An Introduction to Literature

I. READING, THINKING, AND WRITING CRITICALLY ABOUT LITERATURE. 1. Reading and Responding to Literature. What is Literature? Looking at an Example: Robert Frost's Immigrants. Looking at a Second Example: Pat Mora's Immigrants. Thinking about a Story: The Parable of the Prodigal Son. Samuel, Grace Paley. What's Past is Prologue. Incident, Countee Cullen. 2. Writing about Literature: From Idea to Essay. Why Write? Getting Ideas: Pre-Writing. Annotating a Text. Brainstorming for Ideas for Writing. The Story of an Hour, Kate Chopin. Focused Free Writing. Listing and Clustering. Developing an Awareness of the Writer's Use of Language. Asking Questions. Keeping a Journal. Arriving at a Thesis. Writing a Draft. Sample Draft of an Essay on Kate Chopin's The Story of anHour. Revising a Draft. Peer Review. The Final Version (Sample Student Essay): Ironies of Life in Kate Chopin's 'The Story of an Hour.' A Brief Overview of the Final Version. Explication. A Sample Explication. The Balloon of the Mind, William Butler Yeats. Comparison and Contrast. Review: How to Write an Effective Essay. Additional Readings. Ripe Figs, Kate Chopin. Infant Joy, Infant Sorrow, William Blake. II. FICTION. 3. Approaching Fiction: Responding in Writing. Cat in the Rain, Ernest Hemingway. Responses: Annotations and Journal Entries. 4. Stories and Meanings: Plot, Character, Theme. Misery, Anton Chekhov. The Storm, Kate Chopin. Desiree's Baby. 5. Narrative Point of View. Participant (or First-Person) Points of View. Nonparticipant (or Third-Person) Points of View. The Point of a Point of View. John Updike. A & P. The Rumor. 6. Allegory and Symbolism. A Note on Setting. Young Goodman Brown, Nathaniel Hawthorne. A Worn Path, Eudora Welty. 7. In Brief: Writing about Fiction. Plot. Character. Point of View. Setting. Symbolism. Style. Theme. A Story, Notes, and an Essay. The Cask of Amontillado, Edgar Allan Poe. A Student Written Response to a Story. Notes. A Sample Student Essay: Revenge, Noble and Ignoble. 8. Two Fiction Writers in Depth, Flannery Oconnor and Raymond Carver. Flannery O'Connor, Three Stories and Observations on Literature. A Good Man Is Hard to Find. Revelation. Parker's Back. On Fiction: Remarks from Essays and Letters. On Interpreting A Good Man Is Hard to Find. Raymond Carver: Three Stories, and Talking About Stories. Popular Mechanics. What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. Cathedral. Talking about Stories. 9. A Collection of Short Fiction. The Death of Ivan Ilych, Leo Tolstoy. Mademoiselle, Guy de Maupassant. The Yellow Wallpaper, Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Paul's Case, Willa Cather. Araby, James Joyce. The Horse Dealer's Daughter, D. H. Lawrence. A Rose for Emily, William Faulkner. The Chrysanthemums, John Steinbeck. Guests of the Nation, Frank O'Connor. The Son from America, Isaac Bashevis Singer. The Answer is No, Naguib Mahfouz. Battle Royal, Ralph Ellison. A Woman on a Roof, Doris Lessing. The Lottery, Shirley Jackson. Contemporary Voices. A Conversation with My Father, Grace Paley. A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings: A Tale for Children,Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Civil Peace, Chinua Achebe. Boys and Girls, Alice Munro. Only Approved Indians Can Play: Made in USA, Jack Forbes. Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been? Joyce Carol Oates. The Lesson, Toni Cade Bambara. Rape Fantasies, Margaret Atwood. Shiloh, Bobbie Ann Mason. The Artificial Family, Anne Tyler. The Stolen Party, Liliana Heker. Everyday Use, Alice Walker. Powder, Tobias Wolff. The Things They Carried, Tim O'Brien. The Man to Send Rain Clouds, Leslie Marmon Silko. The Oriental Contingent, Diana Chang. Girl, Jamaica Kincaid. The Two, Gloria Naylor. Two Kinds, Amy Tan. Second-Hand Man, Rita Dove. Fleur, Louise Erdrich. One Holy Night, Sandra Cisneros. The Moths, Helena Maria Viramontes. No One's a Mystery, Elizabeth Tallent. In the Gloaming, Alice Elliot Dark. 10. The Novel. Observations on the Novel. III. POETRY. 