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Literature & Composition
Second EditionCarol Jago; Renee H. Shea; Lawrence Scanlon; Robin Dissin Aufses
©2017Literature & Composition, Second Edition offers a wide variety of classic and modern literature, plus the support students need to strengthen their reading, writing, and analysis skills. Instructional chapters lay the groundwork for success by teaching the essential skills of close reading and literary analysis of full-length works, passages of prose, and poetry. Literature & Composition provides students with everything they need to analyze and write about literature—both in the classroom and on the AP® Literature exam.
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Table of Contents
1 –Literature as Conversation: The Active Reader
One must be an inventor to read well... There is then creative reading, as well as creative writing. — Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘The American Scholar’
What Is Active Reading?
Telling It Slant
Emily Dickinson, Tell all the Truth but tell it slant —
Activity: Mary Oliver, Spring in the Classroom
Becoming an Active Reader
Annotation
William Shakespeare, Sonnet 29
Activity: Mark Doty, Golden Retrievals
Reading Journal
Alice Walker, from Everyday Use
Activity: Claude McKay, The Harlem Dancer
Think Aloud Dialogue
Activity: Karen Russell, from Swamplandia!
2 – The Big Picture: Analyzing Fiction and Drama
“Pull a thread here and you’ll find it’s attached to the rest of the world.” — Nadeem Aslam, The Wasted Vigil
Elements of Fiction
Plot
Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One of These Days
Activity
Character
Jane Austen, from Pride and Prejudice
Activity: James Welch, from Fools Crow
Setting
Edgar Allan Poe, from The Masque of the Red Death
John Steinbeck, from The Grapes of Wrath
Henry Roth, from Call It Sleep
George Orwell, from 1984
Activity: Thomas Hardy, from Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Point of View
Dinaw Mengestu, from The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears
Mark Twain, from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Katharine Mansfield, from Miss Brill
Shirley Jackson, from The Lottery
James Joyce, from Mrs. Ulysses
Activity: Brad Watson, Seeing Eye
Suzanne Berne, from A Crime in the Neighborhood
Emily Bronte, from Wuthering Heights
Activity: Colm Toibin, from Brooklyn
Symbol and Metaphor
Ernest Hemingway, from The End of Something
Stephen King, from The Gunslinger
Activity: Naguib Mahfouz, Half a Day
Theme
Edward P. Jones, The First Day
Activity: Jamaica Kincaid, Girl
Analyzing Drama
Plot
Character
George Bernard Shaw, from Pygmalion
William Shakespeare, from Richard III
Setting
Henrik Ibsen, from A Doll’s House
Activity: Hansberry, from A Raisin in the Sun
Symbol
D. L. Coburn, from The Gin Game
Activity: Terrence McNally, Andre’s Mother
From Analysis to Essay: Writing an Interpretive Essay
Susan Glaspell, Trifles
Analyzing Literary Elements
Activity
Developing a Thesis Statement
Activity
Planning an Interpretive Essay
Activity
Supporting Your Interpretation
Activity
A Sample Interpretive Essay: Aneyn M. O’Grady, Student Essay on Trifles
Activity
3 – Close Reading: Analyzing Passages of Fiction
“A writer only begins a book; a reader finishes it.” — Samuel Johnson,
What Is Close Reading?
