PART 1: A GUIDE TO WRITING ABOUT LITERATURE.1. Understanding Literature.Luisa Valenzuela, All about Suicide." Robert Frost, "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening."2. Reading and Writing about Literature.Julia Alvarez''s "Dusting.
"3. Approaching Assignments in Literature.4. Thinking Critically about Your Writing.5. Writing Literary Arguments.6. Using Sources in Your Writing.
7. Documenting Sources and Avoiding Plagiarism.8. Writing Essay Exams about Literature.PART II: FICTION.9. Understanding Fiction.Ernest Hemingway, "Hills Like White Elephants.
"10. Fiction Sampler: The Short-Short Story.Julia Alvarez, "Snow." Amanda Brown, "Love and Other Catastrophes: A Mix Tape." Sandra Cisneros, "Pilón." Lydia Davis, "Television." Dave Eggers, "Accident." Bret Anthony Johnston, "Encounters with Unexpected Animals.
" Stephen Graham Jones, "Discovering America." Jamaica Kincaid, "Girl." Ed Park, "Slide to Unlock." George Saunders, "Sticks."11. Fiction Sampler: Graphic Fiction.Max Brooks, from The Harlem Hellfighters. R.
Crumb, "A Hunger Artist." Marjane Satrapi, from Persepolis. Art Spiegleman, from Maus. Craig Thompson, from Blankets. Gene Luen Yang, from American Born Chinese.12. Reading and Writing about Fiction.Alberto Álvaro Ríos, "The Secret Lion.
"13. Plot.Kate Chopin, "The Story of an Hour." Orhan Pamuk, "Distant Relations." Neil Gaiman, "How to Talk to Girls at Parties." William Faulkner, "A Rose for Emily."14. Character.
John Updike, "A&P". Katherine Mansfield, "Miss Brill." Charles Baxter, "Gryphon." Zadie Smith, "The Girl with Bangs."15. Setting.Kate Chopin, "The Storm." Sherman J.
Alexie, "This Is What It Means to Say Phoenix, Arizona." Ralph Ellison, "Battle Royal." Tillie Olson, "I Stand Here Ironing."16. Point of View.Richard Wright, "Big Black Good Man." Edgar Allan Poe, "The Cask of Amontillado." William Faulkner, "Barn Burning.
" Edwidge Danticat, "New York Day Women."17. Style, Tone, and Language.James Joyce, "Araby." (Mary) Flannery O''Connor, "A Good Man Is Hard to Find." Charlotte Perkins Gilman, "The Yellow Wallpaper." Tim O''Brien, "The Things They Carried."18.
Symbol, Allegory, and Myth.M. K. Hobson, "Oaks Park." Shirley Jackson, "The Lottery." Alice Walker, "Everyday Use." Raymond Carver, "Cathedral." Nathaniel Hawthorne, "Young Goodman Brown.
"19. Theme.Eudora Welty, "A Worn Path." David Michael Kaplan, "Doe Season." D(avid) H(erbert) Lawrence, "The Rocking-Horse Winner." Tobias Wolff, "Bullet in the Brain."20. Joyce Carol Oates''s "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?": A Casebook for Reading, Research, and Writing.
Joyce Carol Oates, "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" Joyce Carol Oates, "When Characters from the Page Are Made Flesh on the Screen." Bob Dylan, "It''s All Over Now, Baby Blue." "The Pied Piper of Tucson" (photo essay). Anonymous, "The Pied Piper of Hamelin." Charles Perrault, "Little Red Riding Hood." A. R. Coulthard, "Joyce Carol Oates''s ''Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?'' as Pure Realism.
" Laura Kalpakian, from a review of Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?: Selected Early Stories. Larry Rubin, "Oates''s ''Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?''" Peter Dickinson, from "Riding in Cars with Boys: Reconsidering Smooth Talk."21. Fiction for Further Reading.Chinua Achebe, "Dead Man''s Path." Margaret Atwood, "Happy Endings." James Baldwin, "Sonny''s Blues." T.
