INTRODUCTION

READING (AND WRITING ABOUT) LITERATURE

Reading Literature

The Pleasures of Fiction

The Dog and the Shadow

Learning to Be Silent

*Reading the Parable in Context

The Pleasures of Poetry

Robert Frost, Dust of Snow

*Reading Frost's Poem in Context

The Pleasures of Drama

*Reading a Play in Context

Understanding Literature:

*Experience

*Interpretation

*Evaluation

*Reading in Context

Writing About Literature

Reasons for Writing About Literature

Ways of Writing About Literature

The Writing Process

Stephen Crane, War Is Kind

PART ONE: FICTION

CHAPTER 1: READING STORIES

Luke: The Prodigal Son

The Experience of Fiction

The Interpretation of Fiction

Reading in Context

The Evaluation of Fiction

John Updike A&P

The Act of Reading Fiction

Kate Chopin, The Story of an Hour

CHAPTER 2: TYPES OF SHORT FICTION

Early Forms: Parable, Fable, and Tale

Aesop, The Wolf and the Mastiff

Petronius, The Widow of Ephesus

The Short Story

The Nonrealistic Story

The Short Novel

CHAPTER 3: THE ELEMENTS OF FICTION

Plot and Structure

Frank O'Connor, Guests of the Nation

Character

Kay Boyle, Astronomer's Wife

Setting

Bobbie Ann Mason, Shiloh

Point of View

William Faulkner, A Rose for Emily

Language and Style

James Joyce, Araby

Theme

Eudora Welty, A Worn Path

Irony and Symbol

D.H. Lawrence, The Rocking-Horse Winner

CHAPTER 4: WRITING ABOUT FICTION

Reasons for Writing About Fiction

Informal Ways of Writing About Fiction

Annotation

Katherine Anne Porter, Magic

Freewriting

Formal Ways of Writing About Fiction

Student Papers on Fiction

Questions for Writing about Fiction

Suggestions for Writing

CHAPTER 5: THREE FICTION WRITERS IN CONTEXT

Reading Edgar Allan Poe and Flannery O'Connor

Questions for In-Depth Reading

*Edgar Allan Poe in Context

*Poe and Journalism

*Poe and the Horror Story

*Poe and the Detective Story

*The Dimension of Style

*Edgar Allan Poe: Stories

The Black Cat

*The Cask of Amontillado

*The Fall of the House of Usher

*The Purloined Letter

*Writer Inspired by Edgar Allan Poe

*Joyce Carol Oates, Artist

*Edgar Allan Poe: Essays

*Critics on Poe

*Flannery O'Connor in Context

*Southern Gothics

*The Catholic Dimension

*O'Connor's Irony

Flannery O'Connor: Stories

Good Country People

A Good Man Is Hard to Find

Everything That Rises Must Converge

The Life You Save May Be Your Own

*Writer Inspired by Flannery O'Connor

Mary Hood, How Far She Went

Flannery O'Connor: Essays and Letters

Critics on O'Connor

CHAPTER 6: A COLLECTION OF SHORT FICTION

*Sherman Alexis, Indian Education

*Margaret Atwood, Happy Endings

*Toni Cade Bambara, The Lesson

*Charles Baxter, Gryphon

Jorge Luis Borges, The Garden of Forking Paths

TRANSLATED BY DONALD YATES

Raymond Carver, Cathedral

Anton Chekhov, The Kiss

TRANSLATED BY CONSTANCE GARNETT

Ralph Ellison, Battle Royal

*F. Scott Fitzgerald, Winter Dreams

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings

TRANSLATED BY GREGORY RABASSA

Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Yellow Wallpaper

Nathaniel Hawthorne, Young Goodman Brown

*Ernest Hemingway, Hills Like White Elephants

*Ha Jin, Taking a Husband

James Joyce, The Boarding House

Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis

TRANSLATED BY ALEXIS WALKER

Jamaica Kincaid, Girl

*Alistair MacLeod, There is a Season

*Lorrie Moore, Community Life

*Alice Munro, Friend of My Youth

*Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

*Frank O'Connor, My Oedipus Complex

Tilie Olson, I Stand Here Ironing

*Carol Shields, Dressing for the Carnival

Leslie Marmon Silko, Yellow Woman

Amy Tan, Rules of the Game

Alice Walker, Everyday Use

Eudora Welty, Why I live at the P.O.

