A market leader for more than 30 years, this paperback anthology continues to uphold the traditions that have made it a success– a rich blend of both classic and contemporary selections as well as Barnet’s signature “how-to” apparatus  that covers the elements of literature and the writing process.

 

The new edition features more student essays than any other anthology giving students a deep reservoir of writing models to learn from including argument papers and film reviews. In addition, a wealth of instructor favorites have been added including works by D.H. Lawrence, Ambrose Bierce, Cynthia Ozick, Liliana Heker, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Thomas Hardy, Linda Pastan, and David Ives.

Detailed Table of Contents

Preface

Letter to Students

Part I READING, THINKING, AND WRITING CRITICALLY ABOUT LITERATURE

1.  Reading and Responding to Literature

What Is Literature?

Literature as Performance: Robert Frost, The Span of Life

Significance

Two Poems about Immigration:

Robert Frost, Immigrants

            Robert Frost, Immigrants

            Pat Mora, Immigrants

Two Contemporary Short Stories

            Lydia Davis, Childcare

            Lydia Davis,  City People

Thinking About a Classic Story

            Luke, The Parable of the Prodigal Son

Stories True and False:

            Grace Paley, Samuel

What's Past Is Prologue

            Jamaica Kincaid, Girl

            Tobias Wolff, Powder

            James Merrill, Christmas Tree

  

2. The Pleasures of Reading--and of Writing Arguments about Literature

The Open Secret of Good Writing

            Emily Wu, The Lesson of the Master

Getting Ready to Write

A Student Writes: From Jottings to a Final Draft

            Will Berger, Less Is More: Characterization in “The Lesson of the Master”

The Student’s Analysis Analyzed

A Second Short Story, and a Student’s Analysis

            Tobias Wolff, Say Yes

            A Sample Student Essay:  Bob Williams,  He’s the Problem

            The Analysis Briefly Analyzed

Three Poems

            Diane Ackerman, Pumping Iron    

            Anonymous, Tweed to Till

             William Blake, The Clod and the Pebble

Two Additional Stories

            Katherine Mansfield, Miss Brill

            Toni Cade Bambara, The Lesson

 

3. More about Writing About Literature: From Idea to Essay

Why Write Arguments about Literature?

Getting Ideas: Pre-Writing.

Annotating a Text.

Brainstorming for Ideas for Writing

            Kate Chopin, The Story of an Hour

Focused Free Writing

Listing and Clustering

Developing an Awareness of the Writer's Use of Language

Asking Questions

Keeping a Journal

Arguing at a Thesis.

Writing a Draft

            Sample Draft of an Essay on Kate Chopin's “The Story of an Hour”

            Lynn Crowe, Ironies in an Hour

Revising a Draft

Peer Review

The Final Version

A Brief Overview of the Final Version

Explication.

A Sample Explication

            William Butler Yeats, The Balloon of the Mind

Explication as Argument

Comparison and Contrast: A Way of Arguing

Review: How to Write an Effective Essay

Additional Reading

Kate Chopin, Ripe Figs

William Stafford, Traveling through the Dark

Lorna Dee Cervantes, Refugee Ship

José Armas, El Tonto del Barrio

 

Part II FICTION

4.  Approaching Fiction: Responding in Writing.

Ernest Hemingway, Cat in the Rain

Responses: Annotations and Journal Entries.

A Sample Essay by a Student:

            Bill Yanagi, Hemingway’s American Wife

 

5.  Stories and Meanings: Plot, Character, Theme.

Aesop, The Vixen and the Lioness

W. Somerset Maugham, The Appointment in Samara

Anonymous, Muddy Road

Anton Chekhov, Misery

Kate Chopin, Desiree's Baby

Alice Walker, Everyday Use

Margaret Atwood, Happy Endings

 William Carlos Williams, The Use of Force

 

6. Narrative Point of View

Participant (or First-Person) Points of View

Non-participant (or Third-Person) Points of View

The Point of a Point of View

John Updike, A & P

Grace Paley, A Man Told Me the Story of His Life

Jean Rhys, I Used to Live Here Once

Anonymous, The Judgment of Solomon

Ambrose Bierce, An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge

Katherine Anne Porter, The Jilting of Granny Weatherall

 

7 Allegory and Symbol

A Note on Setting

Nathaniel Hawthorne, Young Goodman Brown

John Steinbeck, The Chrysanthemums

Eudora Welty, A Worn Path

Gabriel García Márquez, A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings: A Tale for Children