From First Impressions to Questions
F. Scott Fitzgerald, from The Great Gatsby
Talking with the Text
Activity: Zora Neale Hurston, from Their Eyes Were Watching God
Literary Elements
Willa Cather, from My Antonia
Diction
Figurative Language
Activity: George Eliot, from Middlemarch
Syntax
Tone and Mood
Activity: Sarah Orne Jewett, from A White Heron
Connecting Literary Elements of Style
Thomas Hardy, from Far from the Madding Crowd
Activity: V. S. Naipaul, from A House for Mr Biswas
From Analysis to Essay: Writing a Close Analysis Essay
John Cheever, Reunion
Preparing to Write
Developing a Thesis Statement
Organizing a Close Analysis Essay
Integrating Quotations
A Sample Close Analysis Essay: A “Reunion” Gone Wrong
Activity: Toni Morrison, from Song of Solomon
4 – Close Reading: Analyzing Poetry
Poetry might be defined as the clear expression of mixed feelings. — W. H. Auden, New Year Letter
Close Reading Poetry
Step 1: Reading for Literal Meaning
Seamus Heaney, Digging
Activity: Christina Rossetti, Promises like Pie-Crust
Step 2: Consider the Speaker 112
Diction
Shifts
Tone and Mood
Activity: Elizabeth Barrett Browning, My Heart and I
Step 3: Reading for Detail
A. E. Housman, To An Athlete Dying Young
Figurative Language
Activity: Derek Walcott, XIV
Structure
Activity: Alice Moore Dunbar-Nelson, Sonnet
Sound
Activity: Marilyn Nelson, The Century Quilt
Connecting Poetic Elements of Style
Robert Herrick, Delight in Disorder
Activity: John Keats, Bright Star, would I were stedfast as thou art
From Analysis to Essay: Writing a Close Analysis Essay
Maxine Kumin, Woodchucks
Preparing to Write
Developing a Thesis Statement
Organizing a Close Analysis Essay
Integrating Quotations
Documenting Sources
A Sample Close Analysis Essay: Antoine Assaf, Student Essay on Woodchucks
Activity: William Stafford, Traveling Through the Dark
Working with Two Texts: The Comparison and Contrast Essay
Activity
Developing a Thesis Statement
Organizing a Comparison and Contrast Essay
Transitions
Documenting Sources
A Sample Comparison and Contrast Essay: Javier Echevarria, Student Essay on Woodchucks and Traveling Through the Dark
Activity: Lucille Clifton, in the inner city and Claude McKay, The City’s Love
5 – Home and Family
Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. — Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
Central Text
August Wilson, Fences
Classic Text
Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis
Texts in Context: The Metamorphosis and the Modernist Vision
T. S. Eliot, from Tradition and the Individual Talent (nonfiction)
Otto Dix, The War (painting)
Robert Burns, A Red, Red Rose and H. D., Sea Rose (poetry)
Amy Lowell, The Emperor’s Garden (poetry) and A London Thoroughfare, 2 AM (poetry)
Fernand Leger, La Ville (painting)
T. S. Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (poetry)
Virginia Woolf, from Mrs. Dalloway (fiction)
Fiction
Tillie Olsen, I Stand Here Ironing
Helena Maria Viramontes, The Moths
Alice Munro, The Progress of Love
Poetry
Ben Jonson, On My First Son
Anne Bradstreet, Before the Birth of One of Her Children
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Sonnet: On Receiving a Letter Informing Me of the Birth of a Son, 1796
William Wordsworth, We Are Seven
William Butler Yeats, A Prayer for My Daughter
Langston Hughes, Mother to Son
Richard Wilbur, The Writer
Simon Ortiz, My Father’s Song
Sharon Olds, Rite of Passage
Naomi Shihab Nye, My Father and the Fig Tree
Mary Oliver, Wild Geese
Michael Afaa Weaver, My Father’s Geography
Li-Young Lee, The Hammock
Suzanne Rancourt, Whose Mouth Do I Speak With
Kevin Young, Cousins
Rebecca Hazelton, My Husband
Paired Poems
Robert Hayden, Those Winter Sundays
Theodore Roethke, My Papa’s Waltz
Marilyn Chin, Turtle Soup
Adrienne Su, Peaches
Close Reading: Connotation
Suggestions for Writing: Home and Family
6 – Identity and Culture
No man, for any considerable period, can wear one face to himself, and another ot the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which may be the true. —Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter
Central Text
Jhumpa Lahiri, Interpreter of Maladies
Classic Text
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
Texts in Context: Heart of Darkness and the Legacy of Colonialism
Chinua Achebe, An Image of Africa (nonfiction)
Binyavanga Wainaina, How to Write About Africa (nonfiction)
Rudyard Kipling, The White Man’s Burden (poetry)
H. T. Johnson, The Black Man’s Burden (poetry)
Amedeo Modigliani, Woman’s Head (sculpture) and Fang Ngil Mask (sculpture)
Doris Lessing, The Old Chief Mshlanga (fiction)
Felix Mnthali, The Stranglehold of English Lit (poetry)
Leopold Senghor, In Memoriam (poetry)
Fiction
Nathaniel Hawthorne, Young Goodman Brown
Joyce Carol Oates, Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Apollo
Poetry
Alexander Pope, The Quiet Life
William Wordsworth, The World Is Too Much With Us
Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Apology
Emily Dickinson, I’m Nobody! Who Are You?