*New Voices

Maile Meloy, Ranch Girl

Timothy A. Westmoreland, Darkening of the World

*Literature in the News

*Catcher in the Rye

*Bad Writing

*Oprah's Book Club

*The Best Book in the World

PART TWO: POETRY

CHAPTER 7: READING POEMS

The Experience of Poetry

Robert Hayden, Those Winter Sundays

*Reading in Context

The Interpretation of Poetry

Robert Frost, Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening

*Reading in Context

The Evaluation of Poetry

Adrienne Rich, Aunt Jennifer's Tigers

The Act of Reading Poetry

Theodore Roethke, My Papa's Waltz

CHAPTER 8: TYPES OF POETRY

Narrative Poetry

Lyric Poetry

CHAPTER 9: ELEMENTS OF POETRY

Voice: Speaker and Tone

Stephen Crane, War Is Kind

Robert Browning, My Last Duchess

Muriel Stuart, In the Orchard

Gerard Manley Hopkins, Thou art indeed just, Lord

Anonymous, Western Wind

Henry Reed, Naming of Parts

Jacques Prevert, Family Portrait

Diction

William Wordsworth, I wandered lonely as a cloud

Edwin Arlington Robinson, Miniver Cheevy

William Wordsworth, It is a beauteous evening

Robert Herrick, Delight in Disorder

Adrienne Rich, Rape

Imagery

Elizabeth Bishop, First Death in Nova Scotia

William Butler Yeats, The Lake Isle of Innisfree

Robert Browning, Meeting at Night

H. D. (Hilda Doolittle), Heat

Thomas Hardy, Neutral Tones

Figures of Speech: Simile and Metaphor

William Shakespeare, That time of year thou may'st in me behold

John Donne, Hymn to God the Father

Robert Wallace, The Double-Play

Louis Simpson, The Battle

Judith Wright, Woman to Child

Symbolism and Allegory

Peter Meinke, Advice to My Son

Christina Rossetti, Up-Hill

William Blake, A Poison Tree

Robert Frost, The Road Not Taken

George Herbert, Virtue

Emily Dickinson, Because I could not stop for Death

Syntax

John Donne, The Sun Rising

Thomas Hardy, The Man He Killed

William Butler Yeats, An Irish Airman Foresees His Death

Robert Frost, The Silken Tent

E. E. Cummings, Me up at does

Stevie Smith, Mother Among the Dustbins

Sound: Rhyme, Alliteration, Assonance

Gerard Manley Hopkins, In the Valley of the Elwy

Thomas Hardy, During Wind and Rain

Alexander Pope, Sound and Sense

Bob McKenty, Adam's Song

May Swenson, The Universe

Helen Chasin, The Word Plum

Rhythm and Meter

Robert Frost, The Span of Life

George Gordon, Lord Byron The Destruction of Sennacherib

Anne Sexton, Her Kind

William Carlos Williams, The Red Wheelbarrow

Structure: Closed Form and Open Form

John Keats, On First Looking into Chapman's Homer

Walt Whitman, When I heard the learn'd astronomer

E. E. Cummings, el(a

E. E. Cummings, [Buffalo Bill's]

William Carlos Williams, The Dance

Denise Levertov, O Taste and See

Theodore Roethke, The Waking

C. P. Cavafy, The City

TRANSLATED BY EDMUND KEELEY AND PHILIP SHERRARD

Theme

Emily Dickinson, Crumbling is not an instant's Act

CHAPTER 10: TRANSFORMATIONS

Revisions

William Blake, London

William Butler Yeats, A Dream of Death

Emily Dickinson, The Wind begun to knead (rock) theGrass

D. H. Lawrence, Piano

Langston Hughes, Ballad of Booker T.