D. H.  Lawrence, The Horse Dealer’s Daughter

Shirley Jackson, The Lottery

 

8. Students Writing about Stories

Prompts for Writing about Plot, Character, Point of View, Setting, Symbolism, Style, and Theme

Fiction into Film

            Asking Questions, Thinking Critically, Making Comparisons

            Film as a Medium

            Film Techniques

            Theme

Comparing Filmed and Printed Stories

Getting Ready to write

Drafting an Essay

            Checklist: Getting Ideas for Writing Arguments about Film

Your Turn: Thinking about Filming Fiction

Seven Students Write about Short Stories

            Anne Geraghty Thinks about Character in Poe’s “The Cask of Amontillado”

Notes.

            The Final Version of the Essay: Anne Geraghty, Revenge, Noble and Ignoble

Gender Criticism: A Response to “The Judgment of Solomon”

            A Sample Essay: Anne McCauley, How Wise Was Solomon

            A Feminist Reading of James Thurber’s “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty”

Working Toward a Thesis: Journal entries

Developing the Thesis: List Notes

            Sample Draft: Susan Levy,  “Walter Mitty Is No Joke”

A Note on Reading against the Grain

            A Skeptical Look at the Parable of he Prodigal Son

            Steve Scipione, “The Parable of the Shrewd Son”

 Talking about Setting as Symbolic: Notes and an Essay on Kate Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour”

            Amy Jones,  “Spring Comes to Mrs. Mallard”

Two Students Interpret Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery”: Notes and Essays

            Nat Komor, “We All Participate in the Lottery”

            Anne Hearn “Is ‘The Lottery’ Fair?”

Sample Essay with Documentation

            Jean Lee, “”Do the Pink Ribbons in Hawthorne‘s ‘Young Goodman Brown’ Have a Meaning?”

           

9.  A Fiction Writer in Depth: Flannery O'Connor

Flannery O’Connor: Three Stories and Observations on Literature

Flannery O’Connor, A Good Man Is Hard to Find

Flannery O’Connor, Good Country People

Flannery O’Connor, Revelation

On Fiction: Remarks from Essays and Letters.

From “The Fiction Writer and His Country”

From “Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction”

From “The Nature and Aim of Fiction”

From “Writing Short Stories”

A Reasonable Use of the Unreasonable”

On Interpreting “A Good Man Is Hard to Find”

           

10.  A Collection of Short Fiction 

Chris Adrian, Every Night for a Thousand Years

Margaret Atwood, Gertrude Talks Back

Jorge Luis Borges, The Gospel According to Mark

Raymond Carver, Cathedral

Oscar Casares, Yolanda

Diana Chang, The Oriental Contingent

Kate Chopin, The Storm

Alice Elliot Dark, In the Gloaming

Ralph Ellison, Battle Royal

Louise Erdrich, The Red Convertible

William Faulkner, A Rose for Emily

William Faulkner, Barn Burning

Jack Forbes, Only Appproved Indians Can Play: Made in USA

Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Yellow Wallpaper

Patricia Grace, Flies

Gish Jen, Who’s Irish?

James Joyce, Araby

Franz Kafka, A Hunger Artist

Jack London, To Build a Fire

Bobbie Ann Mason, Shiloh

Guy de Maupassant, Mademoiselle

Guy de Maupassant, The Necklace

Katherine Min, Courting a Monk

Lorrie Moore, How to Become a Writer

Alice Munro  Boys and Girls

Gloria Naylor, The Two

Joyce Carol Oates, Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?

Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

Cynthia Ozick, The Shawl

Edgar Allan Poe, The Tell-Tale Heart

Edgar Allan Poe, The Cask of Amontillado

Michele Serros, Senior Picture Day

Leslie Marmon Silko, The Man to Send Rain Clouds

Amy Tan, Two Kinds 

Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Illych

John Updike, The Rumor

 

Part III. POETRY

11.  Approaching Poetry: Responding in Writing

Langston Hughes, Harlem.

Thinking About “Harlem”

Some Journal Entries.

            A Sample Essay by a Student: Michael Locke, Langston Hughes’s ‘Harlem’

Aphra Behn, Song: Love Armed.

Journal Entries.

            A Sample Essay by a Student: Geoffrey Sullivan “The Double Nature of Love.”

