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Summary
Literature: The Human Experienceis based on a simple premise: All students can and will connect with literature if the works they read are engaging, exciting, and relevant. Accordingly, every edition of this classroom favorite has featured a broad range of enticing stories, poems, plays, and essays that explore timeless, ever-resonant themes: innocence and experience, conformity and rebellion, culture and identity, love and hate, and the presence of death. The affordable new edition, with a new co-author, freshens the successful formula with an infusion of contemporary literature and a more focused approach to making connections across time and cultures between literature and life.
Author Biography
RICHARD ABCARIAN (Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley) is a professor of English emeritus at California State University, Northridge, where he taught for 37 years. During his teaching career, he won two Fulbright professorships. In addition to editing Literature: The Human Experience and its compact edition, he is the editor of a critical edition of Richard Wright's A Native Son, as well as several other literature textbooks. MARVIN KLOTZ (Ph.D., New York University) is a professor of English emeritus at California State University, Northridge, where he taught for 33 years and won Northridge's distinguished teaching award in 1983. He is also the winner of two Fulbright professorships (in Vietnam and Iraq) and was a National Endowment for the Arts Summer Fellow twice. In addition to editing Literature: The Human Experience and several other textbooks, he coauthored a guide and index to the characters in Faulkner's fiction. SAMUEL COHEN (Ph.D., City University of New York) is an assistant professor in the English Department at the University of Missouri where he won the 2008 Provost’s Outstanding Junior Faculty Teaching Award. He is the author of After the End of History: American Fiction in the 1990s (University of Iowa Press, 2009) and has published in such journals as Novel, Clio, Twentieth-Century Literature, The Journal of Basic Writing, and Dialogue: A Journal for Writing Specialists. His other book for Bedford/St. Martin’s is 50 Essays: A Composition Anthology, now in its second edition.
Table of Contents
Preface for Instructors
INTRODUCTION
Responding to Literature
Emily Dickinson, There Is No Frigate Like A Book
Why We Read Literature
Reading Actively
Reading and Thinking Critically
Reading Fiction
The Methods of Fiction
Tone
Plot
Characterization
Setting
Point of View
Irony
Theme
Exploring Fiction
Reading Poetry
Walt Whitman, When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer
Word Choice
Figurative Language
The Music of Poetry
Exploring Poetry
Annotating While You Read
William Shakespeare, Sonnet 29
Edwin Arlington Robinson, How Annandale Went Out
Reading Drama
Stages and Staging
The Elements of Drama
Characters
Dramatic Irony
Plot and Conflict
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
Exploring Nonfiction
Writing About Literature
Responding to Your Reading
Keeping a Journal
Exploring and Planning
Good Questions
Establishing a Working Thesis
Gathering Information
Organizing Information
Revising the Essay
Editing Your Draft
Selecting Strong Verbs
Eliminating Unnecessary Modifiers
Making 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 Internet Sources
A Checklist for Writing about Literature
INNOCENCE AND EXPERIENCE
Questions for Thinking and Writing
Fiction
Nathaniel Hawthorne, Young Goodman Brown (1804-1864)
James Joyce, Araby (1882-1941)
NEW Flannery O'Connor, A Good Man Is Hard to Find (1925-1964)
Toni Cade Bambara, The Lesson (1939-1995)
Jamaica Kincaid, Girl (b. 1949)
Sandra Cisneros, The House on Mango Street (b. 1954)
NEW Aimee Bender, Tiger Mending (b. 1969)
Connecting Stories: Learning on the Job
NEW John Updike, A & P (b. 1932)
NEW Virgil Suarez, The Perfect Hotspot (b. 1962)
Poetry
William Blake, The Chimney Sweeper (1757-1827)
NEW William Blake, The Lamb (1757-1827)
William Blake, The Tyger (1757-1827)
William Blake, The Garden of Love (1757-1827)
William Blake, London (1757-1827)
John Keats, On First Looking into Chapman's Homer (1795-1821)
Robert Browning, My Last Duchess (1812-1889)
Emily Dickinson, I felt a Funeral, in my Brain (1830-1886)
Thomas Hardy, The Ruined Maid (1840-1928)
Gerard Manley Hopkins, Spring and Fall (1844-1889)
A. E. Housman, When I Was One-and-Twenty (1859-1936)
A. E. Housman, Terence, This Is Stupid Stuff (1859-1936)
William Butler Yeats, Leda and the Swan (1865-1939)
Robert Frost, Birches (1874-1963)
Robert Frost, The Road Not Taken (1874-1963)
NEW e.e. cummings, In Just— (1894-1962)
Stevie Smith, To Carry the Child (1902-1971)
Stevie Smith, Not Waving but Drowning (1902-1971)
Countee Cullen, Incident (1903-1946)
Dylan Thomas, Fern Hill (1914-1953)
Ruth Stone, Metaphors of the Tree (b. 1915)
Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Constantly Risking Absurdity (b. 1919)
Philip Larkin, This Be the Verse (1922-1985)
Philip Larkin, A Study of Reading Habits (1922-1985)
NEWAudre Lorde, Hanging Fire (1934-1992)
NEW Stephen Dobyns, Do They Have a Reason? (b. 1941)
NEW Louise Gluck, The School Children (b. 1943)
Hanan Mikha’il Ashrawi, From the Diary of an Almost Four-Year Old (b.1946)
Katherine McAlpine, Plus C'est la Même Chose (b. 1948)
Rita Dove, Lamentations (b. 1952)
Sandra Cisneros, My Wicked Wicked Ways (b. 1954)
John Brehm, At the Poetry Reading (b. 1955)
Evelyn Lau, Solipsism (b. 1971)
Connecting Poems: Revisiting Fairy Tales
Bruce Bennett, The True Story of Snow White (1906-2007)