11. Approaching Poetry: Responding in Writing. Harlem, Langston Hughes. Thinking about Harlem. Some Journal Entries. Final Draft: Langston Hughes's Harlem. 12. Lyric Poetry. Michael Row the Boat Ashore, Anonymous. Careless Love, Anonymous. The Colorado Trail, Anonymous. Sally Goodin, Anonymous. Western Wind, Anonymous. Song: Love Armed, Aphra Behn. Stop All the Clocks, Cut Off the Telephone, W. H. Auden. The Self-Unseeing, Thomas Hardy. Battle Hymn of the Republic, Julia Ward Howe. Deep River, Anonymous. Didn't My Lord Deliver Daniel, Anonymous. Evenin' Air Blues, Langston Hughes. I Ask My Mother to Sing, Li-Young Lee. The Spring and the Fall, Edna St. Vincent Millay. Anthem for Doomed Youth, Wilfred Owen. A Noiseless Patient Spider, Walt Whitman. Ode on a Grecian Urn, John Keats. Anyone Lived in a Pretty How Town, E. E. Cummings. Sympathy, Paul Laurence Dunbar. Jump Cabling, Linda Pastan. General Review of the Sex Situation, Dorothy Parker. 13. The Speaking Tone of Voice. I'm Nobody! Who are you?, Emily Dickinson. The Hour-Glass, Ben Jonson. The Mother, Gwendolyn Brooks. We Real Cool. The Reader as the Speaker. Not Waving but Drowning, Stevie Smith. The Dramatic Monologue. My Last Duchess, Robert Browning. Diction and Tone. To the Virgins to Make Much of Time, Robert Herrick. The Man He Killed, Thomas Hardy. An Epitaph, Walter de la Mare. Spring and Fall: To a Young Child, Gerard Manley Hopkins. For a Lady I Know, Countee Cullen. My Mother and the Bed, Lyn Lifshin. The Voice of the Satirist. Next to of Course God America I, E. E. Cummings. Barbie Doll, Marge Piercy. What's That Smell in the Kitchen? Marge Piercy. To the Lady, Mitsuye Yamada. Dear John Wayne, Louise Erdrich. 14. Figurative Language: Simile, Metaphor, Personification,Apostrophe. A Red, Red Rose, Robert Burns. Metaphors, Sylvia Plath. Simile. A Simile for Her Smile, Richard Wilbur. Metaphor. On First Looking into Chapman's Homer, John Keats. A Work of Artifice, Marge Piercy. Personification. Apostrophe. Song, Edmund Waller. The Red Wheelbarrow, William Carlos Williams. The Eagle, Alfred, Lord Tennyson. Uphill, Christina Rossetti. The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner, Randall Jarrell. On the Death of Mr. Robert Levet, Samuel Johnson. Digging, Seamus Heaney. Indian Boarding School: The Runaways, Louise Erdrich. 15. Imagery and Symbolism. The Sick Rose, William Blake. I Saw in Louisiana a Live-Oak Growing, Walt Whitman. The Whale in the Blue; Washing Machine, John Haines. Kubla Khan, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Refugee Ship, Lorna Dee Cervantes. Diving into the Wreck, Adrienne Rich. The Emperor of Ice Cream, Wallace Stevens. A Note on Haiku. Fallen Petals Rise, Moritake. If Only We Could, Sokan. River in Summer, Shiki. Four Haiku, Richard Wright. After Weeks of Watching the Roof Leak, Gary Snyder. Writing a Haiku. Look, O Look, There Go, Taigi. 16. Irony. Rites of Passage, Sharon Olds. How to Eat Alone, Daniel Halpern. Earth, John Hall Wheelock. Ozymandias, Percy Bysshe Shelley. Ethics. Linda Pastan. To His Coy Mistress, Andrew Marvell. Holy Sonnet XIV ('Batter My Heart, Three-personedGod,') John Donne. Dream Boogie, Langston Hughes. Tony Went to the Bodega but He didn't Buy Anything, MartinEspada. Love is Not All: It is Not Meat nor Drink, Edna St. Vincent Millay. 17. Rhythm and Versification. An Immorality, Ezra Pound. Eight O'Clock, A. E. Housman. My Papa's Waltz, Theodore Roethke. The Dance, William Carlos Williams. Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night, Dylan Thomas. The Pitcher, Robert Francis. Versification: A Glossary for Reference. Blackberry Eating, Galway Kinnell. Nothing in Heaven Functions as It Ought, X. J. Kennedy. When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer, Walt Whitman. The Colonel, Carolyn Forch. 18. In Brief: Writing About Poetry. First Response. Speaker and Tone. Audience Structure and Form. Center of Interest and Theme. Diction. Sound Effects. A Note on Explication. A Student's Written Response to a Poem. Aunt Jennifer's Tigers, Adrienne Rich. Aunt Jennifer's Screen and Adrienne Rich's Poem, MariaFuentes. 