- Shopping Bag ( 0 items )
Other sellers (Paperback)
-
All (30) from $47.99
-
New (8) from $62.60
-
Used (22) from $47.99
More About This Textbook
Overview
Literature is a conversation — between writers and other writers, and between writers and readers. In Literature and Its Writers, Ann and Samuel Charters complement a rich and varied selection of stories, poems, and plays with an unparalleled array of commentaries about that literature by the writers themselves. Such "writer talk" inspires students to respond as it models ways for them to enter the conversation. In the sixth edition, the Charters continue to entice students to join the conversation, with adventurous and intriguing new literary works, more detailed coverage of literary elements, and more help with reading and writing.
This anthology is now available with video! Learn more about VideoCentral for Literature.
Product Details
Related Subjects
Meet the Author
Ann Charters received her B.A. at Berkeley and her Ph.D. at Columbia. She first met Kerouac at a poetry reading in Berkeley in 1956, and compiled a comprehensive bibliography of his work in 1967. A professor of English at the University of Connecticut, she is also the editor of Selected Letters of Jack Kerouac and the Portable Kerouac Reader, and the author of Beats and Company: Portrait of a Literary Generation.
Samuel Charters has taught creative writing and published widely in a variety of genres, including eleven books of poetry, four novels, a book of criticism on contemporary American poetry, a biography (coauthored with Ann Charters) of the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, and translations of the poetry of Tomas Transtromer and Edith Sodergran. An ethnomusicologist, he produces blues and jazz recordings and has published many books about music, among them a history of New Orleans jazz and a study of bluesman Robert Johnson.
Biography
It's nearly impossible to come across a significant study of Jack Kerouac without encountering the name Ann Charters. A foremost Beat scholar, she wrote the first biography of the On the Road author and has studied his milieu for over 20 years. Charters also has a personal connection to back up her scholarly interest in the Beats: When she was a junior at University of California, Berkeley, her roommate set her up on a date with Peter Orlovsky. Charters was actually in love with her professor, Sam Charters, whom she later married; as for Orlovsky, he was Allen Ginsberg's boyfriend. Charters said in a magazine interview, "My roommate...said to me, 'I'll fix you up with a wonderful boy who's your own age.' This was Peter Orlovsky, before he was living with Allen, and who considered 'Howl' to be the greatest poem since Whitman's Leaves of Grass."Though the romance didn't pan out, Charters' love of the Beats endured, and she became the genre's anthologist of note. After completing biographies of Kerouac and the futurist poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, Charters assembled the now-classic The Story and Its Writer, a collection of exemplary short stories and commentary by and about authors such as Raymond Carver and Anton Chekhov. In addition to her taste and eye for good literature, one of Charters' strengths is her ability to incorporate the author's voice. She got Kerouac's cooperation on her biography of him and included the authors' own analyses of their work in The Story and Its Writer.
This acumen probably reached its apotheosis when Charters edited a collection of Kerouac's letters. By that time, a second Kerouac biography, Memory Babe by Gerald Nicosia, had been released, and as Charters told the Alsop Review, "my book was, I thought, in comparison, woefully inadequate." She continued, "That's why I took on the editing, because I saw with the letters that it could be a way of giving a biography through my selection, which emphasizes Jack's life as a writer.... If I were to write a biography -- and I will not rewrite my first biography -- well, I've done that with this two-volume set."
Though she has focused on Kerouac in her work, Charters has also done a lot to improve the understanding of Beat literature in general, not only by editing well-known anthologies such as The Portable Beat Reader but also by writing introductions and essays in editions of major works. For a British anthology called The Penguin Book of the Beats (which follows the structure of The Portable Beat Reader), she explained her approach in a publisher's interview: "I decided I wouldn't just alphabetically arrange my favorite Beat writers or put them in big sections, like Poetry, Fiction, Essays. I would organize it historically, so that someone who didn't know much about Beat writing could come in and use the book as an introduction to the whole field and have some guidelines."
Charters is appealing as an editor and anthologist because she embraces, rather than trying to distance herself from, her personal connection to the era she covers. With The Portable Sixties Reader, her most expansive collection yet, she continues to illuminate a crucial literary era.
Good To Know
Charters has taught at Brown University, Columbia University, and the University of Connecticut, where she has been a professor of English since 1974.Charters on Kerouac's detractors: "Most people are, at heart, good people, but fairly conservative. They really like to think that there's a tried-and-true way of writing, and you sit and write 13 revisions. And when they hear that he's bragging that he's written it in one draft they kind of get their hackles up." (online zine interview)
Table of Contents
Introduction: Connecting with Literature
Sample Paper — Raymond Carver's "Creative Writing 101"
Reading Literature
Thinking and Writing about Literature
Part One — FICTION
- What is a Short Story?
