To my muse by jose rizal meaning per stanza

Instructor’s Manual to accompany

The Longman Anthology of World Literature

SECOND EDITION

VOLUME II VOLUME D: THE SEVENTEENTH AND EIGHTEENTH CENTURIES

VOLUME E: THE NINETEENTH CENTURY VOLUME F: THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

David Damrosch David L. Pike General Editors

April Alliston Marshall Brown

Page duBois Sabry Hafez

Ursula K. Heise Djelal Kadir

Sheldon Pollock Bruce Robbins Haruo Shirane

Jane Tylus Pauline Yu

Longman

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London Toronto Sydney Tokyo Singapore Madrid

Mexico City Munich Paris Cape Town Hong Kong Montreal

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Vice President and Editor-in-Chief: Joseph Terry Senior Supplements Editor: Donna Campion Text Design, Project Manager, and Electronic Page Makeup: Grapevine Publishing

Services, Inc.

Instructor’s Manual to accompany The Longman Anthology of World Literature, Second Edition, Volume II, by David Damrosch et al.

Copyright © 2009 Pearson Education, Inc.

All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. Instructors may reproduce portions of this book for classroom use only. All other reproductions are strictly prohibited without prior permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

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ISBN 10: 0-205-64606-9 ISBN 13: 978-0-205-64606-7

Longman is an imprint of

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CONTENTS

General Editors’ Preface ix Guide to MyLiteratureLab xv

VOLUME D: The Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries

The World the Mughals Made 1 Zahiruddin Muhammad Babur 2 Jahangir 4 Mirza Muhammad Rafi “Sauda” and Mir Muhammad Taqi “Mir” 6 Banarasidas 10

Chikamatsu Mon’zaemon 12

Cao Xueqin 16 RESONANCE: Shen Fu 21

The Ottoman Empire 23 Mihri Khatun 23 Fuzuli 23 Nedîm 24 Lady Mary Wortley Montagu 25

The Age of the Enlightenment

Jean-Baptiste Poquelin [Molière] 27

PERSPECTIVES: Court Culture and Female Authorship 30

Aphra Behn 42 RESONANCE: George Warren 51

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Jonathan Swift 52

PERSPECTIVES: Journeys in Search of the Self 58

François-Marie Arouet [Voltaire] 71

Alexander Pope 79

PERSPECTIVES: Liberty and Libertines 88

VOLUME E: The Nineteenth Century

Teaching Romanticism Today 95

William Wordsworth 101

PERSPECTIVES: Romantic Nature 107 Jean-Jacques Rousseau 107

Immanuel Kant 108

William Blake 108

John Keats 109

Annette von Droste-Hülshoff 109

Giacomo Leopardi 110

Ralph Waldo Emerson 110

Henry David Thoreau 111

Johann Wolfgang Goethe 112

George Gordon, Lord Byron 124

Ghalib 125

Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin 126

PERSPECTIVES: The National Poet 128 Nguyen Du 129

Anna Letitia Barbauld 130

Adam Mickiewicz 131

Dionysios Solomos 132

Walt Whitman 132

PERSPECTIVES: On the Colonial Frontier 135 Mikhail Lermontov and Domingo Faustino Sarmiento 136

Charles A. Eastman (Ohiyesa) 140

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Hawaiian Songs 141

José Rizal 141

The Romantic Fantastic 142

Samuel Taylor Coleridge 143

Ludwig Tieck 145

Honoré de Balzac 146

Edgar Allan Poe 148

Gustave Flaubert 149

PERSPECTIVES: Occidentalism—Europe Through Foreign Eyes 152

Elizabeth Barrett Browning 155

Charles Baudelaire 157

Leo Tolstoy 160

Fyodor Dostoevsky 162 RESONANCES: Friedrich Nietzsche and Ishikawa Takuboku 165

Other Americas 166

Hathali Nez and Washington Matthews 166

Herman Melville 168

Frederick Douglass 171

Harriet Jacobs 173

Emily Dickinson 175

Joaquim María Machado de Assis 178

Charlotte Perkins Gilman 180

Rubén Darío 181

Henrik Ibsen 182

Higuchi Ichiyo 185

Anton Chekhov 185

Rabindranath Tagore 187

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VOLUME F: The Twentieth Century

