Synopses & Reviews
Literature and Ourselves, 4/e, is a thematically organized anthology that treats literature as a continually expanding commentary on our infinitely varied lives, helping readers make the connection between literature and their own unique life stories. Each of the six themes - Family, Men and Women, Grief and Loss, Freedom and Responsibility, Imagination and Discovery, and Quest - progress outward from the self to larger issues. Within each theme, the book provides a unique combination of traditional and contemporary works organized by genre - essays, fiction, poetry, and drama - that reflect the diverse cultures and ethnicities that make up our world today. The fourth edition features new essays, poems, stories, and plays, three new casebooks (Amy Tan, Joyce Carol Oates, and Tim O'Brien), greater emphasis on writing about film, enhanced coverage of science fiction/fantasy, and new end-of-unit questions, "Writing About Literature and Film."
Table of Contents
Preface.
INTRODUCTION.
Literature.
Text-Oriented Approaches.
Author-Oriented Approaches.
Reader-Oriented Approaches.
Essays. Theme/Tone/Imagery/Diction/Syntax.
Review: Reading and Analyzing Essays.
Fiction. Point of View/Setting/Style/Character/Plot/Theme.
Review: Reading and Writing about Short Stories.
Poetry. Speaker and Situation/Theme/Tone/Diction/Syntax/Imagery/Sound.
Review: Reading and Writing about Poems.
Drama. Performance versus Reading: Stage Directions/Setting/Style/ Character/Plot/Theme.
Review: Reading and Writing about Plays.
The Writing Process. Developing Ideas.
Brainstorming/Freewriting/Clustering/Keeping a Journal/Narrowing a Topic/Developing a Thesis Statement/Focusing Your Paper/Defining the Purpose.
Researching.
Finding Sources/Selecting Material/Documenting Sources.
Organizing.
Blocking and Planning/Identifying Your Audience.
Drafting.
Getting Started, Writing Your Introduction/Developing Paragraphs and Making Transitions/Concluding Well.
Revising and Editing.
Using Active Voice/Grammar and Punctuation/Proofreading Effectively.
Ways To Write about Literature. The Literary Response Essay.
The Comparison/Contrast Essay.
The Critical Analysis Essay.
The Evaluative Essay.
The Research Paper.
Writing a Strong Argumentative Essay. ** Inductive Argument.
Literary Argument.
Evaluating and Using Sources.
THEMATIC ANTHOLOGY.
Family.
Writing about Family.
Essays.
Joan Didion, On Going Home.
Frances Mayes, Bramare: (Archaic) To Yearn For.
Janisse Ray, Native Genius. **
Fiction.
Luke, The Parable of the Prodigal Son.
Carson McCullers, A Domestic Dilemma.
James Baldwin, Sonny’s Blues.
Truman Capote, A Christmas Memory.
Alice Walker, Everyday Use.
Sherman Alexie, Because My Father Always Said He Was the Only Indian Who Saw Jimi Hendrix Play the Star Spangled Banner. **
Poetry.
William Butler Yeats, A Prayer for My Daughter.
Langston Hughes, Mother to Son. **
Theodore Roethke, My Papa’s Waltz.
Gwendolyn Brooks, The Mother. **
Mary TallMountain, There Is No Word for Goodbye.
Alicia Ostriker, First Love.
Maxine Kumin, Nature.
Luis Omar Salinas, My Father Is a Simple Man.
Nikki Giovanni, Nikki-Rosa.
Marilyn Nelson, The House on Moscow Street.
Afaa M. Weaver, Improvisation for Piano : After Mood Indigo.
Li-Young Lee, The Gift.
Ed Whitelock, Future Connected By. **
Drama.
Terrence McNally, Andre’s Mother.
Casebook on August Wilson.
Writing about Relationships.
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 Schulman, Love Is a Fallacy. **
Paul Theroux, Here’s to You Mrs. Robinson. **
John Gierach, The Fishing Car. **
David Osborne, Beyond the Cult of Fatherhood.
Rose del Castillo Guilbault, Americanization Is Tough on “Macho”.
Fiction.