Coraghessan Boyle, "Greasy Lake." Junot Díaz, "No Face." James Franco, "Halloween." Gabriel García Márquez, "A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings." Ha Jin, "The Bane of the Internet." Franz Kafka, "A Hunger Artist." Lorrie Moore, "Referential." Joyce Carol Oates, "Heat.
" Flannery O''Connor, "Everything That Rises Must Converge." Edgar Allan Poe, "The Tell-Tale Heart." Katherine Anne Porter, "The Jilting of Granny Weatherall." John Steinbeck, "The Chrysanthemums." Amy Tan, "Two Kinds."PART III: POETRY.22. Understanding Poetry.
Marianne Moore, "Poetry." Pamela Spiro Wagner, "How to Read a Poem: Beginner''s Manual." William Shakespeare, "That time of year thou mayst in me behold." E. E. Cummings, "l(a."23. Reading and Writing about Poetry.
Robert Hayden, "Those Winter Sundays." Seamus Heaney, "Digging."24. Voice.Emily Dickinson, "I''m nobody! Who are you?" Louise Glück, "Gretel in Darkness." Langston Hughes, "Negro." Robert Browning, "My Last Duchess." Leslie Marmon Silko, "Where Mountain Lion Lay Down with Deer.
" Janice Mirikitani, "Suicide Note." Rafael Campo, "My Voice." Robert Frost, "Fire and Ice." Thomas Hardy, "The Man He Killed." Amy Lowell, "Patterns." William Wordsworth, "The World Is Too Much with Us." Sylvia Plath, "Morning Song." Claude McKay, "The White City.
" Robert Herrick, "To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time." Robert Browning, "Porphyria''s Lover." Percy Bysshe Shelley, "Ozymandias." Sherman Alexie, "Evolution." Anne Sexton, "Cinderella." Sandra M. Castillo, "Castro Moves into the Havana Hilton." Agha Shahid Ali, "The Wolf''s Postscript to ''Little Red Riding Hood''.
" Dudley Randall, "Ballad of Birmingham." Wislawa Szymborska, "Hitler''s First Photograph."25. Word Choice, Word Order.Bob Holman, "Beautiful." Walt Whitman, "When I Heard the Learn''d Astronomer." Rhina Espaillat, "Bilingual/Bilingue." Adrienne Rich, "Living in Sin.
" E. E. Cummings, "in Just-."Francisco X. Alarcón, "Mexican'' Is Not a Noun." Margaret Atwood, "The City Planners." Jim Sagel, "Baca Grande." Adrienne Su, "The English Canon.
" Mark Halliday, "The Value of Education." Paul Laurence Dunbar, "We Wear the Mask." Mary Karr, "A Blessing from My Sixteen Years'' Son." Gwendolyn Brooks, "We Real Cool." Gwendolyn Brooks, "What Shall I Give My Children?" Edmund Spenser, "One day I wrote her name upon the strand." E. E. Cummings, "anyone lived in a pretty how town.
" A. E. Housman, "To an Athlete Dying Young." Charles Jensen, "Poem in Which Words Have Been Left Out."26. Imagery.Jane Flanders, "Cloud Painter." William Carlos Williams, "Red Wheelbarrow.
" Ezra Pound, "In a Station of the Metro." Gary Snyder, "Some Good Things to Be Said for the Iron Age." William Carlos Williams, "The Great Figure." David Trinidad, "9773 Comanche Ave." Fernando Pessoa, "Solemnly Over the Fertile Land." F. J. Bergmann, "An Apology.
" Hart Crane, "Echoes." Lola Ridge, "Wall Street at Night." Robert Frost, "Nothing Gold Can Stay." Jean Toomer, "Reapers." Kobayashi Issa, "Haiku." N. Scott Momaday, "Long Shadows at Dulce." Frederick Morgan, "The Busses.
" William Shakespeare, "My mistress'' eyes are nothing like the sun." Octavio Paz, "Daybreak." Octavio Paz, "Nightfall."27. Figures of Speech.William Shakespeare, Shall I compare thee to a summer''s day? Langston Hughes, Harlem. Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Constantly Risking Absurdity. Audre Lorde, Rooming houses are old women.