PERSPECTIVES: The Art of the Manifesto 190 Filippo Tommaso Marinetti 191

Tristan Tzara 192

André Breton 194

Mina Loy 195

Yokomitsu Riichi 197

Oswald de Andrade 198

André Breton, Leon Trotsky, and Diego Rivera 199

Joseph Conrad 200

Premchand 202

Lu Xun 205

James Joyce 207

Virginia Woolf 208

Akutagawa Ryunosuke 211

PERSPECTIVES: Modernist Memory 213 T. S. Eliot 213

Constantine Cavafy 214

Claude McKay 215

Federico García Lorca 216

Carlos Drummond de Andrade 216

Emile Habiby 217

Octavio Paz 219

Franz Kafka 220

Anna Akhmatova 223 RESONANCE: Osip Mandelstam 224

William Butler Yeats 225

PERSPECTIVES: Poetry About Poetry 226 Eugenio Montale 228

Fernando Pessoa 229

Pablo Neruda 230

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Wallace Stevens 231

Nazim Hikmet 232

Bei Dao 232

Bertolt Brecht 233

PERSPECTIVES: Echoes of War 237

Samuel Beckett 243

PERSPECTIVES: Cosmopolitan Exiles 246 César Vallejo 247

Vladimir Nabokov 248

Czeslaw Milosz 249

V. S. Naipaul 250

Adonis (Ali Ahmad Sa’id) 252

Jorge Luis Borges 252 RESONANCE: Gabriel García Márquez 255

Naguib Mahfouz 255

PERSPECTIVES: The 1001 Nights in the Twentieth Century 258 Güneli Gün 259

John Barth 259

Italo Calvino 259

Assia Djebar 260

Léopold Sédar Senghor 261

Aimé Césaire 264

James Baldwin 268

Gerald Vizenor 269

PERSPECTIVES: Indigenous Cultures in the Twentieth Century 271

Zhang Ailing (Eileen Chang) 275

Mahasweta Devi 276

PERSPECTIVES: Gendered Spaces 277

Chinua Achebe 281

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Wole Soyinka 284

PERSPECTIVES: Postcolonial Conditions 286 Mahmoud Darwish and Faiz Ahmad Faiz 286

Reza Baraheni 289

Farough Faroghzad 289

Derek Walcott 290

Salman Rushdie 291

PERSPECTIVES: Literature, Technology, and Media 291

Index 301

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General Editors’ Preface

The tremendous wealth of world literature available today is also a kind of embar- rassment of riches: How can we best present this great range of works in class? We’ve designed the second edition of The Longman Anthology of World Literature with this issue constantly in mind, giving teachable groupings and illuminating juxtapo- sitions throughout the Anthology and framing compelling texts with introductions and notes that give the context needed for an informed and pleasurable reading. Yet finally it comes down to individual class sessions and the detailed discussion of par- ticular works, and here is where this teaching companion comes in. In this book we suggest fruitful modes of approach, presenting ways to engage students, to foster un- derstanding, and to stimulate lively discussion of all our major texts and groupings of works.

We have set three ambitious goals for ourselves in creating this teaching com- panion. First, it has been written directly by the editors responsible for each sec- tion of the Anthology—the use of the Anthology in class isn’t some afterthought; it’s an integral part of our own work on the project. In seeking people to join us on the editorial board, we looked for coeditors who are dynamic and experienced teachers as well as deeply knowledgeable scholars and clear, lively writers. We’ve seen this teaching companion as the opportunity to share directly with you our best ideas on how to bring these texts alive in class.

To this end, our second goal has been to discuss every major author or com- bination of authors in the Anthology, opening up possible lines of approach, indi- cating good connections that can be made, and sketching important trends in scholarly debate. Third, we’ve tried to be suggestive rather than prescriptive, and we hope to inform instructors who are new to some of this material while also in- triguing people interested in a fresh take on familiar works. This volume gives us a chance to expand on the reasons behind our choices and to indicate ways that we have found these materials to work best during many years of teaching them.