-
- Reading, Thinking and Writing about Short Fiction
-
- Plot and Point of View
-
- Character and Setting
-
- Style and Theme
-
- CONVERSATIONS ON STORIES AND STORYTELLERS
-
- STORIES AND STORYTELLERS
Sherman Alexie*Old Testament, The Judgment of Solomon
Grace Paley, Samuel
Close Reading Short Fiction
Some Guidelines for Close Reading
Sample Close Reading —Grace Paley, Samuel
Critical Thinking about Short Fiction
Writing about Short Fiction
Sample Paper — Grace Paley's Commentary and "Samuel"
Other Resources to Help Your Writing
Sample Paper —Grace Paley's Point of View in "Samuel"
Plot
*Plot Summary
*Raymond Carver, Popular Mechanics
*Questions for Critical Thinking about Plot
*Writing about Plot
*Alasdair Gray, Pillow Talk
Point of View
*Herta Muller, Workday
*Dagoberto Gilb, Love in L.A.
*Questions for Critical Thinking about Point of View
*Writing about Point of View
*Useful Terms to Remember
Character
*Roberto Bolano, Jim
*Questions for Critical Thinking about Character
*Writing about Character
Jamaica Kincaid, Girl
Setting
*Daniel Orozco, Orientation
*Questions for Critical Thinking about Setting
*Writing about Setting
Gabriel Garcia Marquez, A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings
* Useful Terms to Remember
Style
*David Foster Wallace, Everything is Green
*Lydia Davis, Blind Date
Voice
Tone
Irony
Symbol
*Franz Kafka, I Wish I Were a Red Indian
*Yasunari Kawabata, The Grasshopper and the Bell Cricket
*Questions for Critical Thinking about Style
*Writing about Style
Theme
Interpreting the Theme of a Story
*Naguib Mahfouz, Half a Day
*Rosario Morales, The Day It Happened
*Questions for Critical Thinking about Theme
*Writing about Theme
*Useful Terms to Remember
Flannery O'Connor
Good Country People
A Good Man Is Hard to Find
On Flannery O'Connor's Fiction
Flannery O'Connor
From Letters, 1954-55
Flannery O'Connor
Writing Short Stories
Flannery O'Connor
The Element of Suspense in A Good Man Is Hard to Find
Sally Fitzgerald
Southern Sources of A Good Man Is Hard to Find
Edgar Allan Poe
The Cask of Amontillado
The Fall of the House of Usher
On Critical Views of Edgar Allan Poe's Short Stories
Edgar Allan Poe
The Importance of the Single Effect in a Prose Tale
D.H. Lawrence
On The Fall of the House of Usher and The Cask of Amontillado
Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren
A New Critical Reading of The Fall of the House of Usher
J. Gerald Kennedy
On The Fall of the House of Usher
David S. Reynolds
PoeÕs Art of Transformation in The Cask of Amontillado
*Writing about Flannery O'Connor and Edgar Allan Poe
The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven
COMMENTARY: Sherman Alexie, Superman and Me
*Dorothy Allison
Jason Who Will Be Famous
Margaret Atwood
Happy Endings
James Baldwin
Sonny's Blues
COMMENTARY: James Baldwin, Autobiographical Notes
Toni Cade Bambara
The Lesson
*Jose Antonio Burciaga
La Puerta
Raymond Carver
Cathedral
COMMENTARIES: Raymond Carver, On Writing
Raymond Carver, Creative Writing 101
CONNECTION: Raymond Carver, Popular Mechanics
Anton Chekhov
The Lady with the Pet Dog
COMMENTARY: Anton Chekhov, Technique in Writing the Short Story
CONNECTION: Joyce Carol Oates, The Lady with the Pet Dog
Kate Chopin
Desiree's Baby
The Story of an Hour
COMMENTARY: Kate Chopin, How I Stumbled upon Maupassant
*Stephen Crane
The Open Boat
COMMENTARY: Stephen Crane, The Sinking of the Commodore
Junot Diaz
How to Date a Browngirl, Blackgirl, Whitegirl, or Halfie
Ralph Ellison
Battle Royal
COMMENTARY: Ralph Ellison, The Influence of Folklore on Battle Royal
William Faulkner
A Rose for Emily
COMMENTARY: William Faulkner, The Meaning of A Rose for Emily
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
The Yellow Wallpaper
COMMENTARIES: Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Undergoing the Cure for Nervous Prostration
Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, A Feminist Reading of Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper
Susan Glaspell
A Jury of Her Peers
COMMENTARIES: Elaine Showalter, On Glaspell's A Jury of Her Peers
CONNECTIONS: Susan Glaspell, Trifles
Lynn Nottage, POOF!