Parodies

William Carlos Williams, This Is Just to Say

Kenneth Koch, Variations on a Theme by William Carlos Williams

Gerard Manley Hopkins, Carrion Comfort

Gary Layne Hatch, Terrier Torment; or, Mr.Hopkins and His Dog

William Shakespeare, Shall I compare thee to a summer's day

Howard Moss, Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer's Day

Robert Frost, Dust of Snow

Bob McKenty, Snow on Frost

Poems and Paintings

Vincent Van Gogh, The Starry Night

Anne Sexton, The Starry Night

Francesco de Goya, The Third of May, 1808

David Gewanter Goya's The Third of May, 1808

Pieter Breughel the Elder, Landscape with the Fall of Icarus

W. H. Auden, Muse des Beaux Arts

Pieter Breughel the Elder, Hunters in the Snow

Joseph Langland, Hunters in the Snow

William Blake, The Sick Rose (watercolor)

William Blake, The Sick Rose (poem)

Henri Matisse, Dance

Natalie Safir, Matisse's Dance

*Cathy Song, Girl Powdering Her Neck

*Kitagawa Utamaro, Girl Powdering Her Neck

*Johannes Vermeer, Young Woman with a Water Jug

*Stephen Mitchell, Vermeer

*Marcel Duchamp, Nude Descending a Staircase

*X.J. Kennedy, Nude Descending a Staircase

Gustav Klimt, The Kiss

Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Short Story on a Painting of Gustav Klimt

*John Everett Milais, Ophelia

*E.J. Bellocq, Ophelia

Nathasha Trethewey, Bellocq's Ophelia

*Lun-Yi Tsai, Disbelief

*Lucille Clifton, Tuesday 9/11/01

CHAPTER 11: WRITING ABOUT POETRY

Reasons for Writing About Poetry

Informal Ways of Writing About Poetry

Annotation

Robert Hayden, Those Winter Sundays

Freewriting

Robert Graves, Symptoms of Love

Formal Ways of Writing About Poetry

Sylvia Plath, Mirror

Student Papers of Poetry

Questions for Writing about Poetry

Suggestions for Writing

CHAPTER 12: THREE POETS IN CONTEXT

Reading Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, and Langston Hughes in Depth