Teaching with and across Groupings

A distinctive feature of our Anthology is the grouping of works in Perspectives sec- tion and as Resonances between texts. Together, these groupings are intended both to set works in cultural context and to link them across time and space. These groupings have a strategic pedagogical function as well. We have observed that in other anthologies, brief author listings rarely seem to get taught. Added with the laudable goal of increasing an anthology’s range and inclusiveness, the new materials

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too often get lost in the shuffle. Our groupings of works cluster shorter selections in ways that make them more likely to be taught, creating a critical mass of read- ings around a compelling literary or social issue and economically providing cul- tural context for the major works around them.

We expect that our contextual groupings will be used variously by different people. A Perspectives section can be taught entirely as a freestanding unit, or it can share a week with an important work or major author.

While entire Perspectives sections can be assigned, individual works within them can also be paired with works elsewhere. For example, in Volume E, Walt Whitman can either be taught with the other writers next to him in “Perspectives: The National Poet” or he can be assigned instead with Emily Dickinson and Rubén Darío later in the volume. Darío’s poem “Walt Whitman,” indeed, makes a direct link to work from, whether the two poets are assigned together or in dif- ferent weeks.

Particularly in the case of our fuller Perspectives sections, like the Enlightenment-era section on “Liberty and Libertines” (Volume D), it can be pro- ductive to assign different readings to different members of the class, with students working in teams to explore contrasting viewpoints; these can then be debated in class or presented as written projects. Students interested in exploring Perspectives section issues in greater depth should be alerted to the extensive bibliographies at the end of each volume; Perspectives sections, as well as individual author listings, have bibliographies that can lead students further into the primary sources.

Obviously, the various Perspectives sections and the juxtapositions of works and Resonances are only a few of the many groupings that could be created. We wouldn’t want any student to come away from the course with the misconception that these were the only issues that mattered in the period or culture in question. Rather, these groupings should be seen as exemplary of the sorts of literary and cul- tural debate that were current in a region or an era. Students can be encouraged— individually or in small groups—to research and develop their own perspectival clusters of materials, using as a point of departure some text or some issue that has particularly intrigued them. They could then present their own Perspectives sec- tion to the class as a whole or write it up and analyze it as a term project.

On a larger scale, we have followed custom in dividing the Anthology accord- ing to the broad period divisions that have become ubiquitous in modern literary study, with further division by region in the first three volumes, but there is no rea- son that a survey course should treat these divisions as sacrosanct. Even within a generally chronological presentation, it can be interesting to have some cross- cutting sessions or weeks, such as an overview of the sonnet, or a section on travel writing, or one on short prose narratives. Such groupings can bring together ma- terial from two, three, or more sections and even volumes of the Anthology. Courses organized by genre or by theme will mine the Anthology for entirely dif- ferent groupings suited to individual needs. We hope and expect that teachers and students alike will use our tables of contents as a starting point for ongoing explo- rations and reconfigurations of their own.

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Reading the Illustrations

Our hundred black-and-white illustrations and fifty color images are very much conceived as part of the Anthology’s teachable material, and the extensive captions for the color images and for many of the black-and-white ones are intended to sig- nal effective avenues of approach to them. Many of the images work directly with particular authors or works, but valuable points can be made with images of more general import, including our six cover illustrations. These are teachable images, not mere window dressing, and a detailed caption for each appears at the end of the list of illustrations that follows each volume’s table of contents.

Inter-arts comparisons have to be made with care, respecting the differences embodied in different media—differences often of patronage and audience as well as of materials and method. We wouldn’t want such comparisons to create sim- plistic images of “The Medieval Mind” or “Oriental Art.” Yet to speak of a culture at all is to recognize that its participants share (and may struggle against) com- monalities of history and of worldview, and the varied artistic productions of a given region or era will often show certain family resemblances. Visual art, archi- tecture, and music can be particularly useful in a world literature classroom be- cause they don’t have to be experienced in translation (except in the significant but more limited translation of reproduction). Important aesthetic values have often been shared by poets and painters (who at times have even been one and the same person), and these values and strategies can often be seen most directly and vividly in visual arts, while they may be somewhat muted in translation. As we know, too, our students are growing up in a culture that is more visual than verbal, and see- ing can help them to then read. For both these reasons, starting from visual art can help sensitize students to what to look for in the literary works of the region and period.