 

12.   Narrative Poetry

The Limerick, the Popular Ballad, and Other Narrative Poems

Anonymous, There was a young fellow from Riga

Anonymous British Ballad, Sir Patrick Spence

Anonymous British Ballad, The Demon Lover

John Keats, La Belle Dame sans Merci

Siegfried Sassoon,  The General

Countee Cullen, Incident

Edward Arlington Robinson, Richard Cory

Emily Dickinson, Because I could not stop for Death

John Lennon and Paul McCartney, Eleanor Rigby

E. E. Cummings, anyone lived in a pretty how town

 

13.  Lyric Poetry

Anonymous, Michael Row the Boat Ashore

Anonymous, Careless Love

Anonymous, The Colorado Trail

Anonymous, Western Wind

Julia Ward Howe, Battle Hymn of the Republic  

William Shakespeare, Spring

William Shakespeare, Winter

W. H. Auden, Stop All the Clocks, Cut Off the Telephone

Emily Brontë, Spellbound

Spirituals, or Sorrow Songs

Anonymous African-American, Go Down, Moses

Anonymous African-American, Swing Low, Sweet Chariot

Langston Hughes, Evenin' Air Blues

Li-Young Lee, I Ask My Mother to Sing

Edna St. Vincent Millay, The Spring and the Fall

Wilfred Owen, Anthem for Doomed Youth

Walt Whitman, A Noiseless Patient Spider

Joseph Addison, Ode

John Keats, Ode on a Grecian Urn

Paul Laurence Dunbar, Sympathy

Jack Forbes, Something Nice

Linda Pastan, Jump Cabling

Billy Collins, The Names

 

14.  The Speaking Tone of Voice.

Emily Dickinson, I'm Nobody! Who are you?

Gwendolyn Brooks, We Real Cool.

Gwendolyn Brooks, The Mother  

Linda Pastan, Marks

The Reader as the Speaker.

Stevie Smith, Not Waving but Drowning

Wislawa Szymborska, The Terrorist, He Watches

John Updike, Icarus

Aurora Levins Morales, Child of the Americas

Joseph Bruchac III, Ellis Island

The Dramatic Monologue.

Robert Browning, My Last Duchess

Paula Gunn Allen, Pocahontas to Her English Husband, John Rolfe

Diction and Tone.

Robert Herrick, To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time

Ezra Pound, The River-Merchant’s Wife: A Letter

Wilfred Owens, Dulce et Decorum Est

Thomas Hardy, The Man He Killed

Thomas Hardy, The Ruined Maid

Walter de la Mare, An Epitaph

Gerard Manley Hopkins, Spring and Fall: To a Young Child.

Countee Cullen, For a Lady I Know

Lyn Lifshin, My Mother and the Bed

The Voice of the Satirist.

E.E. Cummings, next to of course god America

Marge Piercy, Barbie Doll

Louise Erdrich, Dear John Wayne

Alexander Pope, Engraved on the Collar of a Dog

 

15.  Figurative Language: Simile, Metaphor, Personification, and Apostrophe.

Robert Burns, A Red, Red Rose.

Sylvia Plath, Metaphor

Simile.

Richard Wilbur, A Simile for Her Smile

Metaphor.

John Keats, On First Looking into Chapman's Homer

Personification

Michael Drayton, Since There’s No Help

Apostrophe

Edmund Waller, Song

William Carlos Williams, The Red Wheelbarrow

Alfred Lord Tennyson, The Eagle

Seamus Heaney, Digging

Dana Gioia, Money

Linda Pastan, Baseball

Craig Raine, A Martian Sends a Postcard Home

William Shakespeare, Sonnet 130

 

16.  Imagery and Symbolism.

William Blake, The Sick Rose

Walt Whitman, I Saw in Louisiana a Live-Oak Growing

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Kubla Khan

Emma Lazarus, The New Colossus

Alfred, Lord Tennyson, The Kraken

Dan Chiasson, The Elephant

Claude McKay, The Tropics in New York

Adrienne Rich, Diving into the Wreck

Christina Rossetti, Uphill

Wallace Stevens, The Emperor of Ice Cream

Edgar Allan Poe,  To Helen

Herman Melville, DuPont’s Round Fight

Naomi  Shihab Nye, The Traveling Onion

A Note on Haiku

Moritake, Fallen petals rise

Sokan, If only we could

Shiki, River in summer

Richard Wright, Four Haiku

Writing a Haiku.

