Contents
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-read
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
Evaluating Secondary Source Materials
Step Four: Drafting, Revising, and Editing
Writing the Introduction
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 The Star-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, Sonnets 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 from Global 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
Writing about Faith
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
A Student Essay
Glossary
Acknowledgments
Index