Reading and Listening

An important addition to our Anthology’s resources is our pair of audio CDs, which can show students how literature has played out in the larger aural culture of its times. As with painting, music can illustrate aspects of a culture’s aesthetics, from reconstructed ancient Egyptian and Greek music, to medieval Japanese court music, to Bach and Handel in the Enlightenment and Jelly Roll Morton and Igor Stravinsky in the twentieth century. Equally, our CDs allow students to hear po- etry read—or sung—aloud, in the original and in translation, giving direct access to the sounds of a variety of the languages included in the Anthology and restoring the aural dimension that great poetry has always had. Our twentieth-century selections include several major poets reading their own work, including T. S. Eliot, Anna Akhmatova, and Pablo Neruda, as well as noted performers and poets reading ear- lier poetry: Dylan Thomas declaiming a speech by Milton’s Satan with evident rel- ish, Adrienne Rich reading a haunting poem by the great Urdu poet Ghalib. A number of our selections also show the kinds of cross-cultural connections found

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in many of our Anthology texts, as with a gorgeous early Arab Christian hymn of the Byzantine era on the first CD and a Spanish Jewish lullaby recorded in Eastern Europe on the second CD.

Teaching with the Web

Our course Website is designed to enhance teaching in a variety of ways. It pro- vides an interactive timeline, practice quizzes for major authors and periods, and annotated links for our major authors and groupings, giving students guidance in further exploration and research for projects and term papers. We include a glos- sary of literary and cultural terms and also an innovative audio glossary. This al- lows students to click on each author’s name, and each name or term included in the pronunciation guides at the end of many of our introductions, so as to hear directly how each should be pronounced. Finally, we have a section of original texts and variant translations for each of the Anthology’s six volumes. Each section includes several poems printed in the original and in two or three translations, giv- ing an opportunity to explore the ways meaning shifts in translation. Finally, we have a supplementary component to the new Translations feature in the second edition. Each original text in these sections is also read aloud in a connected audio file, so that students can hear the original as they look at it in print and in trans- lation. These selections can be downloaded for use in class or given as assignments for students to experience on their own.

Typo Alert!

As you and your students read the Anthology, we would be very grateful if you let us know of any typos you find in the Anthology (or indeed, in this volume too). Every page has been proofread with care, and we’ve fixed all the typos we’ve found, even though a few of them had a weird logic of their own. The enraged Achilles, for ex- ample, disputing Agamemnon’s claim on his prize at the start of the Iliad, swears “a great oath,” which in our page proofs became “a great bath”—an oddly appropriate highlighting of the childishness within his heroism, which we corrected with some regret. Some typos are no doubt still hiding in the 6,500 pages of the Anthology and in this companion volume as well. So please let us know of any lingering errors you encounter and also send us broader ideas and suggestions of all sorts.

An Evolving Collaboration

The scope and definition of world literature has been changing rapidly in recent years, and the second edition of The Longman Anthology has provided us with an opportunity to keep pace with these changes. We’ve designed the Anthology to be open and flexible in form, and it is sure to be used in a variety of ways: in courses with a historical, or a generic, or a thematic basis; in survey courses using the full Anthology and in upper-level courses using only one of its volumes; in quarter-

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system as well as semester-based schools; in community colleges, in liberal arts col- leges, and in universities. We have posted onto our course Website selected syllabi and other teaching materials reflecting actual practice as the Anthology is used in class. We invite contributions for this purpose. The print Anthology itself reflects a collaboration between the editorial board and the many reviewers we thank in our Acknowledgments; our reviewers often went far beyond the call of duty in helping us select texts and find the best ways to present them. The publication of the sec- ond edition of the Anthology is only the next stage in this ongoing collaboration with everyone who is using it in class and sharing their experiences with the rest of us who are working on and with the book.