Questions for In-Depth Reading

*Emily Dickinson in Context

*The Nineteenth-Century New England Literary Scene

*Dickinson and Modern Poetry

*Dickinson and Christianity

Dickinson's Style

Emily Dickinson: Poems

Emily Dickinson, I cannot dance upon my Toes

Emily Dickinson, The Soul selects her own Society

199 I'm "wife"--I've finished that

258 There's a certain Slant of light

341 After great pain, a formal feeling comes

214 I taste a liquor never brewed

348 I dreaded that first Robin, so

986 A narrow Fellow in the Grass

1068Further in Summer than the Birds

536 The Heart asks Pleasure--first

599 There is a pain--so utter

650 Pain--has an element of Blank

744 Remorse--is Memory--awake

280 I felt a Funeral, in my Brain

419 We grow accustomed to the Dark

449 I died for Beauty--but was scarce

465 I heard a Fly buzz--when I died

1078 The Bustle in a House

1100 The last Night that She lived

675 Essentials Oils--are wrung--

328 Some keep the Sabbath going to Church

632 The brain is wider than the sky

1624 Apparently with no surprise

249 Wild Nights--Wild Nights!

1732 My life closed twice before its close

241 I like a look of Agony

435 Much Madness is divinest Sense

1129 Tell all the Truth but tell it slant

585 I like to see it lap the Miles

754 My Life had stood--a Loaded Gun

1463 A Route of Evanescence

Three Dickinson Poems with Aletered Punctuation

*Poets Inspired by Dickinson

*Jane Kenyon, Notes from the Other Side

*Jane Hirshfield, Three Times My Life Has Opened

*Billy Collins, Taking Off Emily Dickinson's Clothes

*Linda Pastan, Emily Dickinson

*Kay Ryan, Crash

*Dickinson on Herself and her First Poems

*Critics on Dickinson

*Robert Frost in Context

*Frost and Popularity

*Frost and Nature

*Frost and the Sonnet

*Frost's Voices

Robert Frost: Poems

The Tuft of Flowers

Mending Wall

Birches

Home Burial

Putting in the Seed

Two Look at Two

Fire and Ice

Acquainted with the Night

Tree at my Window

Departmental

Desert Places

Design

Provide, Provide

The Most of It

*Poets Inspired Frost

*Edward Thomas, When First

*W.S. Merwin, Unknown Bird

*Seamus Heaney, The Forge

*Neal Bowers, Driving Lessons

Critical Comments by Frost

Critics on Frost

Langston Hughes in Context

*The Harlem Renaissance

*Hughes on Music

*Hughes's Influences

*Hughes's Style

Langston Hughes: Poems

Same in Blues

Dream Deferred

The Negro Speaks of Rivers

Mother to Son

I, Too

My People

The Weary Blues

Young Gals Blues

Morning After

Trumpet Player

Dream Boogie

Madam and the Rent Man

Theme for English #B

Aunt Sues Stories

Let America Be America Again

*Poets Inspired by Huges

*Rita Dove, Testimonial

*Michael Harper, Martin's BluesThe Ballad of Birmingham

*Kevin Young, Langston Hughes

*Hughes on Harlem, the Blues

*Critics on Hughes

CHAPTER 13: A COLLECTION OF POEMS

A Selection of Classic Poems

Anonymous, Barbara Allan

Anonymous, Edward, Edward

William Blake, The Clod & the Pebble

William Blake, The Lamb

William Blake, The Tyger

William Blake, The Garden of Love

Anne Bradstreet, To My Dear and Loving Husband

Elizabeth Barrett Browning, How do I Love Thee?

Robert Burns, A Red, Red Rose

Lewis Carroll, Jabberwocky

Samule Taylor Coleridge, Kuba Khan

John Donne, Song

John Donne, A Valediction: Forbidden Mourning

John Donne, The Flea

John Donnne, Death, be not proud

John Donne, Batter my heart, three-personed God

George Gordon, Lord Byron, She Walks in Beauty

Thomas Hardy, The Ruined Maid

Thomas Hardy, Afterwards

George Herbert, The Altar

Robert Herrick, Upon Julia's Clothes

Robert Herrick, To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time

Gerard Manley Hopkins, God's Grandeur

Gerard Manely Hopkins, The Windhover

Gerard Manley Hopkins, Pied Beauty

Gerard Manley Hopkins, Spring and Fall: To a Young Child

A. E. Housman, When I was one-and-twenty

A. E. Housman, To an Athlete Dying Young

Ben Jonson, On My First Son

Ben Jonson, Song: To Celia

John Keats, When I have fears that I may cease to be

John Keats, La Belle Dame sans Merci

John Keats, Ode on a Grecian Urn

John Keats, Ode to a Nightingale

Andrew Marvell, To His Coy Mistress

John Milton, When I consider how my light is spent

John Milton, On the Late Massacre in Piedmont

Edgar Allan Poe, To Helen

Edgar Allan Poe, The Raven

Alexander Pope, from An Essay on Man

William Shakespeare, When in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes

William Shakespeare, Let me not to the marriage of true minds

William Shakespeare, Th' expense of spirit in a waste of shame

William Shakespeare, My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun

Percy Bysshe Shelley, Ozymandias

Edmund Spenser, One day I wrote her name upon the strand

Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Ulysses

Alfred, Lord Tennyson, The Eagle

Walt Whitman, One's Self I Sing

Walt Whitman, A noiseless patient spider

William Wordsworth, The worldis too much with us

William Wordworth, The Solitary Reaper

Thomas Wyatt, They flee from me

A Selection of Modern Poems

W.H. Auden, The Unknown Citizen

W.H. Auden, In Memory of W.B. Yeats

W.H. Auden, Funeral Blues

*W.H. Auden, September 1, 1939

Gwendolyn Brooks, We real cool

Gwendolyn Brooks, First fight. Then fiddle.