Taigi, Look, O look, there go

Cyber-Haiku

 

17.  Irony

Percy Bysshe Shelley, Ozymandias

Andrew Marvell, To His Coy Mistress

John Donne, Holy Sonnet XIV (“Batter my heart, three-personed God”)

Langston Hughes, Dream Boogie

Martín Espada, Tony Went to the Bodega but He Didn't Buy Anything

Edna St. Vincent Millay, Love Is Not All: It Is Not Meat nor Drink

Sherman Alexie, Evolution

Henry Reed,  Naming of Parts

Sarah N. Cleghorn, The Golf Links

 

18.   Rhythm and Versification.

Ezra Pound, An Immorality

A. E. Housman, Eight O'Clock

William Carlos Williams, The Dance

Robert Francis, The Pitcher

Versification: A Glossary for Reference

            Meter

Patterns of Sound

Galway Kinnell, Blackberry Eating

William Carlos Williams, The Artist

Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Constantly Risking Absurdity

A Note about Poetic Forms

            Stanzaic Patterns

            Three Complex Forms: The Sonnet, The Villanelle, and the Sestina

The Sonnet

Six Sonnets.

William Shakespeare, Sonnet 73 (“That time of year thou mayst in me behold”)

William Shakespeare, Sonnet 146 (“Poor soul, the center of my sinful earth”)

John Milton, When I Consider How My Light Is Spent

John Crowe Ransom, Piazza Piece

X. J. Kennedy, Nothing in Heaven Functions as It Ought

Billy Collins, Sonnet

The Villanelle

Edward Arlington Robinson, The House on the Hill

Dylan Thomas, Do Not go Gentle into that Good Night

Elizabeth Bishop, One Art

The Sestina

Elizabeth Bishop, Sestina

Shaped Poetry or Pattern Poetry

George Herbert, Easter Wings

Lillian Morrison, The Sidewalk Racer

Blank Verse and Free Verse.

Walt Whitman, When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer

The Prose Poem

Carolyn Forché, The Colonel

 

19.  Students Writing about Poems

First Response.

Speaker and Tone.

Audience.

Structure and Form.

Center of Interest and Theme.

Diction.

Sound Effects.

A Note on Explication.

Eight Essays by Students

Louise Glück, Gretel in Darkness

Jennifer Anderson’s Annotation’s, Journal, and Final Draft

            Jennifer Anderson, A Memory Poem: Louise Gluck’s “Gretel in Darkness”

Adrienne Rich, Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers

A Student’s Annotations and Essay

             Maria Fuentes, Aunt Jennifer’s Screen and Adrienne Rich’s Poem

A Student’s Essay on a Theme in  Several Poems by One Poet

            Peter Gottsegen Religion and Religious Imagery in Emily Dickinson

An Essay on the Structure of a Poem

            Robert Herrick, Upon Julia’s Clothes

            Annotations

            David Thurston, Herrick’s Julia, Julia’s Herrick

An Essay on Metrics

            Julia Jeffords, Sound and Sense in Housman’s “Eight O’Clock”

            A Brief Overview of the Essay

Three Essays, for Evaluation, on Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”

            Darrel MacDonald’s Annotations and Essay, “Stopping by Woods and Going On”

            Sara Fong’s Journal Entry and Essay, “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” as a Short Story”

            Peter Franken’s Journal Entry and Essay, “The Meaning of “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”

           

20. Poets at Work

Walt Whitman, Enfans d'Adam, number 9

Cathy Song, Out of Our Hands

William Butler Yeats, Leda and the Swan (three versions)

William Butler Yeats, Annunciation

William Butler Yeats, Leda and the Swan (1924)

William Butler Yeats, Leda and the Swan (1933)

 

21.  Variations on Themes: Poems and Paintings

Writing about Poems and Paintings

A Sample Student Essay

            Tina Washington, Two Ways of Looking at a Starry Night

Jane Flanders, Van Gogh's Bed

Adrienne Rich, Mourning Picture

Cathy Song, Beauty and Sadness

Carl Phillips, Luncheon on the Grass

Anne Sexton, The Starry Night

W. H. Auden, Musée des Beaux Arts

X. J. Kennedy, Nude Descending a Staircase

Sherman Alexie, At Navajo Monument Valley Tribal School.

John Updike, Before the Mirror

Greg Pape, American Flamingo

 

22. Three Poets in Depth: Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, and Langston Hughes

On Reading Authors Represented in Depth

Emily Dickinson

These are the days when Birds come back

Papa above!

Wild Nights–Wild Nights!