Finally, we also welcome suggestions for continuing improvements to the Anthology itself. Our Anthology is meant as a resource for teachers in an evolving and growing field, and with your help future editions will allow the Anthology to continue to reflect these changes. So we would be delighted to hear what things you would most like to see added in the future and to learn what existing con- junctions and combinations work best for you, what others might better be rethought. We can be reached by e-mail at the addresses below or by letter at the Department of English and Comparative Literature, 602 Philosophy Hall, Columbia University, New York, NY 10027 (David Damrosch) and the Department of Literature, American University, 4400 Massachusetts Ave. NW, Washington, DC 20016-8047 (David L. Pike).

Our coeditors and we hope that the entries in this teaching companion will assist you in teaching our Anthology. We hope too that you’ll find The Longman Anthology of World Literature as enjoyable to use as it has been to create, and we look forward to hearing from you as you work with it in the coming years.

—David Damrosch, dnd2@columbia.edu

—David L. Pike, dpike18@gmail.com

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MyLiteratureLab offers the best multimedia resources for literature. The site includes detailed online lectures, interactive readings, a glossary of lit- erary and critical terms, extensive help with the writing and research processes, avoiding plagiarism tutorials, and Exchange (Longman’s online peer and instructor review program).

Every Longman Lecture in MyLiteratureLab includes thoughtful ques- tions to prompt discussion and/or to become a topic for an essay. As you have probably already found, the Guide to MyLiterature Lab is in the front of this supplement for your convenience.

MyLiteratureLab Browser Tune-up

To use all of the features of MyLiteratureLab, you will need to install the following plug-ins: Shockwave and Adobe Acrobat Reader. Use the Browser Tune-up to check if you have all of these plug-ins installed and to install them if you do not.

Register to use MyLiteratureLab Resources in your WebCT Course

You will need the access code that is beneath the pull tab of your access code card that either came with your purchase of a new textbook or that you pur- chased separately. (If you do not have an access code you can purchase ac- cess online through the MyLiteratureLab site in your WebCT link.) You only have to register once. Once you have created your own, unique log-in name and password, you will use them each time you link to MyLiteratureLab resources from your course. Whenever you link to the

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Guide to

http://www.myliteraturelab.com

You may check the Instructor Resources section of MyLiteratureLab for a more extensive Faculty Teaching Guide.

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MyLiteratureLab resources from your course for the first time during an on- line session, you will be asked for your log in name and password. Type the name and password that you created during registration. You will not be asked again for your log-in name and password to access other MyLiteratureLab resources. If you close your Internet browser, end your on- line session, or turn off your computer, you may have to enter them again.

Longman Lectures

Experience how listening to literature being read can bring it to life! Listen to these richly illustrated concise ten-minute audio “lectures” narrated by Longman’s textbook authors to help you connect with authors and works. Each lecture is divided into three segments, and each segment concludes with Questions for Thinking and Writing to help you analyze and reflect on what you have heard.

Interactive Readings

Read and explicate stories, poems, and scenes from plays through a series of interactive questions that guide you in the study of the literary elements. Select a Literary Element to view its Interactive Reading and Questions for Thinking and Writing.

Introduction

Welcome, instructors, to MyLiteratureLab. This brief guide highlights the main benefits and features of MyLiteratureLab. In this guide you will find an overview of the three main sections.

1. The Literary Elements: Testing Your Knowledge 2. Where Literature Comes to Life: The Longman Lectures 3. Writing and Research: Tools and Techniques

For more extensive information on these portions of MyLiteratureLab, in- cluding detailed descriptions of each of the Longman Lectures and teach- ing tips for using it in your classroom, please see the Instructor Resources section.

The Literary Elements: Testing Your Knowledge

This section of the site features Diagnostics (linked to the Glossary of Literary and Critical Terms) and Interactive Readings.

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Diagnostics

The Diagnostics, including multiple-choice and fill-in-the-blank questions, enable students to assess their understanding of literary theory and criti- cism by quizzing them on terms such as imagery, archetype, point of view, and soliloquy. Upon completing each diagnostic, students are forwarded to the Glossary of Literary and Critical Terms to fill any gaps in their knowledge.

