Ironing Their Clothes’” (Essay)
“Sometimes the Words Are So Close” (Poem)
Drafts of “Sometimes the Words Are So Close”: A Poet’s Writing Process
“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”
32. 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)
“Osso Buco” (Poem)
“On Writing ‘Osso Buco’” (Essay)
“Nostalgia” (Poem)
“On Writing ‘Nostalgia’” (Essay)
“Questions About Angels” (Poem)
“On Writing ‘Questions About Angels’” (Essay)
“Litany” (Poem)
“On Writing ‘Litany’” (Essay)
“Building with Its Face Blown Off” (Poem)
PERSPECTIVE: Billy Collins, “On ‘Building with Its Face Blown Off’: Michael Meyer Interviews Billy Collins”
Draft Poems
SUGGESTED TOPICS FOR LONGER PAPERS
An Anthology of Poems
33. An Anthology of Classic Poems
W.H. Auden, “The Unknown Citizen”
Charles Baudelaire, “A Carrion”
Aphra Behn, “Song: Love Armed”
William Blake, “Infant Sorrow”
Anne Bradstreet, “Before the Birth of One of Her Children”
Emily Brontë, “Stars”
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “Kubla Khan: Or, a Vision in a Dream”
John Donne, “The Flea”
T.S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”
Gerard Manley Hopkins, “Pied Beauty”
John Keats, “When I Have Fears That I May Cease to Be”
Philip Larkin, “Sad Steps”
Emma Lazarus, “The New Colossus”
Andrew Marvell, “To His Coy Mistress”
Edna St. Vincent Millay, “Spring”
John Milton, “When I consider how my light is spent”
Edgar Allan Poe, “Annabelle Lee”
Edwin Arlington Robinson, “Miniver Cheevy”
William Shakespeare, “When, in disgrace with Fortune and men’s eyes”
Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Ozymandias”
Stevie Smith, “Not Waving but Drowning”
Wallace Stevens, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”
Phillis Wheatley, “To S.M., a young African Painter, on seeing his Works”
Walt Whitman, “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer”
William Butler Yeats, “The Lake Isle of Innisfree”
34. An Anthology of Recent Poems
*José Angel Araguz, “The Name”
Michelle Cliff, “The Land of Look Behind”
Gregory Corso, “Marriage”
Rita Dove, “Daystar”
Lawrence Ferlinghetti, “Constantly Risking Absurdity”
*Amanda Gorman, “In This Place (An American Lyric)”
Seamus Heaney, “Digging”
Brionne Janae, “Alternative Facts”
Luisa Lopez, “Junior Year Abroad”
Audre Lorde, “Learning to Write”
Naomi Shihab Nye, “To Manage”
Adelia Prado, “Denouement”
*Lois Red Elk, “All Thirst Quenched”
*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”
*Natasha Trethewey, “Graveyard Blues”
Drama
The Study 0f Drama
35. Reading Drama
Reading Drama Responsively
Susan Glaspell, Trifles
A SAMPLE CLOSE READING: An Annotated Section of Trifles
PERSPECTIVE: Susan Glaspell, “From ‘A Jury of Her Peers,’ the Short Story Version of Trifles”
Elements of Drama
Plays in Performance
Photos of scenes from:
*Trifles
Oedipus the King
*Othello
The Importance of Being Earnest
*Water by the Spoonful
Proof
Fences
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
Naturalism
Theatrical Conventions of Modern Drama
Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest
39. *Contemporary Drama
Beyond Realism
Musical Theater
*Drama in Popular Forms
*Suzan Lori Parks:
*“Veuve Clicquot”
*“Here Comes the Message”
*“Fine Animal”
*“The Ends of the Earth”
*“Beginning, Middle, End”
*“What Do You See?”
*“This is Shit”
*“Barefoot and Pregnant in the Park”
*“Orange”
*“(Again) Groundhog”
40. *A Cultural Case Study: Quiara Alegría Hudes’s Water by the Spoonful
*Quiara Alegría Hudes, Water by the Spoonful
PERSPECTIVES:
*Quiara Alegría Hudes, “Atonality,” from My Broken Language
*John Coltrane and Leonard Feather, “Interview, 1964”
*Elliott Ackerman, “A Summary of Action,” from Places and Names: On War, Revolution, and Returning
*Anonymous, From Stepping Stones to Recovery from Cocaine
*A SAMPLE STUDENT PAPER: Water by the Spoonful: Exploring the Internet’s Role in Bettering the Self
41. A Collection of Plays
David Auburn, Proof
Lynn Nottage, “POOF!”
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
*Affect Theory Approaches
43. Writing about Literature
Why Am I Being Asked to Do This?
From Reading and Discussion to Writing
Reading the Work Closely
Prewriting
Arguing about Literature
Writing
Revising and Editing
Questions for Writing: A Revision Checklist
Types of Writing Assignments
Explication
Emily Dickinson, “There’s a certain Slant of light”
A SAMPLE STUDENT EXPLICATION: A Reading of Emily Dickinson’s “There’s a certain Slant of Light”
Elizabeth Bishop, “Manners”
An Annotated Version of “Manners”
A SAMPLE STUDENT ANALYSIS: Memory in Elizabeth Bishop’s “Manners”
*A SAMPLE STUDENT COMPARISON: “Coping with Loss in Alice Munro's “Silence” and David Auburn's “Proof”
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 Draft, Integrating Sources, and Organizing the Essay
Documenting Sources and Avoiding Plagiarism
A SAMPLE STUDENT PAPER: How William Faulkner’s Narrator Cultivates a Rose for Emily
Glossary of Literary Terms
Index of First Lines
Index of Authors and Titles
Index of Terms
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