19. Poetry and Translation. Five Versions of a Poem by Catullus. Can Poetry Be Translated? Looking at Translations of a Poem by Charles Baudelaire. Translating a Poem of Your Choice, and Commenting on the Translation. Last Minute Help: Three Spanish Poems. Folk Song. El Pensador de Rodin, Gaby el Mistral. Translating Haiku. A Sample Student Essay with a Translation, Garcia Lorcas Despedida. 20. A Collection of Poems. A Note on Folk Ballads. Sir Patrick Spence, Anonymous. The Three Ravens, Anonymous. The Twa Corbies, Anonymous. Edward, Anonymous. The Demon Lover, Anonymous. John Henry, Anonymous. William Shakespeare. Sonnet 29 ('When, in Disgrace with Fortune and Men'sEyes'). Sonnet 73 ('That Time of Year thou Mayst in MeBehold'). Sonnet 116 ('Let Me not to the Marriage of TrueMinds'). Sonnet 146 ('Poor Soul, the Center of My SinfulEarth'). A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning, John Donne. When I Consider How My Light is Spent, John Milton. The Lamb, William Blake. The Tyger. London. William Wordsworth. The World Is Too Much with Us. I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud. On Being Brought from Africa to America, Phillis Wheatley. The Indian's Welcome to the Pilgrim Fathers, Lydia HowardHuntley Sigourney. To Autumn, John Keats. Concord Hymn, Ralph Waldo Emerson. Ulysses, Alfred, Lord Tennyson. The March into Virginia, Herman Melville. Reconciliation, Walt Whitman. Dover Beach, Matthew Arnold. The Convergence of the Twain, Thomas Hardy. The Dying Words of Jackson, Sidney Lanier. God's Grandeur, Gerard Manley Hopkins. Shropshire Lad no.19 (To an Athlete Dying Young), A. E.Housman. William Butler Yeats. Sailing to Byzantium. For Anne Gregory. Richard Cory, Edwin Arlington Robinson. To America, James Weldon Johnson. Spring and All, William Carlos Williams. The River-Merchant's Wife: A Letter, Ezra Pound. In a Station of the Metro. Helen, H. D. The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, T. S. Eliot. Piazza Piece, John Crowe Ransom. America, Claude McKay. Ars Poetica, Archibald MacLeish. Dulce et Deco rum Est, Wilfred Owen. In Just-, E. E. Cummings. Musee des Beaux Arts, W. H. Auden. The Unknown Citizen, W. H. Auden. Elizabeth Bishop. The Fish. Poem. Frederick Douglass, Robert Hayden. Those Winter Sundays, Frederick Douglass. The Melting Pot, Dudley Randall. Contemporary Voices. Martin Luther King Jr., Gwendolyn Brooks. Naming of Parts, Henry Reed. The Dover Bitch, Anthony Hecht. The Question of Loyalty, Mitsuye Yamada. A Supermarket in California, Allen Ginsberg. Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy's Farm in Pine Island,Minnesota, James Wright. Disagreements, John Hollander. Living in Sin, Adrienne Rich. Rape. A Far Cry from Africa, Derek Walcott. Daddy, Sylvia Plath. A Poem for Black Hearts, Amiri Baraka. The Black Walnut Tree, Mary Oliver. In the Inner City, Lucille Clifton. Pocahontas to Her English Husband, John Rolfe, Paula GunnAllen. The Times They Are-a-Changin', Bob Dylan. Sonrisas, Pat Mora. To Live in the Borderlands Means You, Gloria Anzaldua. But He Was Cool or: He Even Stopped for Green Lights, Don L.Lee. Ellis Island, Joseph Bruchac, III. The School Children, Louise Gluck. The Hug, Tess Gallagher. Master Charge Blues, Nikki Giovanni. A Martian Sends a Postcard Home, Craig Raine. Facing It, Yusef Komunyakuu. Three Thousand Dollar Death Song, Wendy Rose. Vision, Joy Harjo. Moving Camp Too Far, Nila northSun. So Mexicans are Taking Jobs from Americans, Jimmy SantiagoBaca. Daystar, Rita Dove. My Father in the Navy: A Childhood Memory, Judith OrtizCofer. An Argument, David Mura. My Mother, Who Came from China, Where She Never Saw Snow,Laureen Mar. Child of the Americas, Aurora Levins Morales. Bully, Martin Espada. On the Amtrak from Boston to New York City, Sherman Alexie. 