Synopses & Reviews
This collection of classic and contemporary readings is divided into five thematic chapters that explore distinct aspects of human knowledge. Readings are accompanied by a reader-response section encouraging students to draw on their personal experience and knowledge.
Table of Contents
1. Personal Knowledge: Who Am I? Liliana Heker, "The Stolen Party" Julia Alvarez, "Dusting" Alice Walker, "Beauty: When the Other Dancer Is the Self" Leslie Norris, "Blackberries" Langston Hughes, "Theme for English B" Russell Baker, "Summer Beyond Wish" Colette, "The Hand" Robert Frost, "Birches" Loren Eiseley, "The Brown Wasps" Octavio Paz, "The Street" Katherine Anne Porter, "The Grave" Plato, "The Allegory of the Cave" 2. Family Knowledge: Who Has Shaped Me? Claudia Madison, "Ball Game" Robert Hayden, "Those Winter Sundays" Tillie Olsen, "I Stand Here Ironing" Kazuo Ishiguro, "A Family Supper" Theodore Roethke, "My Papa's Waltz" Richard Rodriguez, from "Hunger of Memory" David Michael Kaplan, "Love, Your Only Mother" Galway Kinnell, "After Making Love We Hear Footsteps" Alfred Kazin, "The Kitchen" Jerome Weidman, "My Father Sits in the Dark" Audre Lorde, "Now That I Am Forever with Child" Joan Didion, "On Going Home" 3. Cultural Knowledge: What Are My Roots? Siv Cedering, "Family Album" Pat Mora, "Sonrisas" Clyde Kluckhohn, "Customs" Toni Cade Bambara, "The Lesson" Lucille Clifton, "Homage to My Hips" Karen Tei Yamashita, "The Bath" Maxine Hong Kingston, "Girlhood Among Ghosts" Inés Hernández, "Para Teresa" N. Scott Momaday, "The Last of the Kiowas" Gabriel García Márquez, "The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World" Cathy Song, "Lost Sister" Greg Sarris, "Battling Illegitimacy: Some Words Against the Darkness" 4. Societal Knowledge: What Do Others Think? John Updike, "AandP" Janice Mirikitani, "We, the Dangerous" Brent Staples, "Black Men and Public Space" Gloria Naylor, "The Two" Paul Zimmer, "The Day Zimmer Lost Religion" Martin Luther King, Jr., "Letter from Birmingham Jail" Bel Kaufman, "Sunday in the Park" William Wordsworth, "The World Is Too Much with Us" Albert Camus, from "The Myth of Sisyphus" Yukio Mishima, "Swaddling Clothes" T. S. Eliot, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" Sigmund Freud, from "Civilization and Its Discontents" 5. Disturbing Knowledge: What Do I Think? Dino Buzzati, "The Falling Girl" Emily Dickinson, "I heard a Fly buzz--when I died--" Barbara Grizzuti Harrison, "Growing Up Apocalyptic" Jean-Paul Sartre, "The Wall" Ghita Orth, "What Didn't Happen in Arizona" Niccolo Machiavelli, from "The Prince" Krishnan Varna, "The Grass-Eaters" William Stafford, "Traveling Through the Dark" Virginia Woolf, "The Death of the Moth" Flannery O'Connor, "Good Country People" Linda Pastan, "Ethics" Thucydides, from "History of the Peloponnesian War"