*Gwendolyn Brooks, Song in the Front Yard

Countee Cullen, Incident

e.e. cummings, anyone lived in a pretty how town

e.e. cummings, I thank You God for this most amazing

Paul Laurence Dunbar, We wear the mask

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

Philip Larkin, A Study of Reading Habits

D.H. Lawrence, Humming-bird

D.H. Lawrence, Snake

Archibald MacLeish, Ars Poetica

Claude McKay, The Tropics in New York

Marianne Moore, Poetry

Wilfred Owen, Dulce et Decorum Est

Sylvia Plath, Blackberrying

Sylvia Plath, Metaphors

*Sylvia Plath, Morning Song

Ezra Pound, The River-Merchant's Wife: A Letter

Ezra Pound, The Garden

John Crowe Ransom, Piazza Piece

Theodore Roethke, Elegy for Jane

*Siegfried Sassoon, They

Anne Sexton, Two Hands

William Stafford, Traveling through the Dark

Wallace Stevens, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird

Mary Swenson, Women

Dylan Thomas, Do not go gentle into that good night

Jean Toomer, Reapers

William Carlos Williams, Spring and All

William Carlos Williams, Dance Russe

William Carlos Williams, Landscape with the Fall of Icarus

Richard Wilbur, The Death of a Toad

James Wright, Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy's Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota

James Wright, A Blessing

William Butler Yeats, The Second Coming

William Butler Yeats, The Wild Swans at Coole

William Butler Yeats, Leda and the Swan

William Butler Yeats, Sailing to Byzantium

William Butler Yeats, When You Are Old

A Selection of Contemporary Poems

*Diane Ackerman, Spiders

*Sherman Alexie, Indian Boy Love Song #1

*Sherman Alexie, Indian Boy Love Song #2

Margaret Atwood, This is a Photograph of Me

Jimmy Santiago Baca, from Meditations on the South Valley XVII

*Edward Kamau Brathwaite, Ogun

Raymond Carver, Photograph of My Father in his Twenty-Second Year

Lucille Clifton, Homage to My Hips

*Judith Ortiz Cofer, The Game

*Billy Collins, Introduction to Poetry

*Billy Collins, The History Lesson

*Billy Collins, My Number

*Wendy Cope, The Ted Williams Villanelle

Gregory Corso, Marriage

*Mark Doty, Golden Retrievals

Rita Dove, Canary

Louise Erdrich, Indian Boarding School: The Runaways

Nikki Giovanni, Ego Tripping

Nikki Giovanni, Nikki Rosa

Donald Hall, My son, my executioner

Robert Hass, Meditation at Lagunitas

Seamus Heaney, Digging

Seamus Heaney, Mid-Term Break

*Michael Hogan, Kickoff

*Aron Keesbury, To Waist

*Jane Kenyon, Peonies at Dusk

*Jane Kenyon, Otherwise

*Jane Kenyon, Let Evening Come

Yusef Komunyakaa, Facing It

*Michael Longley, The Butchers

Audre Lorde, Hanging Fire

*Paul Muldoon, Lag

Sharon Olds, Size and Sheer Will

*Sharon Olds, Rite of Passage

*Sharon Olds, 35/10

Robert F. Panara, On His Deafness

Linda Pastan, Ethics

Alberto Rios, A Dream of Husbands

Kraft Rompf, Waiting Table

Gertrude Schnackenberg, Signs

Cathy Song, Lost Sister

Gary Soto, Behind Grandma's House

*Krishna Tateneni, Blindness

*Baron Wormser, Friday Night

*Poetry of the World

*Yehuda Amichai (Israel), A Pity. We Were Such a Good Invention (Translated by Assia Gutmann)

*Cairil Anwar (Indonesia), At the Mosque (Translated by Burton Rafael)

*Matshuo Basho (Japan), Three Haiku (Translated by Robert Hass)

Rosario Castellanos (Mexico), Chess (Translated by Maureen Ahern)

*Bei Dao (China), Declaration (Translated by Bonnie McDougall)

*Zbigniew Herbert (Poland), Pebble (Translated by Czeslaw Milosz and Peter Dale Scott)

Osip Mandelstam (Russia), The Stalin Epigram (Translated by Clarence Brown and W.S. Merwin)

Czeslaw Milosz (Poland), A Song on the End of the World (Translated by Anthony Milosz)

Pablo Neruda (Chile), Ode to My Socks (Translated by Robert Bly)

Boris Pasternak (Russia), Hamlet (Translated by John Stallworthy and Peter France)

