Introduction

Part One:  Reading Literature

Critical Reading:  Engagement, Response, and Analysis

            Engaging with a Text:  Annotation

Special Feature:  Sample Student Annotation of Sandra Cisneros’s “Bread”

            Responding to a Text:  The Reader’s Journal

                                                  The Reader’s Box

  Sample Student Reader’s Journal

  Freewriting

            Analyzing a Text

                        Approaches

                                    Author-Oriented Approaches

                                    Reader-Oriented Approaches

                                    Text-Oriented Approaches

                        The Elements of the Essay

                                    Style

                                    Tone

                                    Theme

The Reader’s Box

Questions for Engagement, Response, and Analysis

Essay  

                        The Elements of Fiction

                                    Point of View

                                    Setting

                                    Style

                                    Character

                                    Plot

                                    Theme

The Reader’s Box

 Questions for Engagement, Response and Analysis

  Short Stories

                        The Elements of Poetry

                                    Situation and Speaker

                                    Structure and Sound

                                    Style

                                    Theme

The Reader’s Box

Questions for Engagement, Response, and Analysis 

Poetry

                        The Elements of Drama

                                    Dialogue and Stage Directions

                                    Setting

                                    Style

                                    Character

                                    Plot

                                    Theme

The Reader’s Box

Questions for Engagement Response, and Analysis 

Drama

Part Two:  Writing About Literature

Critical Writing:  Argument

Steps for Writing Arguments about Literature

            Step One:  Establishing Purpose and Audience

                        Modes

                        Debatable Topics

                        Audience

            Step Two:  Generating a Working Thesis

                        Re-reading

                        Pre-Writing Strategies

The Writer’s Box

Sample Student Brainstorming

Clustering and Listing 

                        Honing the Thesis

            Step Three:  Gathering Evidence

                        Primary Source Evidence

                        Secondary Source Evidence

            Step Four:  Drafting, Revising, and Editing

                        Writing the Introduction

                        Crafting Body Paragraphs and Making Transitions

                        Concluding Well

                        Integrating Source Evidence

The Writer’s Box

Avoiding Common Pitfalls at the Drafting Stage

                        Revising and Editing

The Writer’s Box

 Avoiding Common Pitfalls in the Editing Stage

Sample Student Paper

Thematic Anthology

Family  

Writing about Family  

Essays

Joan Didion, On Going Home 

Bill Cosby, from Fatherhood**

Frances Mayes, Bramare: (Archaic) To Yearn For

Fiction

Carson McCullers, A Domestic Dilemma  

James Baldwin, Sonny’s Blues  

Truman Capote, A Christmas Memory  

Joyce Carol Oates, Where Are You Going, Where Have You  Been?**  

Sherman Alexie, Because My Father Always Said He Was the Only Indian Who Saw Jimi Hendrix Play TheStar-Spangled Banner at Woodstock  

Poetry

William Butler Yeats, A Prayer for My Daughter  

Theodore Roethke, My Papa’s Waltz  

Gwendolyn Brooks, The Mother  

Sylvia Plath, Daddy**  

Luis Omar Salinas, My Father Is a Simple Man  

Nikki Giovanni, Nikki-Rosa

Li-Young Lee, The Gift  

Edward J. Whitelock, Future Connected By 

Drama

Casebook on August Wilson

August Wilson

Fences 

Sandra Shannon, The Dramatic Vision of August Wilson  

Alan Nadel, Boundaries, Logistics, and Identity: The Property of Metaphor in Fences and Joe Turner’s Come and Gone 