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Young Goodman Brown
COMMENTARY: Herman Melville, Blackness in Hawthorne's Young Goodman Brown
CONNECTION, Edgar Allan Poe, The Importance of the Single Effect in a Prose Tale
Ernest Hemingway
Hills Like White Elephants
Zora Neale Hurston
*Sweat
COMMENTARY: Zora Neale Hurston, How it Feels to Be Colored Me
CONNECTION, Alice Walker, Zora Neale Hurston: A Cautionary Tale and a Partisan View
Shirley Jackson
The Lottery
COMMENTARY: Shirley Jackson, The Morning of June 28, 1948, and The Lottery
Sarah Orne Jewett
*A White Heron
Ha Jin
*Saboteur
James Joyce
Araby
CONNECTION: John Updike, A&P
Franz Kafka
A Hunger Artist
R. Crumb and David Zane Mairowitz, A Hunger Artist
The Metamorphosis
COMMENTARY: Gustav Janouch, Kafka's View of The Metamorphosis
CONNECTION: Franz Kafka, I Wish I Were a Red Indian
D.H. Lawrence
The Rocking-Horse Winner
CONNECTION: D.H. Lawrence, On Poe's The Fall of the House of Usher and The Cask of Amontillado
Jack London
To Build a Fire
Guy de Maupassant
The Necklace
CONNECTION: Kate Chopin, How I Stumbled on Maupassant
Herman Melville
Bartleby, the Scrivener
CONNECTION: Herman Melville, Blackness in Hawthorne's Young Goodman Brown
Lorrie Moore
How to Become a Writer
Joyce Carol Oates
The Lady with the Pet Dog
Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?
COMMENTARY: Joyce Carol Oates, Smooth Talk: Short Story Into Film
CONNECTION: Anton Chekhov, The Lady with the Pet Dog
Tim O'Brien
The Things They Carried
COMMENTARY: Bobbie Ann Mason, On Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried
Tillie Olsen
I Stand Here Ironing
ZZ Packer
Brownies
Grace Paley
*A Conversation with My Father
COMMENTARY: Paley, A Conversation with Ann Charters
CONNECTION: Grace Paley, Samuel
Luigi Pirandello
*War
CONNECTION: Luigi Pirandello, Six Characters in Search of an Author
Marjane Satrapi
*From Persepolis: The Veil
*COMMENTARY: Sydney Plum, Reading The Veil by Marjane Satrapi
Leslie Marmon Silko
Yellow Woman
COMMENTARY: Paula Gunn Allen, Whirlwind Man Steals Yellow Woman
John Steinbeck
The Chrysanthemums
Amy Tan
Two Kinds
John Updike
A&P
CONNECTION: James Joyce, A&P
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
Harrison Bergeron
Alice Walker
Everyday Use
COMMENTARY: Alice Walker, Zora Neale Hurston: A Cautionary Tale and a Partisan View
CONNECTION: Zora Neale Hurston, Sweat
Eudora Welty
A Worn Path
COMMENTARY: Eudora Welty, Is Phoenix Jackson's Grandson Really Dead?
William Carlos Williams
The Use of Force
Tobias Wolff
Say Yes
PART TWO — POETRY
8. What is a poem?
Marianne Moore, Poetry (1935)
*Pablo Neruda, Poetry
Archibald MacLeish, Ars Poetica
Ann Menebroker, A Mere Glimpse
*Fred Voss, How Many Times Can We Follow Dante Down Into Hell?
*Victor Hernado Cruz today is a day of great joy
*Commentary: James Tate, "Like it or not we are a part of our time."