Geoffrey Chaucer, The Wife of Bath’s Tale.
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.
Gloria Naylor, Mama Day. **
Jhumpa Lahiri, A Temporary Matter. **
Poetry.
William Shakespeare, Sonnets 116, 130, and 138.
John Donne, A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning.
Andrew Marvell, To His Coy Mistress.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Sonnet 43.
Edgar Allan Poe, To Helen.
Robert Browning
Porphyria’s Lover.
My Last Duchess: Ferrara.
Emily Dickinson
I’m wife—I’ve finished that—.
I tend my flowers for thee—.
Robert Frost
The Death of the Hired Man.
Home Burial.
H[ilda] D[oolittle], Helen.
Edna St. Vincent Millay, Sonnet 42.
Muriel Rukeyser, Myth.
Rosario Castellanos, Chess. **
W. S Merwin, The Judgment of Paris. **
Maya Angelou, Phenomenal Woman.
Ted Hughes, Incompatibilities.
Marge Piercy, Barbie Doll.
Janice Mirikitani, Breaking Tradition.
Judith Ortiz Cofer, Anniversary.
Rita Dove
Courtship : from Beulah and Thomas.
Courtship, Diligence.
Drama.
Henrik Ibsen, A Doll’s House.
Casebook on Sylvia Plath. **
Writing about Men and Women.
Sylvia Plath
Daddy.
All the Dead Dears.
The Colossus.
By Candlelight.
Mirror.
Metaphors.
Lady Lazarus.
On Writing from The Journals of Sylvia Plath.
Hugh Kenner, Sincerity Kills.
Susan Van Dyne,Fueling the Phoenix Fire: The Manuscripts of Sylvia Plath’s “Lady Lazarus”.
Donna Richardson, Plath’s Mirror.
Karen Alkalay-Gut, Plath’s Metaphors.
Heather Cam, “Daddy”: Sylvia Plath’s Debt to Anne Sexton.
Thomas Dilworth, Colossal Influences on Sylvia Plath.
A Student Essay.
Men and Women: Suggestions for Writing.
Men and Women: Writing about Film.
FEAR AND LOSS.
Writing about Fear and Loss.
Essays.
H.H.A. Cooper, Terrorism: The Problem of Definition Revisited. **
Elie Wiesel, Yom Kippur: The Day without Forgiveness.
Naipaul, V. S., “Loss”. **
Ian Frazier,Coyote vs Acme. **
Fiction.
Katherine Anne Porter, The Grave.
F. Scott Fitzgerald, Winter Dreams.
William Faulkner, A Rose for Emily.
Arna Bontemps, A Summer Tragedy.
Chinua Achebe,Dead Men’s Path. **
Bharati Mukherjee, The Management of Grief. **
Madison Smartt Bell, Customs of the Country.
Eric Skipper, The Runt.
Poetry.
William Shakespeare, Sonnet 73.
Percy Bysshe Shelley, Ozymandias.
Edwin Arlington Robinson, Richard Cory.
Paul Laurence Dunbar, We Wear the Mask.
John McCrae, In Flanders Fields.
Robert Frost
Design.
Once by the Pacific.
Claude McKay, If We Must Die.
Wilfred Owen, Dulce et Decorum Est.
E. E. Cummings
Buffalo Bill’s Defunct.
Anyone Lived in a Pretty How Town.
Langston Hughes, Drama for Winter Night (Fifth Avenue).
Countee Cullen, Incident.
Randall Jarrell, Death of the Ball Turret Gunner. **
Henry Reed, Naming of Parts.
Dylan Thomas, Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night.
Derek Walcott, The Young Wife.
Mary Oliver, University Hospital, Boston.
Billy Collins, Forgetfulness.
Sharon Olds, On the Subway.
Adam Zagajewski, Try to Praise the Mutilated World.
Samuel Wharton, Riveaulx Abbey, Winter. **
Drama.
William Shakespeare,Othello, the Moor of Venice.
Casebook on Amy Tan.
Writing about Grief and Loss.
Amy Tan
Young Girl’s Wish.
Immortal 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.