John Timpane, Filling the Time: Reading History in the Drama of August Wilson  

Harry Elam Jr.,  August Wilson’s Women 

Bonnie Lyons, An Interview with August Wilson  

A Student Essay  

Family: Suggestions for Writing  

Family: Writing about Film  

Men and Women  

Writing about Men and Women  

Essays

Virginia Woolf, Professions for Women  

Max Shulman, Love Is a Fallacy  

David Osborne, Beyond the Cult of Fatherhood  

Fiction

Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Birth-Mark  

Kate Chopin, Désirée’s Baby  

Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Yellow Wallpaper  

Zora Neale Hurston, The Gilded Six-Bits  

Ernest Hemingway, Hills Like White Elephants 

Jhumpa Lahiri, A Temporary Matter  

Poetry

William Shakespeare, Sonnet 138 

Andrew Marvell, To His Coy Mistress 

Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Sonnet 43  

Robert Browning, My Last Duchess  

Maya Angelou, Phenomenal Woman 

Marge Piercy, Barbie Doll 

Janice Mirikitani, Breaking Tradition  

Julia Alvarez, Abbot Academy**

Judith Ortiz Cofer, Anniversary  

Rita Dove, Courtship from Beulah and Thomas,   Courtship, Diligence  

Drama

Henrik Ibsen, A Doll’s House  

Casebook on Robert Frost **

Robert Frost

The Pasture

The Silken Tent

Never Again Would Birds’ Song Be the Same

Meeting and Passing

Putting in the Seed

The Subverted Flower

Home Burial  

The Death of the Hired Man  

Bereft

Judith Oster, Frost’s Poetry of Metaphor

Katherine Kearns, “The Place Is the Asylum”: Women and Nature in Robert Frost’s Poetry

Robert Penn Warren and Cleanth Brooks, The Craft of Poetry: Interview with Robert Frost

A Student Essay  

Men and Women: Suggestions for Writing  

Men and Women: Writing about Film   

vulnerability

Writing about Vulnerability

Essays

Black Elk Speaks **

Elie Wiesel, Yom Kippur: The Day Without Forgiveness  

Bill McKibben,  Happiness Is **

Barbara Kingsolver,  A Pure, High Note of Anguish **

Stephen Sloan, The Meaning of Terrorism from Terrorism: The Present Threat in Context **

Leonard Weinberg, Why Do People Become Terrorists fromGlobal Terrorism: A Beginner’s Guide **

Fiction

Anton Chekhov, The Lottery Ticket **

William Faulkner, A Rose for Emily  

Chinua Achebe, Dead Men’s Path 

Bharati Mukherjee, The Management of Grief  

Todd James Pierce, Newsworld II **

Poetry

Percy Bysshe Shelley, Ozymandias  

Edwin Arlington Robinson, Richard Cory 

Paul Laurence Dunbar, We Wear the Mask  

John McCrae, In Flanders Fields  

Claude McKay, If We Must Die  

Wilfred Owen, Dulce et Decorum Est  

e. e. cummings, Buffalo Bill’s Defunct  

Randall Jarrell, The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner  

Dylan Thomas, Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night  

Billy Collins, Forgetfulness  

Sharon Olds, On the Subway  

Ron Rash, Last Service **

Adam Zagajewski, Try to Praise the Mutilated World  

Drama

William Shakespeare, Othello, the Moor of Venice  

Casebook on Amy Tan

Amy Tan

 Young Girl’s Wish  

Heart  

E. D. Huntley, Amy Tan: A Critical Companion  

Victoria Chen, Chinese American Women, Language, and Moving Subjectivity  

The Salon Interview: Amy Tan, The Spirit Within  

A Student Essay  

Vulnerability: Suggestions for Writing  

Vulnerability: Writing about Film  

Freedom and Responsibility  

Writing about Freedom and Responsibility

Essays

Jonathan Swift, A Modest Proposal  

Thomas Jefferson, The Declaration of Independence  

Abraham Lincoln, The Gettysburg Address  

Martin Luther King Jr., Letter from Birmingham City Jail  

Fiction

Luke, The Parable of the Prodigal Son **  

Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Harrison Bergeron  

Ursula K. LeGuin, The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas 

John Updike, A & P  

Madison Smartt Bell, Customs of the Country **

Poetry

William Wordsworth, The World Is Too Much with Us 

Walt Whitman, For You O Democarcy **

Rudyard Kipling, If   

W. H. Auden, The Unknown Citizen  

Karl Shapiro, The Conscientious Objector  

Anne Sexton, Ringing the Bells  

Pat Mora, Immigrants  

Dwight Okita, In Response to Executive Order 9066: All Americans of Japanese Descent Must Report to Relocation Centers 