Countee Cullen, Heritage
Robert Frost, The Most of It
Dylan Thomas, Fern Hill
Gwendolyn Brooks, We Real Cool
Sylvia Plath, Mirror
Mahmoud Darwish, Identity Card
Kamau Brathwaite, Ogun
Nathalie Handal, Caribe in Nueva York
Natalie Diaz, The Facts of Art
Molly Rose Quinn, Dolorosa
Gregory Pardlo, Written by Himself
Juan Felipe Herrera, Half-Mexican
Paired Poems
John Milton, When I consider how my light is spent
Jorge Luis Borges, A Blindman
Natasha Trethewey, History Lesson
Natasha Trethewey, Southern History
Jennifer Fumiko Cahill, Where You Fell
Dara Barnat, Imprint
Close Reading: Figurative Language
Suggestions for Writing: Identity and Culture
7 – Love and Relationships
Ay me! for aught that I could ever read,
Could ever hear by tale or history,
The course of true love never did run smooth.
— William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Central Text
James Joyce, The Dead
Classic Text
Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest
Texts in Context: The Importance of Being Earnest and The Satiric Tradition
George Bernard Shaw, from A New Old Play and an Old New One (nonfiction)
The Onion, School “Fine,” U. S. Teens Report (nonfiction)
Jane Austen, from Pride and Prejudice (fiction)
Jonathan Swift, A Satirical Elegy on the Death of a Late Famous General (poetry)
“I Want Out” and “I Want You” (propaganda posters)
Sherman Alexie, How to Write the Great American Indian Novel (poem)
Ishmael Reed, Points of View (poetry)
Matthea Harvey, PROM KING AND QUEEN SEEK U. N. RECOGNITION OF THEIR OWN COUNTRY…PROMVANIA! (poetry)
Fiction
Katherine Mansfield, Bliss
William Faulkner, A Rose for Emily
Sandra Cisneros, Woman Hollering Creek
Poetry [Renee]
Sir Thomas Wyatt, They flee from me
Sir Philip Sidney, Leave me, O Love, which reachest but to dust
John Donne, The Flea
Robert Herrick, To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time
Lord Byron, She walks in Beauty
Edna St. Vincent Millay, Love is not all
Margaret Atwood, Siren Song
Elizabeth Bishop, One Art
Audre Lorde, Movement Song
Billy Collins, Weighing the Dog
Cornelius Eady, I’m a Fool to Love You
Jane Hirschfield, This was once a love poem
David Hernandez, Lisa
Major Jackson, Urban Renewal XVIII
Warsan Shire, For Women Who Are Difficult to Love
Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Chess
Paired Poems
William Shakespeare, My mistress’s eyes are nothing like the sun
Pablo Neruda, Mi fea, Sonet XX
Pablo Neruda, My ugly love, Sonnet XX
John Donne, A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning
Adrienne Rich, A Valediction Forbidding Mourning
Close Reading: Irony
Suggestions for Writing: Love and Relationships
8 – Conformity and Rebellion
Not all those who wander are lost. — J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings
Central Text
Edwidge Danticat, The Book of the Dead
Classic Text
William Shakespeare, Hamlet
Texts in Context: The Character of Hamlet
Marjorie Garber, from Hamlet: The Matter of Character (nonfiction)
Sir Thomas Lawrence, John Philip Kemble as Hamlet (painting)
Hamlet and the Ghost of His Father (painting)
William Hazlitt, from The Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays (nonfiction)
C. S. Lewis, Hamlet—The Prince or the Poem? (nonfiction)
Zbigniew Herbert, Elegy of Fortinbras (poetry)
Margaret Atwood, Gertrude Talks Back (poetry)
Meghan O’Rourke, The Long Goodbye (nonfiction)
Fiction
Herman Melville, Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street
Zora Neale Hurston, Spunk
Karen Russell, The Prospectors
Poetry
Alexander Pope, Sound and Sense
Percy Bysshe Shelley, Song: To the Men of England
Emily Dickinson, Much Madness is divinest Sense—
Wallace Stevens, Disillusionment at Ten O’clock
E. E. Cummings, anyone lived in a pretty how town
Dylan Thomas, Do not go gentle into that good night
Gwendolyn Brooks, The Chicago Defender Sends a Reporter to Little Rock
Anne Sexton, Her Kind
Frank O’Hara, The Day Lady Died
Allen Ginsberg, Is About
Terrance Hayes, Talk
Barbara Jane Reyes, To Be Walang Hiya