*A.K. Ramanujan (India), Pleasure

*Wole Soyinka (Nigeria), Hamlet

*Derek Walcott (Caribbean), Sea Grapes

*New Voices

*Kay Ryan

*Mockingbird

*Your Face Will Stick

*Blandeur

*All Shall Be Restored

*Simon Armitage

*Zoom

*Poem

*Drawing the Arctic Circle

*On and Owd Piktcha

*Literature in the News

*Billy Collins, The Bard of Simple Things

*Celebrating Poetry: National Poetry Day/Month

*September 11th: American Poets Respond

Aliki Barnstone, Making Love After September 11, 2001

Bart Edelman, Coat of Sorrow

Alicia Ostriker, The window, at the moment of flame

Billy Collins, The Names

PART THREE: DRAMA

CHAPTER 14: READING PLAYS

The Experience of Drama

Isabella Augusta Persse, Lady Gregory

The Rising of the Moon

The Interpretation of Drama

The Evaluation of Drama

CHAPTER 15: TYPES OF DRAMA

Tragedy

Comedy

CHAPTER 16: ELEMENTS OF DRAMA

Plot

Character

Dialogue

*Subtext

Staging

Symbolism and Irony

Theme

CHAPTER 17: WRITING ABOUT DRAMA

Reasons for Writing about Drama

Informal Ways of Writing About Drama

Annotation

Double-Column Notebook

Formal Ways of Writing About Drama

Student Papers on Drama

Questions for Writing About Drama

Questions for In-Depth Reading

Suggestions for Writing

CHAPTER 18: THE GREEK THEATER: SOPHOCLES

Reading Sophocles in Context

*Athens in the Golden Age

*Greek Tragedy

*Sophocles and His Works

*Oedipus the King

Sophocles, Oedipus Rex (Translated by Fitts and Fitzgerald)

Critics on Sophocles

CHAPTER 19: THE ELIZABETHAN THEATER: SHAKESPEARE

Reading Shakespeare in Context

*London in the Age of Elizabeth

*The Arts in the Age of Elizabeth

*Stagecraft in the Elizabethan Age

*Shakespeare and His Works

William Shakespeare, The Tragedy of Othello

William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Prince of Denmark

Critics on Shakespeare

Literature in the News:

In Love with Shakespeare

Shakespeare and Sexuality

CHAPTER 20: THE MODERN REALISTIC THEATER: IBSEN

Reading Ibsen in Context

Realism

A Note on the Theater of the Absurd

Ibsen, Exile, and Change

Henrik Ibsen, A Doll House Translated bt Rolf Fjelde

CHAPTER 21: A COLLECTION OF MODERN AND CONTEMPORARY PLAYS

*Anton Chekhov, A Marriage Proposal

Susan Glaspell, Trifles

David Henry Hwang, M. Butterfly

*Eugene Ionesco, The Gap

Terrence McNally, Andre's Mother

Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman

Wendy Wasserstein, Tender Offer

*Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest

August Wilson, Fences

*New Voices

*Mary Gallagher

*Brother

*Warren Leight

*The Final Interrogation of Ceausescu's Dog

PART FOUR: RESEARCH AND CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES

CHAPTER 22: WRITING WITH SOURCES

Why Do Research About Literature

Clarifying the Assignment

Selecting a Topic

Finding and Using Sources

Using Computerized Databases

Using the Internet for Research

Developing a Critical Perspective

Developing a Thesis

Drafting and Revising

Conventions

Documenting Sources

Documenting Electronic Sources

Alternative Documentation Style: Endnotes and Footnotes

A Student Essay Using One Source as a Stimulus

Sample Research Papers

CHAPTER 23: CRITICAL THEORY: APPROACHES TO THE ANALYSIS AND INTERPRETATION OF LITERATURE

Reading for Analysis

William Carlos Williams, The Use of Force (story)

Emily Dickinson, I'm "wife"- I've finished that (poem)

The Canon and the Curriculum

Formalist Perspectives

Biographical Perspectives

Historical Perspectives

Psychological Perspectives

Feminist and Marxist Perspectives

Reader-Response Perspectives

Mythological Perspectives

Structuralist Perspectives

Deconstructive Perspectives

Cultural Studies Perspectives

Using Critical Perspectives as Heuristics

Appendix: Poets' Lives

Glossary

Index