Drama

Susan Glaspell, Trifles  

Casebook on Tim O’Brien

Tim O’Brien

 On the Rainy River  

 How to Tell a True War Story

 The Man I Killed  

 Steven Kaplan, The Undying Uncertainty of the Narrator in Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried  

 Catherine Calloway, “How to Tell a True War Story”: Metafiction in  The Things They Carried  

 Daniel Robinson, Getting It Right: The Short Fiction of Tim  O’Brien  

 A Student Essay  

Freedom and Responsibility: Suggestions for Writing   

Freedom and Responsibility: Writing about Film  

CREATIVITY

Writing about Creativity  

Essays

Genesis I **

Ursula K. LeGuin, The Child and the Shadow 

David Mamet, Girl Copy **

bell hooks, Beauty Laid Bare: Aesthetics in the Ordinary **

Fiction

Mark Twain, A Fable 

James Thurber, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty **

Ray Bradbury, There Will Come Soft Rains  

Woody Allen, The Kugelmass Episode  

Margaret Atwood, Happy Endings **

Poetry

John Keats, Ode on a Grecian Urn  

Emily Dickinson

I cannot dance upon my Toes 326 **

They shut me up in Prose 613**

I dwell in Possibility 657 **

There is no Frigate like a Book 1263 **

Archibald MacLeish, Ars Poetica  

Countee Cullen, Yet Do I Marvel  

W. H. Auden, Musée des Beaux Arts  

Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Constantly Risking Absurdity

Sylvia Plath, Metaphors **

Seamus Heaney, Digging  

Billy Collins, Marginalia **

Alberto Ríos, The Vietnam Wall  

Drama

Wendy Wasserstein, Tender Offer **

Casebook on Alice Walker **

Alice Walker

Everyday Use

Nineteen Fifty-five

In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens

The Way Forward Is with a Broken Heart: Epilogue

Donna Hairsty Winchell, from Alice Walker

Houston A Baker Jr. And Charlotte Pierce-Baker, Patches: Quilts and Community in Alice Walker’s “Everyday Use”

David Cowart, Heritage and Deracination in Walker’s “Everyday Use”

A Student Essay  

Creativity: Suggestions for Writing 

Creativity: Writing about Film  

Quest  

Writing about Quest  

Essays

Plato, Allegory of the Cave  

Matthew, Beatitudes

William Golding, Thinking As a Hobby  

Fiction

James Joyce, Araby  

Arthur C. Clarke, The Star 

Toni Cade Bambara, Raymond’s Run 

Isabel Allende, And of Clay Are We Created  

Louise Erdrich, Naked Woman Playing Chopin: A Fargo Romance  **

Poetry

John Donne, Holy Sonnet 14  

John Milton, Sonnet 16  

William Blake, The Lamb **

The Tyger  

Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Ulysses 

Gerard Manley Hopkins, God’s Grandeur  

T. S. Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock  

Langston Hughes, Harlem

John Ciardi, In Place of a Curse ** 

N. Scott Momaday, Carriers of the Dream Wheel  

Drama

Sophocles, Oedipus Rex  

Casebook on Flannery O’Connor

Flannery O’Connor

 A Good Man Is Hard to Find  

Greenleaf   

The Fiction Writer and His Country  

Frederick J. Hoffman, The Search for Redemption: Flannery O’Connor’s Fiction 

Gilbert H. Muller, Violence and the Grotesque  

Margaret Earley Whitt, Understanding Flannery O’Connor:  Greenleaf 

A Student Essay  

Quest: Suggestions for Writing  

Quest: Writing about Film  

Appendix A: Critical Approaches to Literature  

Appendix B: Writing about Film

A Student Essay  

Appendix C: Documenting a Research Paper: MLA Format

Glossary  

Acknowledgments  

Index  

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