9. Reading, Thinking, and Writing about Poetry
Reading Poetry
Close Reading
Paraphrase
Guidelines for Reading Poetry
Sample Close Reading — Linda Pastan, To a Daughter Leaving Home
Critical Thinking about Poetry
Writing about Poetry
Sample Paper —A Moving Lyric: Pastan's "To a Daughter Leaving Home"
10. RHYME
Emily Dickinson, A word is dead
Alliteration
Assonance
Walt Whitman, A Farm Picture
Onomatopoeia
Rhyme
A. E. Housman, Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
*Georgia Douglas Johnson, I Want to Die While You Love me
A Range of Rhyme
Stevie Smith, Not Waving but Drowning
Connection: Anne Sexton, An Obsessive Combination of Ontological Inscape, Trickery and Love
Rhymed Poems for Further Reading
Sir Thomas Wyatt, They Flee from Me
Ben Jonson, On My First Son
Robert Herrick, To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time
*Robert Browning, A Woman's Last Word
*e. e. cummings, when God lets my body be
Theodore Roethke, My Papa's Waltz
*Anne Sexton, And One for My Dame
*Dana Gioia, Summer Storm
Rhyme and Popular Songs
Lou Reed, Chelsea Girls
*Natalie Merchant, Jealousy
*Writing about Rhyme
*Useful Terms to Remember
11. POETIC METER
*Edgar Lee Masters, Petit, the Poet
Accent and Meter
*Mary Coleridge, A Clever Woman
*Ralph Waldo Emerson, from The Humble Bee
*Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, from The Song of Hiawatha
*Christina Rossetti, What are heavy? sea-sand and sorrow
Blank Verse
*Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Books, books, books!
The Stanza
*Paul Lawrence Dunbar, Life
Poems for Further Reading
*Thomas Hood, from The Bridge of Sighs
*Mary Coleridge, Eyes
*Thomas Hardy, I need not go
*Robert Hayden, A Road in Kentucky
*Writing about Poetic Meter
*Useful Terms to Remember
12. THE MEANING OF WORDS
Tone
*Carl Sandburg, Grass
Edwin Arlington Robinson, Miniver Cheevy
Edwin Arlington Robinson, Richard Cory
Words and Their Meaning
Lewis Carroll, Jabberwocky
Denotative and Connotative Meaning
Diction
Syntax
Imagery
Elizabeth Bishop, The Bight
A Close Reading of The Bight
Figurative and Literal Language
Simile and Metaphor
*William Carlos Williams, To Waken an Old Lady
Personification
John Keats, To Autumn
Rolf Aggestam , Lightning Bolt
*Les Murray, The Cows on Killing Day
* Other Figures of Speech
Symbol, Apostrophe, Metonymy, Synecdoche, Paradox, Oxymoron, Hyperbole, Understatement
Poems for Further Reading
*Sylvia Plath, Metaphors
*Louis Gluck, The Wild Iris
*Kate Gleason, After Fighting for Hours
*Writing about Tone and Figurative Language
*Useful Terms to Remember
13. TRADITIONAL FORMS
*The Structural Elements: The Couplet, Stanza, Quatrain, Octave, Tercet
Narrative Poetry
The Ballad
Ballads for Further Reading
Anonymous, The Daemon Lover
Anonymous, Barbara Allan
*Amy Lowell, Evelyn Ray
The Ode
John Keats, Ode on a Grecian Urn
Percy Bysshe Shelley, Ode to the West Wind
The Elegy
Thomas Gray, Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard
*Theodore Roethke, Elegy for Jane
The Sonnet
William Shakespeare, That time of year thou mayst in me behold
Sonnets for Further Reading
Francisco Petrarch, Love's Inconsistency
*Lady Mary Wroth, When last I saw thee, I did not thee see
John Donne, Death, Be Not Proud
*William Wordsworth, Upon Westminster Bridge, Sept. 3, 1802
Percy Bysshe Shelley, Ozymandias
Elizabeth Barrett Browning, How Do I Love Thee?
Countee Cullen, Yet I Do Marvel
*Edna St. Vincent Millay, What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why
*Gwendolyn Brooks, The Rites for Cousin Vit
*June Jordan, Something Like A Sonnet for Phillis Miracle Wheatley
The Sestina and the Villanelle
Elizabeth Bishop, Sestina
Dylan Thomas, Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night
Dramatic Poetry
*William Shakespeare, "Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow", from Macbeth
The Dramatic Monologue
Robert Browning My Last Duchess
The Pattern Poem
George Herbert, Easter Wings
*Guillame Apollinaire, Hail World
*Guillame Apollinaire, It's Raining
*The Epigram, the Aphorism, and the Limerick
Dorothy Parker, from A Pig's Eye View of Literature: The lives and Times of John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and George Gordon, Lord Byron
*James Richardson, from Vectors: Five Hundred Aphorisms and Ten-Second Essays
Dylan Thomas, The last time I slept with the Queen
Wendy Cope, "The fine English poet, John Donne"
J. Walker, On T. S. Eliot's Prufrock
Richard Leighton Green, Apropos Coleridge's Kubla Khan
A. Cinna, On Hamlet
*Poems for Further Reading
Andrew Marvell, To His Coy Mistress
William Wordsworth, I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud
*Christina Rossetti, A Birthday
Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Ulysses
Commentaries:
Erica Jong, Devouring Time: Shakespeare's Sonnets;
Percy Bysshe Shelley, from A Defence of Poetry;
* Writing about Poetic Forms
*Useful Terms to Remember
14. OTHER FORMS of POETRY
*H. D., The Pool
Imagism
Imagist Poems for Further Reading
Ezra Pound, In a Station at the Metro
T. E. Hulme, Images
*D. H. Lawrence, The White Horse
H. D., Oread
*Amy Lowell, Meeting House Hill
William Carlos Williams, The Red Wheelbarrow
Wallace Stevens, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird
*Classical Chinese Verse and Japanese Haiku
*Li Ta'I Po, A Song of Changgan
*Ezra Pound, The River Merchant's Wife, A Letter
*Charles Wright After Reading Tu Fu, I Go Outside to the Dwarf Orchard
*An Introduction to Haiku
*Yone Noguchi, "Bits of song . . ."