21. Three Poets in Depth: Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, and Langston Hughes. On Reading Authors Represented in Depth. Emily Dickinson. These are the Days When Birds Come Back. Papa above! Wild Nights '-' Wild Nights! There's a Certain Slant of Light. I Got so I Could Hear His Name '-'. The Soul Selects Her own Society. This was a Poet '-' It is That. I heard a Fly Buzz '-' When I Died. This World is not Conclusion. I Like to See it Lap the Miles. Because I Could not Stop for Death. A Narrow Fellow in the Grass. Further in Summer than the Birds. Tell All the Truth but Tell it Slant. A Route of Evanescence. Those '-' Dying, Then. Apparently with No Surprise. Letters about Poetry. Letter to Susan Gilbert (Dickinson). Letter to T. W. Higginson. Robert Frost. The Pasture. Mending Wall. The Wood-Pile. The Road Not Taken. The Telephone. The Vanishing Red. The Oven Bird. Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening. The Aim Was Song. Two Look at Two. The Need of Being Versed in Country Things. Acquainted with the Night. Desert Places. Design. The Silken Tent. Come In. The Most of It. The Gift Outright. The Draft Horse. Robert Frost on Poetry. The Figure a Poem Makes. From The Constant Symbol. Langston Hughes. The Negro Speaks of Rivers. Mother to Son. The Weary Blues. The South. Ruby Brown. Let America Be America Again. Poet to Patron. Ballad of the Landlord. Too Blue. Harlem 1. Theme for English B. Poet to Bigot. Langston Hughes on Poetry. The Negro and the Racial Mountain. On the Cultural Achievements of African Americans. IV. DRAMA. 22. Some Elements of Drama. Thinking about the Language of Drama. Plot and Character. Trifles, Susan Glaspell. 23. Tragedy. A Note on Greek Tragedy. Note on the Greek Theater. Sophocles. Oedipus Rex. Antigone. A Note on the Elizabethan Theater. Hamlet, William Shakespeare. 24. Comedy. The Man in a Case, Wendy Wasserstein. A Midsummer Night's Dream, William Shakespeare. 25. In Brief: Writing About Drama. Plot and Conflict. Character. Tragedy. Comedy. Nonverbal Language. The Play in Performance. A Sample Student Essay: Using Sources: The Women in Death of aSalesman. 26. Plays and Contexts. A Doll's House, Henrik Ibsen. Contexts for a Dolls House. Notes for the Tragedy of Modern Times, Henrik Ibsen. Adaptation of A Doll's House for a German Production. Speech at the Banquet of the Norwegian League for Women's Rights, Henrik Ibsen. The Glass Menagerie, Tennessee Williams. A Context for The Glass Menagerie. Production Notes, Tennessee Williams. Contemporary Voices. Arthur Miller. Death of a Salesman. Tragedy and the Common Man. Los Vendidos, Luis Valdez. The Actos. On Tidy Endings, Harvey Fierstein. 'night, Mother, Marsha Norman. A Context for night, Mother. Talking about 'night, Mother. Fences, August Wilson. A Context for Fences. Talking about Fences. The Sound of a Voice, David Hwang. Thoughts about Ethnic Theater. Oleanna, David Mamet. Talking about Drama. V. CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES. 27. Critical Approaches: The Nature of Criticism. Formalist (or New) Criticism. Deconstruction. Reader-Response Criticism. Archetypal (or Myth) Criticism. Historical Scholarship, Marxist Criticism, The New Historicism, and Biographical Criticism. Psychological (or Psychoanalytic) Criticism. Gender (Feminist, and Lesbian and Gay) Criticism. 28. Critical Perspectives on Joseph Conrad. A Casebook on Heart of Darkness. Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad. Remarks on Fiction. An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrads 'Heart of Darkness,' Chinua Achebe. The Double Worlds of Men and Women. Elaine Showalter. The Symbolism of the Two Knitters, Ian Watt. The Imperial Attitude, Edward Said. Teaching the Politics of 'Heart of Darkness,' Gerald Graff. Appendix A. Remarks about Manuscript Form. Basic Manuscript Form. Corrections in the Final Copy. Quotations and Quotation Marks. Appendix B. Writing a Research Paper. Primary and Secondary Materials. Locating Material: First Steps. Other Bibliographic Aids. Taking Notes. Two Mechanical Aids: The Photocopier and the Word Processor. A Guide to Note Taking. Drafting the Paper. Documentation. What to Document: Avoiding Plagiarism. Footnotes and Internal Parenthetical Citations (MLA format). Parenthetical Citations and List of Works Cited (MLA format). Appendix C. Glossary of Literary Terms. Index of Critical Terms. Index of Authors, Titles, and First Lines of Poems.