Interactive Readings

The Interactive Readings section is designed to help students understand how to use literary elements to interpret works of literature. Each reading focuses on a particular literary element, such as word choice, tone and style, and character analysis. As students read a particular selection, key pas- sages are highlighted. When students click on the highlighted text, a box appears that contains explanations, analysis, and/or questions highlighting how the passage can be interpreted using the literary elements. These read- ings can be assigned as homework, and students may be required to submit their written responses to the questions.

Where Literature Comes to Life: The Longman Lectures

This section of MyLiteratureLab features a menu of nine-minute lectures. All of the Longman Lectures are given by Longman’s authors—critically ac- claimed writers, award-winning teachers, and performance poets. Longman’s “guest lecturers” discuss some of the most commonly taught lit- erary works and authors in depth. In the process, they encourage students to analyze stories, poems, and plays, and develop thoughtful essay ideas.

The lectures are richly illustrated with words and images to contextu- alize and enrich the content of each lecture. As you will hear, each lecture is divided into three parts—Reading, Interpreting, and Writing. Each part of each lecture is accompanied by a diverse selection of Critical Thinking and Writing Questions. Some questions provide feedback and suggestions for online research and essay development. Students’ answers to the ques- tions can be e-mailed to you or used to spark class discussion.

As a whole, the lectures are designed to complement in-class discussion of particular works and augment related assignments in your syllabus. Available to students around the clock, the three-part structure of the lec- tures encourages students to read and interpret works more thoughtfully and spark ideas for research and writing. The lectures may also be assigned as extra-credit work or be used as an emergency substitute instructor.

Below we discuss the primary purpose of each part of the lectures and provide examples.

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Part 1: Reading

Students often are reluctant readers. The first part of each lecture, Reading, sparks student interest through the lecturer’s interpretative reading. The reading of a key passage places the work within a context that appeals to stu- dents. Some readings are dramatic and performative; others provide analy- sis about how a work is structured. The lecturers’ varying approaches to their subject matter help reach students with different learning styles. At the same time, related visuals help students see the work while reading it. Here are a few examples of opening statements in Part 1 of the lectures.

• From Shakespeare’s sonnets lecture: In Shakespeare’s Sonnets (published in 1609 but probably written in the middle 1590s), love—whether for the fair youth or the dark lady—is only one of several themes. Some of these themes—for instance beauty and the tragic effect of time on beauty—are easily connected with love. Let’s glimpse a few of the themes by looking at the opening line of some of the sonnets.

• From the Flannery O’Connor “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” lecture: What if I told you about a writer who included in her works a youth who, in baptizing his mentally defective nephew, manages to drown him, or a woman with a wooden leg and a Ph.D. in philosophy who . . . is robbed of her wooden leg and stripped of her self-confident belief in nothing . . . ? If I then told you that this author is a devout Catholic, would you be astonished? If so, you are not yet familiar with the works of Flannery O’Connor.

• From the James Baldwin “Sonny’s Blues” lecture: From the opening scene . . . until the final scene in a darkened nightclub when Sonny, bathed in blue light, performs the magic of improvisational jazz on his piano, these two brothers move in and out of each others’ lives, attempting to communicate but most often failing.

Part 2: Interpreting

Many students lack confidence in their ability to analyze and interpret works of literature. Some students are impatient to find the “right” answer. Part 2 of each lecture provides provocative “keys” for understanding. The lecturers’ comments humanize both the work and its author. For example:

• From the Seamus Heaney “Digging” lecture: Not only is he [Heaney] honoring the work of his father and grandfather, he is using his own kind of digging—that is, writing poetry—to show us the worth of the work they did. And in this respect, he honors and carries on their tradition—but with a different tool. As such, it’s a poem about writing poetry—with digging as its metaphor.

• From the James Joyce “Araby” lecture: Notice how the bright images of his love, Mangan’s sister, always appear out of the dreary background that sur-

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rounds them. Compare the words and phrases that are used to describe Mangan’s sister and the boy’s feelings about her with the language that de- scribes his neighborhood or his everyday activities. Let the words open your senses—visualize and feel the bright, warm image of Mangan’s sister as her dress swings and the soft rope of her hair tosses from side to side and contrast it with the dark, cold image of the short days of winter and the acrid smell of ashpits and horse stables in the surrounding neighborhood.