*Matsuo Basho, The summer grass —
Down this road
It's spring
Old pond
*Lafcadio Hearne, Old Pond
*Taniguchi Buson, On the anniversary of Basho's death
The sparrow chirps
*Kobayashi Issa, Sitting with my father
Children's imitations of cormorants
*Masaoka Shiki, A thawed pond
Night and again
*Some Contemporary Haiku
*Robert Spiess, an aging willow
Ronald Baatz, as though the whole earth
*Matsuo Allard, an icicle the moon
*Alexis Rotella, just friends
*John Carley, buoyed up on the rising tide
*Cheryl Savageau, Department of Labor Haiku
*Poetry in Open Form and the Lyric Poem
*The Lyric Poem Today
*Philip Levine, The Lost Angel
*Confessional Mode
*Anne Sexton, The Fortress
*Connections: See Marilyn Chin, Audre Lorde, Sharon Olds , Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Alicia Suskin Ostriker
The Prose Poem
Marcia Southwick, A Star Is Born in the Eagle Nebula
*Eve Wood, Recognition
*Claribel Alegria, Carmen Bomba: Poet
Poems for further study
*Judith Ortiz Cofer, Quincineara
Li-Young Lee, Eating Alone
Nick Carbo, American Adobo
Marisa de los Santos, Because I Love You,
*Luis J. Rodriguez, Carrying My Tools
Commentaries: Ezra Pound, On the Principles of Imagism
*Amy Lowell, Vers libre (free verse), a verse/form based on cadence
*Writing About Other Poetic Forms
*Useful Terms to Remember
15. POETS RESPOND TO OTHER POETS
John Keats, On First Looking into Chapman's Homer
Quotation
Paraphrase
Allusion
Samuel Charters, A Man Dancing Alone on an Island in Greece
Imitation
Parody
Leigh Hunt, Jenny Kissed Me
T. S. Kerrigan, Elvis Kissed Me
*Argument
*Philip Larkin, This Be The Verse
*Carol Rumens, This Be The Verse (Philip Larkin)
Address and Tribute
Allen Ginsberg, A Supermarket in California
Commentary: Marilyn Chin, On the Canon
*Writing about Poets' Responses to other Poets
16. POETS and THEIR WORLDS: Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, and Langston Hughes, and Tomas Transtršmer
The World of Emily Dickinson
*Commentary: Emily Dickinson, on Elizabeth Barrett Browning, I think I was enchanted
*Elizabeth Barrett Browning, When our two souls stand up
*Emily Bronte, Last Lines
*Christina Rossetti, Remember
*Christina Rossetti, from Sing-Song
EMILY DICKINSON
You love me — you are sure —
I'm "wife" — I've finished that —
I taste a liquor never brewed
Wild Nights — Wild Nights!
"Hope" is the thing with feathers —
*Success is counted sweetest
There's a certain slant of light
I'm Nobody! Who are you?
