Literature: The Human Experience Reading and Writing

by Abcarian, Richard; Klotz, Marvin; Cohen, Samuel

• ISBN13: 9781457604294
• ISBN10: 1457604299
• Edition: 11th
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2012-09-07
• Publisher: Bedford/St. Martin's

Summary

Literature: The Human Experience is 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, life and death. The affordable new edition (a third less expensive than comparable anthologies) opens students eyes to a more contemporary selection of writing, while continuing to help them see, and write about, illuminating connections to literature past and present, lives near and far, and experiences that are enduringly human.

Author Biography

Marvin Klotz (PhD, New York University) is a professor of English emeritus at California State University, Northridge, where he taught for thirty-three years and won Northridge's distinguished teaching award in 1983. He is also the winner of two Fulbright professorships (in Vietnam and Iran) 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 (PhD, City University of New York) is Associate Professor of English and Director of Graduate Studies at the University of Missouri. He is the author of After the End of History: American Fiction in the 1990s, co-editor (with Lee Konstantinou) of The Legacy of David Foster Wallace, Series Editor of The New American Canon: The Iowa Series in Contemporary Literature and Culture, and has published in such journals as Novel, Clio, Twentieth-Century Literature, The Journal of Basic Writing, and Dialogue: A Journal for Writing Specialists. For Bedford/St. Martin's, he　is author of　50 Essays: A Portable Anthology and coauthor of Literature: The Human Experience.

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 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