Grief and Loss: Suggestions for Writing.
Grief and Loss: 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.
Harriet Jacobs, The Slave Who Dared to Feel Like a Man.
Martin Luther King, Jr., Letter from Birmingham City Jail.
Vaclav Havel, The Trial.
Fiction.
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Harrison Bergeron.
Philip K. Dick,Minority Report. **
Ursula K. LeGuin, The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas.
John Updike, A & P.
Poetry.
William Blake, London.
William Wordsworth, The World Is Too Much with Us.
Rudyard Kipling, If.
Langston Hughes, I Too. **
Stephen Crane, A Man Said to the Universe.
W. H. Auden, The Unknown Citizen.
Karl Shapiro, The Conscientious Objector.
Randall Jarrell, The Woman at the Washington Zoo.
Anne Sexton, Ringing the Bells.
Adrienne Rich, Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers.
Linda Pastan, Ethics. **
Pat Mora, Immigrants.
Joy Harjo, The Woman Hanging from the Thirteenth Floor Window.
Dwight Okita, In Response to Executive Order 9066: All Americans of Japanese Descent Must Report to Relocation Centers.
Drama.
Susan Glaspel, Trifles. **
Casebook on Tim O’Brien.
Writing about War.
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.
IMAGINATION AND REALITY.
Writing about Imagination and Reality.
Essays.
Ursula K. LeGuin, The Child and the Shadow. **
David James Duncan,My One Conversation with Collin Walcott. **
Fiction.
Mark Twain, A Fable.
Ray Bradbury, There Will Come Soft Rains.
Woody Allen, The Kugelmass Episode.
Louise Erdrich, Naked Woman Playing Chopin: A Fargo Romance.
Poetry.
John Keats, Ode on a Grecian Urn.
Archibald MacLeish, Ars Poetica.
W. H. Auden, Musée des Beaux Arts.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Constantly Risking Absurdity.
Countee Cullen, Yet Do I Marvel.
Audre Lorde, The Art of Response.
Seamus Heaney, Digging.
Billy Collins, Poem.
Victor Hernández Cruz, today is a day of great joy.
Alberto Ríos, The Vietnam Wall.
Drama.
Tom Stoppard, The Real Inspector Hound. **
Casebook on Joyce Carol Oates.
Writing about Illusion and Reality.
Joyce Carol Oates
Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?
Valentine.
Joyce M. Wegs, “Don’t You Know Who I Am?” The Grotesque in Oates’s “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?”
Don Moser, The Pied Piper of Tucson: He Cruised in a Golden Car, Looking for the Action.
Nancy Bishop Dessommes, O’Connor’s Mrs. May and Oates’s Connie: An Unlikely Pair of Religious Initiates.
A Student Essay.
Imagination and Reality: Suggestions for Writing.
Imagination and Reality: Writing about Film.
QUEST.
Writing about Quest.
Essays.
Plato, Allegory of the Cave.
William Golding, Thinking As a Hobby. **
Garrison Keillor, Attitude. **
Lorian Hemingway, from The Walk on Water. **
Fiction.
James Joyce, Araby.
Bernard Malamud, Angel Levine.
Arthur C. Clarke, The Star.
Philip Roth, The Conversion of the Jews.
Toni Cade Bambara, Raymond’s Run.
Isabel Allende, And of Clay Are We Created. **
Poetry.
Psalm 8.
Psalm 13.
John Donne, Holy Sonnet 14.
John Milton, Sonnet 16.
William Blake, The Tyger.
William Wordsworth, My Heart Leaps Up.
Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Ulysses.
Gerard Manley Hopkins, God’s Grandeur.
William Butler Yeats, Sailing to Byzantium.
T. S. Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.
Langston Hughes, Harlem.
N. Scott Momaday, Carriers of the Dream Wheel.
Fred Chappell, An Old Mountain Woman Reading the Book of Job.
Judith Ortiz Cofer, Latin Women Pray.
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: The Matrix and The Lord of the Rings as Case Studies. **
Appendix C: Documenting a Research Paper: MLA Style Sheet.
Glossary.
Acknowledgments.
Index.