After Great Pain — a formal feeling comes —
Much Madness is divinest Sense
I died for Beauty — but was scarce
I heard a fly buzz — when I died —
Because I could not stop for death —
A narrow Fellow in the Grass
Commentaries:
Thomas Wentworth Higgins, from Emily Dickinson's Letters
Thomas Bailey Aldrich, In Re Emily Dickinson
Richard Wilbur, On Emily Dickinson
The World of Robert Frost
*Commentary: Octavio Paz, Meeting Robert Frost
*Thomas Hardy, An August Midnight
*Edward Arlington Robinson, Eros Tyrannos
*Edgar Lee Masters, Mabel Osborne
*Edgar Lee Masters, Lucinda Matlock
*Edward Thomas, Early One Morning
ROBERT FROST
*In White
The Pasture
Mending Wall
Home Burial
Birches
To Earthward
Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening
The Road Not Taken
After Apple Picking
Commentaries:
Rose C. Feld, An Interview with Robert Frost
*Carol Frost, From Sincerity and Inventions: On Robert Frost
Philip L. Gerber, On Frost's After Apple Picking
James Wright, The Music of Robert Frost's Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening
The World of Langston Hughes
Commentaries from the Harlem Renaissance
*W. E. B. DuBois, from The Souls of Black Folk
Alain Locke, from The New Negro
Poems
Langston Hughes, The Negro Speaks of Rivers
James Weldon Johnson, The Creation
Angelina Weld Grimke, The Black Finger
Angelina Weld Grimke, Tenebris
*Claude McKay, The Tropics in New York
Claude McKay, If We Must Die
*Jean Toomer, Lyrics from Cane
Countee Cullen, From Heritage
Countee Cullen, Incident
LANGSTON HUGHES
Mother to Son
*Negro
*Love Again Blues
I, Too
Song for a Dark Girl
House in the World
Commentaries
Langston Hughes, A Toast to Harlem
Jessie Fauset, Meeting Langston Hughes
Arnold Rampersad, Langston Hughes as Folk Poet
A Conversation about Tomas Transtromer
17. POEMS and POETS
W. H. Auden
Musee des Beaux Arts
Stop All the Clocks
Lay your sleeping head, my love
Elizabeth Bishop
*Manners
*Sandpiper
The Fish
One Art
Commentary, Brett C. Millier, On Elizabeth Bishop's One Art
William Blake
from Songs of Innocence: Introduction
The Lamb
Holy Thursday
The Little Boy Lost
The Little Boy Found
from Songs of Experience: Introduction
The Sick Rose
The Tyger
London
A Poison Tree
The Garden of Love
Anne Bradstreet
To My Dear and Loving Husband
Before the Birth of One of Her Children
In Memory of My Dear Grand-Child Elizabeth Bradstreet, Who
Deceased August, 1665, Being a Year and a Half Old
Gwendolyn Brooks
We Real Cool
The Mother
The Bean Eaters
Connection: Robert Hayden, On Negro Poetry
Marilyn Chin
How I Got That Name
*Sad Guitar
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Kubla Khan, or, a Vision in a Dream
Frost at Midnight
Connection: Richard Leighton Green, Apropos Coleridge's Kubla Khan
Billy Collins
*The Only Day in Existence
Momento Mori
*Today
e. e. Cummings
somewhere I have never traveled
Buffalo Bill's
*goodby betty, don't remember me
in Just—
John Donne
A Valediction: Forbidding Morning
The Sun Rising
*The Flea
Batter my heart, three-personed God
Connection: Wendy Cope, That fine English poet John Donne
Rita Dove
Singsong
The Pond, Porch-View, Six p.m.,Early Spring
T. S. Eliot
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
Commentary: Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren, On T. S. Eliot's The Love Song of J. Alfred
Prufrock
Connection: J. Walker, On T. S. Eliot's "Prufrock"
Louise Gluck
First Memory
*Happiness
Seamus Heaney
Digging
Mid-Term Break
Gerard Manley Hopkins
The Windhover
Pied Beauty
God's Grandeur
Thou art indeed just, Lord
Commentary: Bernard Bergonzi, On Hopkins' The Windhover
John Keats
*Bright Star
Ode to a Nightingale
When I have fears
Robert Lowell
Skunk Hour
For the Union Dead
*Epilogue
Commentary: Robert Lowell, An Explication of Skunk Hour
Sharon Olds
Parents Day
*I Go Back to May 1937
Sex without Love
*Commentary: Ann Charters, The Woman in the Dark Raincoat, a Reading by Sharon Olds
Sylvia Plath
Morning Song
Daddy
*Commentary: Richard Wilbur, "Cottage Street, 1953"
Adrienne Rich
Aunt Jennifer's Tigers
Diving into the Wreck
Anne Sexton
* Obsessive Combination of Ontological Inscape, Trickery and Love
*To a Friend Whose Work Has Come to Triumph
*Pain for a Daughter
*Connection: W. H. Auden, Musee des Beaux Arts
Gary Soto
Mexicans Begin Jogging
*Oranges
Waiting at the Curb, Lynwood, California, 1967
Walt Whitman
From A Song of Myself, 1, 6, 50-52
*Commentary: Walt Whitman reviews Leaves of Grass
Commentary: Ezra Pound, What I Feel about Walt Whitman
William Carlos Williams
Spring and All
*Danse Russe
*from March
*The Widow's Lament in Springtime
Connection: A Red Wheelbarrow (p. 000) and To Waken an Old Lady
*Commentary: Spirit of 76, the poet writes to a publisher
William Wordsworth
Ode: Intimations of Immortality
The world is too much with us
Commentary: William Wordsworth, From the Introduction to Lyrical Ballads
James Wright
Evening
A Blessing
Lying on a Hammock at William Duffy's Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota
Connection: James Wright, The Music of Robert Frost's Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening
*Commentary: Sven Birkerts, James Wright's "Hammock," A Sounding
William Butler Yeats
The Lake Isle of Innisfree
The Second Coming
*The Wild Swans at Coole
18. THEMES for THINKING and WRITING about POETRY
*In Wonder at the Natural World
*Commentary: Henry David Thoreau, from Walden, "It is difficult to begin without borrowing . . ."