There's a certain Slant of light

I got so I could hear his name–

The Soul selects her own Society

This   was a Poet–It is That

I heard a Fly Buzz–when I died

The World is not Conclusion

I like to see it lap the Miles

A narrow Fellow in the Grass

Further in Summer than the Birds

Tell all the Truth but tell it slant

A Route of Evanesence

Those–dying, then

Apparently with no surprise

I felt a funeral, in my Brain

I felt a Cleaving in my Mind

The Dust behind I strove to join

Letters about Poetry.

Letter to Susan Gilbert (Dickinson).

Letters to T.W. Higginson

Letter to T.W. Higginson

Robert Frost.

The Pasture

Mending Wall

The Wood-Pile

The Road Not Taken.

The Telephone.

The Oven Bird.

The Vanishing Red

The Aim Was Song

The Need of Being Versed in Country Things

Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening

Acquainted with the Night

Desert Places

Design

The Silken Tent

Come In

The Most of It

Robert Frost on Poetry

The Figure a Poem Makes

From “The Constant Symbol”

 

Langston Hughes

The Negro Speaks of Rivers

Mother to Son

The Weary Blues

The South

Ruby Brown.

Poet to Patron.

Ballad of the Landlord

Too Blue

Harlem [1].

Theme for English B

Poet to Bigot

Langston Hughes on Poetry

The Negro and the Racial Mountain

On the Cultural Achievement of African-Americans

 

23.  Poetry and Translation

A Poem Translated from Spanish, in an Essay by a Student

            George Guzman, García Lorca’s “Despedida”

A Note on Using the First-Person Singular Pronoun in Essays

Translating a Poem of your Choice, and Commenting on the Translation

Last-Minute Help: Three Spanish Poems

Anonymous, Ya se van los pastores

Anonymous,  Una gallina con pollos  

Gabriela Mistral, El Pensador de Rodin

Translating Haiku

Basho, Old pond

Further Thoughts about Translating Poetry

Catullus, Odi et amo

Can Poetry Be Translated?

Looking at Translations of a Poem by Charles Baudelaire

Charles Baudelaire, L’Albatros

 

24.  A Collection of Poems.

A Note on Folk Ballads

Anonymous British Ballad, The Three Ravens

Anonymous British Ballad, The Twa Corbies

Anonymous British Ballad, Edward

Anonymous, John Henry

Sherman Alexie, On the Amtrak from Boston to New York City

Matthew Arnold, Dover Beach

W.  H. Auden, The Unknown Citizen

Jimmy Santiago Baca,  So Mexicans Are Taking Jobs from Americans

Amiri Baraka, A Poem for Black Hearts

Elizabeth Bishop, The Fish

William Blake, Infant Joy

William Blake, Infant Sorrow

William Blake, The Lamb

William Blake, The Tyger

William Blake, London

Robert Bly, Driving to Town Late to Mail a Letter

Gwendolyn Brooks, Martin Luther King Jr.

Gwendolyn Brooks, The Bean Eaters

Robert Browning, Porphyria’s Lover

George Gordon, Lord Byron, She Walks in Beauty

Lucille Clifton, in the inner city

Judith Ortiz Cofer, My Father in the Navy: A Childhood Memory

John Donne, A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning

John Donne, The Flea

John Donne, Death Be Not Proud

Rita Dove, Daystar

Bob Dylan, The Times They Are A-Changin'

T. S. Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

Ralph Waldo Emerson,   Hymn

Martín Espada, Bully

Allen Ginsberg, A Supermarket in California

Nikki Giovanni, Master Charge Blues

Louise Glück, The School Children

H.D., Helen

Thomas Hardy, Ah, Are You Digging on My Grave

Joy Harjo, Vision

Robert Hayden, Those Winter Sundays

Anthony Hecht, The Dover Bitch

Robert Herrick, Delight in Disorder

Gerard Manley Hopkins, God's Grandeur

Gerard Manly Hopkins, Pied Beauty

A. E. Housman, To an Athlete Dying Young

A. E. Housman, When I Was One-and-Twenty

A. E. Housman, Loveliest of Trees

James Weldon Johnson, To America

Ben Jonson, On My First Son.