Robert Burns, Oh, my love is like a red, red rose. N. Scott Momaday, Simile. Sylvia Plath, Metaphors. John Updike, Ex-Basketball Player. Randall Jarrell, The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner. Marge Piercy, The Secretary Chant. John Donne, A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning.
Martín Espada, My Father as a Guitar. Sylvia Plath, Daddy. Edna St. Vincent Millay, If I should learn, in some quite casual way. Anne Bradstreet, To My Dear and Loving Husband. Andrew Marvell, To His Coy Mistress. Robert Frost, Out, Out--. Countee Cullen, Incident.
Margaret Atwood, You fit into me. Richard Lovelace, To Lucasta Going to the Wars. Dylan Thomas, The Hand That Signed the Paper. Nancy Mercado, Going to Work. John Keats, Ode to a Nightingale. Allen Ginsberg, A Supermarket in California.28. Sound.
Walt Whitman, "Had I the Choice." Gwendolyn Brooks, "Sadie and Maud." Emily Dickinson, "I like to see it lap the Miles--." Adrienne Rich, "Aunt Jennifer''s Tigers." Thomas Lux, "A Little Tooth." Lewis Carroll, "A Boat Beneath a Sunny Sky." N. Scott Momaday, "Comparatives.
" Robert Herrick, "Delight in Disorder." Robert Frost, "The Road Not Taken." Gerard Manley Hopkins, "Pied Beauty." Shel Silverstein, "Where the Sidewalk Ends." Jacob Saenz, "Evolution of My Block." Lewis Carroll, "Jabberwocky."29. Form.
John Keats, "On the Sonnet." William Shakespeare, "When, in disgrace with Fortune and men''s eyes." John Keats, "On First Looking into Chapman''s Homer." Edna St. Vincent Millay, "Love is not all." Lynn Aarti Chandhok, "The Carpet Factory." Gwendolyn Brooks, "First Fight, Then Fiddle." Rhina Espaillat, "Find Work.
" Alberto Álvaro Ríos, "Nani." Elizabeth Bishop, "Sestina." Patricia Smith, "Ethel''s Sestina." Theodore Roethke, "The Waking." Deborah Paredez, "Wife''s Disaster Manual." Samuel Taylor Coleridge, "What Is an Epigram?" Dorothy Parker, "News Item." Carol Ann Duffy, "Mrs. Darwin.
" Martín Espada, "Why I Went to College." A. R. Ammons, "Both Ways." Matsuo Basho, "Four Haiku." Jack Kerouac, "American Haiku." Carl Sandburg, "Chicago." E.
E. Cummings, "the sky was can dy." Walt Whitman, from "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking." William Carlos Williams, "Spring and All." Richard Blanco, "Mexican Almuerzo in New England." Claire Lee, "Living in Numbers." May Swenson, "Women." George Herbert, "Easter Wings.
" John Hollander, "Skeleton Key." May Swenson, "Women Should Be Pedestals." 30. Symbol, Allegory, Allusion, Myth.William Blake, "The Sick Rose." Robert Frost, "For Once, Then, Something." Emily Dickinson, "Volcanoes be in Sicily." Langston Hughes, "Island.
" Edgar Allan Poe, "The Raven." Virgil Suárez, "Isla." Christina Rossetti, "Uphill." Carl Dennis, "At the Border." William Meredith, "Dreams of Suicide." Billy Collins, "Aristotle." R. S.
Gwynn, "Shakespearean Sonnet." Countee Cullen, "Yet Do I Marvel." May Swenson, "The Centaur." William Butler Yeats, "Leda and the Swan." Seamus Heaney, "Anything Can Happen." W. H. Auden, "Musée des Beaux Arts.
" T. S. Eliot, "Journey of the Magi."31. Discovering Themes in Poetry.Robert Herrick, "The Argument of His Book." Theodore Roethke, "My Papa''s Waltz." Robert Hayden, "Those Winter Sund.
ays" Julia Alvarez, "Dusting." Seamus Heaney, "Digging." Judith Ortiz Cofer, "My Fath.