*Thomas Lovell Beddoes, A Lake
*John Clare, The Sky Lark
*Robinson Jeffers, Hurt Hawks
*Mary Oliver, Sleeping in the Forest
*John Casteen, Night Hunting
Women's Consciousness, Women's Voices
*Commentary: Elizabeth Barrett Browning, from Aurora Leigh, "Books, books, books!"
*Ruth Stone, In an Iridescent Time
Alicia Suskin Ostriker, The Change
*Marilyn Hacker, Rondeau After a Transatlantic Telephone Call
*Anne Waldman, Stereo
*Jenny Bornholdt, The Boyfriends
*Daisy Zamora, Precisely
Black Consciousness, Black Voices
Commentary: Robert Hayden, On Negro Poetry
Phillis Wheatley, On Being Brought from Africa to America
*Paul Lawrence Dunbar, Theology
Paul Lawrence Dunbar, Sympathy
James Weldon Johnson, Sunset in the Tropics
Robert Hayden, Those Winter Sundays
Etheridge Knight, The Idea of Ancestry
Dudley Randall, Ballad of Birmingham
*Allen Polite, Song
Amiri Baraka, Legacy
Audre Lorde, Hanging Fire
Lucille Clifton, to miss ann
*Poetry of Protest and Social Concern
Commentary:David Wojahn, On Political Poetry
Nikki Giovanni, Adulthood
Carolyn Forche, The Colonel
*Pat Mora, Elena
Joan Jobe Smith, Feminist Arm Candy for the Mafia
Fred Voss, I Once Needed a Chance Too
*Sarah Holbrook, Canvassing
*Turning Protest into Song
*Bob Dylan, Blowin' in the Wind
*Country Joe McDonald, I-Feel-Like-I'm Fixin'-To-Die Rag
The Faces of War
*Commentary: Stephen Crane, from The Red Badge of Courage
*Herman Melville, Shiloh
Stephen Crane, War is Kind
Thomas Hardy, The Man He Killed
Wilfred Owen, Dulce et Decorum Est
Randall Jarrrell, The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner
Ed Webster, from San Joaquin Valley Poems
*Forest Hamer, My Father's Vietnam Tour Near Over
19. Contemporary Movements in Poetry
Poetry of the Beat Generation
Commentary: John Clellon Holmes, from This is the Beat Generation
*Bonnie Bremser, Artist Meeting with the Beats, from Poets and Odd Fellows
*Ray Bremser, Blues for Bonnie—Take 1, January 1960
*Allen Ginsberg, Sunflower Sutra
*Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Dog
*Frank O'Hara, The Day Lady Died
*Diane Di Prima, Revolutionary Letter #3
Gregory Corso, I am 25
*Edward Sanders, After a Year of Isolation
Poetry of the Chaps and Zines
Commentary:Gerald Locklin, The Small Presses and Little Magazines, A Few Reflections
Ann Menebroker, Repossessed
*Tom Kryss, Things Thrown Away
a. levy, perhaps (#5)