Robin Coste Lewis, Art & Craft
Jamila Woods, Ghazal for White Hen Pantry
Paired Poems
Matthew Prior, An Epitaph
W. H. Auden, The Unknown Citizen
Carol Ann Duffy, Penelope
A. E. Stallings, The Wife of the Man of Many Wiles
Close Reading: Tone
Suggestions for Writing: Conformity and Rebellion
9 – Tradition and Progress
The world owes all its onward impulses to men ill at ease. The happy man inevitably confines himself within ancient limits. — Nathaniel Hawthorne
Central Text
Flannery O’Connor, A Good Man Is Hard to Find
Classic Text
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
Texts in Context: The Ethical Implications of Frankenstein
Stephen Gould, from The Monster’s Human Nature (nonfiction)
Jericho Brown, Dear Dr. Frankenstein (poetry)
Brian Aldiss, Super Toys Last All Summer Long (fiction)
Jon Turney, from Frankenstein’s Footsteps (nonfiction)
Stephen Dunn, Mary Shelley in Brigantine (poetry)
Alison Hawthorne Deming, Science (poetry)
Cari Romm, The Enduring Scariness of the Mad Scientist (nonfiction)
Fiction
James Baldwin, Sonny’s Blues
Alice Walker, Everyday Use
Hanif Kureishi, We’re Not Jews
Poetry
Thomas Gray, Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard
William Blake, London
Matthew Arnold, Dover Beach
Gerard Manley Hopkins, God’s Grandeur
Emily Dickinson, Crumbling is not an instant’s Act
Robert Frost, Mending Wall
William Butler Yeats, The Second Coming
James Wright, Autumn Begins in Martin’s Ferry, Ohio
Seamus Heaney, Bogland
Yehuda Amichai, The Eve of Rosh Hashanah
May Swenson, Goodbye, Goldeneye
Toi Derricotte, Black Boys Play the Classics
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, Indian Movie, New Jersey
Amit Majmudar, To the Hyphenated Poets
Richard Blanco, Mother Country
LeConté Dill, We Who Weave
Paired Poems
Walt Whitman, Mannahatta
Carl Sandburg, Chicago
William Wordsworth, London, 1802
Paul Laurence Dunbar, Douglass
Close Reading: Syntax
Suggestions for Writing: Tradition and Progress
10 – War and Peace
Do dreams offer lessons? Do nightmares have themes, do we awaken and analyze them and live our lives and advise others as a result? Can the foot soldier teach anything important about war, merely for having been there? I think not. He can tell war stories. — Tim O’Brien, If I Die in a Combat Zone
Central Text
Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried
Classic Text
William Shakespeare, Othello
Texts in Context: Critical Perspectives on Othello
Isaac Butler, Why Is Othello Black? (nonfiction)
Charles Lamb, from Othello’s Color: Theatrical vs. Literary Representation (nonfiction)
Jennifer Hill Coucher, Reading Othello and Watching a Girl Skip Rope (poetry)
Nicole Galland, from I, Iago (fiction)
James Earl Jones, from The Sun God (nonfiction)
Andrew Davies, from Othello (screenplay)
Toni Morrison, from Desdemona (fiction)
Fiction
Cynthia Ozick, The Shawl
Bharati Mukherjee, The Management of Grief
Phil Klay, Ten Kliks South
Poetry
Julia Ward Howe, Battle Hymn of the Republic
Walt Whitman, Vigil strange I kept on the field one night
Thomas Hardy, Channel Firing
Siegfried Sassoon, Lamentations
Wilfred Owen, Dulce et Decorum Est
Anna Akhmatova, The First Long-Range Artillery Shell in Leningrad
Henry Reed, Naming of Parts
Richard Wilbur, First Snow in Alsace
Uri Zvi Greenberg, We Were Not Likened to Dogs
Margaret Atwood, It Is Dangerous to Read Newspapers
Wislawa Szymborska, The Terrorist, He Watches
Yousif al-Sa’igh, An Iraqi Evening
Dunya Mikhail, The War Works Hard
Brian Turner, Sadiq
Solmaz Sharif, Safe House
Cathy Linh Che, Split
Jill McDonough, Twelve-Hour Shifts
Amit Majmudar, Welcome Home, Troops!
Paired Poems
Richard Lovelace, To Lucasta, Going to the Wars
Robert Graves, To Lucasta on Going to the War—for the Fourth Time
Thomas Hardy, A Wife in London
Yusef Komunyakaa, Between Days
Wilfred Owen, The Parable of the Old Man and the Young
Wilfred Owen, Arms and the Boy
Close Reading: Imagery
Suggestions for Writing: War and Peace
MLA Guidelines for a List of Works Cited
Glossary of Terms
Index