Ben Jonson, Still to be Neat

John Keats, To Autumn

X. J. Kennedy, For Allen Ginsberg

Yusef Komunyakaa, Facing It

Archibald MacLeish, Ars Poetica

Çlaude McKay, America

Herman Melville, Misgivings

HermanMelville, The  Tuft of Kelp

Pat Mora, Illegal Alien

Pat Mora, Legal Alien

Carol Muske, Chivalry

Sharon Olds, Rites of Passage

Linda Pastan, Love Poem

Marge Piercy, To be of use

Sylvia Plath, Daddy

Ezra Pound, In a Station of the Metro

Wyatt Prunty, Learning the Bicycle

Dudley Randall, The Melting Pot

Adrienne Rich, For the Felling of an Elm in the Harvard Yard

Adrienne Rich, Living in Sin

Anne Sexton, Her Kind

William Shakespeare, Sonnet 29 (When, in disgrace with Fortune and men’s eyes)

William Shakespeare, Sonnet 116 (Let me not to the marriage of true minds)

Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Ulysses

Kitty Tsui, A Chinese Banquet

John Updike, Ex-Basketball Player

Derek Walcott, A Far Cry from Africa

Phillis Wheatley, On Being Brought from Africa to America

Walt Whitman, Reconciliation

Walt Whitman, A Sight in Camp in the Daybreak Gray and Grim

Walt Whitman, The Dalliance of Eagles

William Carlos Williams, Spring and All

William Wordsworth, The World Is Too Much with Us

William Wordsworth, I Wondered Lonely as a Cloud

William Wordsworth, The Solitary Reaper

James Wright, Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota

William Butler Yeats, Sailing to Byzantium

 

Part IV DRAMA

 

25.  How to Read a Play 

Thinking About the Language of Drama.

Plot and Character.

Susan Glaspell, Trifles

Tennessee Williams, The Glass Menagerie

A Context for The Glass Menagerie

Tennessee Williams, Production Notes

 

26.  Tragedy

A Note on Greek Theater

Two Plays by Sophocles

Sophocles, Oedipus the King

Sophocles, Antigone

A Play by Shakespeare

A Note on the Elizabethan Theater

Hamlet

A Note on the Text of Hamlet

Portfolio: Hamlet on the Stage

William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Prince of Denmark

 

27.  Comedy

William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream

 

28.   Two Plays about Marriage

Henrik Ibsen, A Doll's House

Contexts for A Doll's House

Henrik Ibsen, Notes for the Tragedy of Modern Times

Henrik Ibsen, Adaptations of A Doll's House for a German Production

Henrik Ibsen, Speech at the Banquet of the Norwegian League for Women's Rights

Clare Boothe Luce, Slam the Door Softly

 

29.  Students Writing About Plays

Plot and Conflict.

Character.

Tragedy.

Comedy.

Nonverbal Language.

The Play in Performance

Writing about a Filmed Version of a Play

Checklist: Writing about a Filmed Play

Five Essays by Students

            An Essay on Plot: Joel Shapiro, “The Solid Structure of The Glass Menagerie”

            An Essay on Setting: Margaret Hammer, “What the Kitchen in Trifles Tells Us”

            An Essay on Character and Theme: Carlos Alonso,  “Fairy Mischief and Morality in A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream”

            An Essay on a Film: Will Saretta, “Branagh’s Film of Hamlet”

            A Sample Student Essay Using Sources:  Ruth Katz, “The Women in  Death of a Salesman”

 

30.  A Collection of Plays

Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman

A Context for Death of a Salesman

Arthur Miller, Tragedy and the Common Man

Luis Valdez, Los Vendidos

            A Context for Los Vendidos

Luis Valdez, The Actos

Jane Martin, Rodeo

August Wilson, Fences

            A Context for Fences

            August Wilson, Talking About Fences

David Ives, Sure Thing

Terrence McNally, Andre’s Mother

 

 

31 Critical Approaches: The Nature of Criticism

Formalist (or New) Criticism

Deconstruction

Reader Response Criticism

Archetypal (or Myth) Criticism

Historical Scholarship

Marxist Criticism

The New Historicism

Biographical Criticism

Psychological (or Psychoanalytic) Criticism

Gender (Feminist, and Lesbian and Gay) Criticism

Suggestions for Further Reading

 

Appendix A

Basic Manuscript Form

Corrections in Final Copy

Quotations and Quotation Marks

Documentation: Footnotes, Internal Parenthetical Citations, and  a List of Works Cited (MLA format)

Citing Sources on the World Wide Web

 

 

Appendix B: Writing Essay Examinations

Why Do Instructors give Essay Examinations

Getting Ready

Writing Essay Answers

 

 

Appendix C Glossary of Literary Terms