*Robert E. McDonough, Resume
*Susan Grimm, Things I Can Know
Joan Jobe Smith, The Carol Burnett Show
Ronald Baatz, The Oldest Songs
Gerald Locklin, So It Goes
*Gerald Locklin, Friday Night Lights
*Writing about Themes in Poetry
PART THREE — DRAMA
20. What is a Play?
August Strindberg, The Stronger
21. Reading, Thinking and Writing about Drama
Reading Drama
Guidelines for Reading Drama
Sample Close Reading — August Strindberg, The Stronger
Critical Thinking about Drama
Writing about Drama
Sample Paper — A Reader's Response to the Opening Lines of Strindberg's The Stronger
22. The Elements of Drama
Anton Chekhov, A Monologue
Plot
Characters
Dialogue
Staging
Theme
Willy Russell, Educating Rita [excerpt]
*Questions for Critical Thinking about Drama
*Writing about the Elements of Drama
*Useful Terms to Remember
23. Plays and Playwrights
Sophocles
Oedipus the King
COMMENTARIES: Aristotle, On the Elements and General Principles of Tragedy
Sigmund Freud, The Oedipus Complex
*Fitzgerald on Translating Sophocles
William Shakespeare
* A Midsummer Night's Dream
Hamlet, Prince of Denmark
CONNECTION: CONVERSATION ON HAMLET —Bullough, Keats, Greenblatt, Stoppard, Gielgud, Lahr, Pennington
Henrik Ibsen
A Doll's House
COMMENTARIES: Henrik Ibsen, Notes for A Doll House
George Bernard Shaw, On A Doll House
Joan Templeton, Is A Doll House a Feminist Text?
Liv Ullmann, On Preforming Nora in Ibsen's A Doll House
Susan Glaspell
Trifles
COMMENTARY: Leonard Mustazza, Generic Translation and Thematic Shifts in Glaspell's Trifles and A Jury of Her Peers
CONNECTIONS: Susan Glaspell, A Jury of Her Peers; Lynn Nottage, POOF!
Luigi Pirandello
*Six Characters in Search of an Author
*COMMENTARIES: Richard Gilman, Thought is a Form of Action: on Six Characters in Search of an Author
* Luigi Pirandello, from Preface to Six Characters in Search of an Author
Arthur Miller
Death of a Salesman
COMMENTARIES: Arthur Miller, On Death of a Salesman as an American Tragedy
Helge Normann Nilsen, Marxism and the Early Plays of Arthur Miller
Lorraine Hansberry
A Raisin in the Sun
COMMENTARY: Lorraine Hansberry, An Author's Reflections: Willy Loman, Walter Younger, and He Who Must Live
Lorraine Hansberry, My Shakespearean Experience
Lynn Nottage
POOF!
Commentary: Lynn Nottage, On Writing POOF!
CONNECTION: Susan Glaspell, Trifles
Edwin Sanchez
*Pops
24. CONVERSATION ON HAMLET AS TEXT AND PERFORMANCE
Geoffery Bullough, Sources of Shakespeare's Hamlet
John Keats, From a Letter to George and Thomas Keats, 21 December 1817
Stephen Greenblatt, On the Ghost in Hamlet
Tom Stoppard, Dogg's Hamlet: The Encore
Sir John Gielgud, On Playing Hamlet
John Lahr, Review of Hamlet
*Michael Pennington, On Hamlet's Madness
*Some Help with Writing about Drama
PART FOUR — WRITING ABOUT LITERATURE
25. Critical Perspectives and Literary Theory
Formalist Criticism Biographical Criticism Psychological Criticism Mythological Criticism Historical Criticism Sociological Criticism Reader-Response Criticism Poststructuralist and Deconstructionist Criticism Gender Criticism Cultural Criticism Selected Bibliography
26. Developing Your Ideas in an Essay
Keeping a Journal or Notebook to Record Your Initial Responses to the Text
Using the Commentaries to Ask New Questions about What You Have Read
Generating Ideas for Brainstorming, Freewriting, and Listing
Organizing Your Notes into a Preliminary Thesis Sentence and Outline
Writing the Rough Draft
Revising Your Essay
Sample Revised Draft: The Voice of the Storyteller in Eudora Welty's A Worn Path
Making a Final Check of Your Finished Essay
Peer Review
Common Problems in Writing about Literature
Guidelines for Writing an Essay about Literature
27. Basic Types of Literary Papers
Explication
Sample Essay: An Interpretation of Langston Hughes's The Negro Speaks of Rivers
Analysis
Sample Essay: Nature and Neighbors in Robert Frost's Mending Wall
Comparison and Contrast
Sample Essay: On the Differences between Susan Glaspell's Trifles and A Jury of Her Peers
Writing about the Context of Literature
28. Writing Research Papers
Three Keys to Literary Research
Finding and Focusing a Topic
Assigned Topics
Choosing Your Own Topic
Finding and Using Sources
Library Research
Using the Web for Research
Evaluating Print and Online Sources
Your Working Bibliography
Working with Sources and Taking Notes
Drafting Your Research Paper
Summarizing, Paraphrasing, and Quoting
Documenting Your Sources
MLA Format
In-Text or Parenthetical Citations
List of Works Cited
Footnotes and Endnotes
Revising Your Research Paper
Student Research Paper: Jennifer Silva, Emily Dickinson and Religion
Glossary of Literary Terms
Index of First Lines
Index of Authors and Titles
Glossary of Literary Terms
Index of First Lines/Authors and Titles