• From the Billy Collins “The Names” lecture: A typical Collins poem be- gins in the morning. The poet walks around his empty house, thinks about last night’s supper or tonight’s bottle of wine, puts on some jazz, goes out and runs a few errands or takes a train into the city, comes home, looks out the win- dow, and makes a poem. To say that Collins writes a low-pressure kind of po- etry is like observing that a flat tire could stand a little air. It’s the poetic equivalent of an episode of Seinfeld, “the show about nothing.” But . . . I sympathize. Indeed, I’m a little envious. Collins’s saving grace is the wit that laces his observations of everyday matters. Poets, he says, “have enough to do / complaining about the price of tobacco, // passing the dripping ladle, / and singing songs to a bird in a cage. // We are busy doing nothing. . . .”

• From the Hawthorne “Young Goodman Brown” lecture: Let’s consider two specific ways to better understand and enjoy this famous story. First, can you sum up its theme—what’s its central message? In some stories, the theme is easy to find. You can just underline its general statements, those that appear to sum up some large truth. In a fable, the theme is often stated in a moral at the end, such as: “Be careful in choosing your friends.” In Stephen Crane’s story of a shipwreck, “The Open Boat,” Crane tells us, among other things, that “it occurs to a man that Nature does not regard him as important.” But Hawthorne’s story is trickier. If you underline its general statements and ex- pect one of them to be its theme, you’ll miss the whole point of the story. See paragraph 65: “Evil is the nature of mankind.” Does Hawthorne believe that? Do you? Those are the words of the Devil, always a bad guy to believe. No, after you finish reading the story, especially pondering its closing paragraph, you can sum its theme much better in your own words.

Part 3: Writing In Part 3, Writing, the lectures further the discussions in Part 2 and help students form their own interpretations. The historical and cultural back- drop of the times, the writer’s life experiences, and a close reading of the text all help students make connections. The lectures are peppered with ideas that students might pursue to write a critical essay or even a research paper. Here are a few examples:

• From the Seamus Heaney “Digging” lecture: While both use natural im- agery, Yeats writes of nature in idealized terms that seem to transcend everyday

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life. Images like “Dropping the veils of morning to where the cricket sings” and “midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow” remove us from the gritty world of toil. For Heaney, nature is anything but an escape. It is the here and now substance of everyday living—the harsh “rasping” of the spade—the “strain- ing rump”—and the “heaving of sods.” No pun intended on the title “Digging,” but Heaney’s poetry is much earthier and grounded than that of Yeats. And much of this attitude toward nature can be attributed to his own background.

• From the Baldwin “Sonny’s Blues” lecture: Though the setting in Harlem in the mid twentieth century is in many ways crucial to an understanding of the problems faced by these two African American brothers, their story is uni- versal. Therefore, an essay on the theme or themes in “Sonny’s Blues” can be especially informative. Ask yourself what major ideas Baldwin is suggesting in the story. One theme, the theme of learning wisdom through suffering, is as old as literature, and Baldwin shows us through the searching and suffering of the two brothers that literature can share with us the wisdom of the ages, that we can learn about the agony and the beauty and the creativity within our- selves by vicariously sharing theirs.

• From the Kate Chopin “The Story of an Hour” lecture: Kate Chopin published several of her stories in the magazines of her time. However, Vogue and The Century initially refused to publish “The Story of an Hour.” The Century regarded the story as “immoral” and Vogue only published it after Chopin’s Bayou Folk became a success. Discuss “The Story of an Hour” in terms of the artistic, moral, and intellectual sensibilities of Chopin’s time. Consider why Chopin’s story was branded as “immoral” and why literary per- ceptions have changed over the years.

• From the Sophocles Oedipus the King lecture: Over time, this play has drawn many conflicting interpretations. Here are a few long-debated questions for you to think about. Is Oedipus a helpless, passive tool of the gods? Who is responsible for his terrible downfall? Does he himself bring about his own mis- fortune? Is he an innocent victim? If the downfall of a person of high estate (as Aristotle thought tragedies generally show) is due to a tragic flaw or weak- ness in the person’s character, does Oedipus have any tragic flaw? If he does, how would you define it? Consider his speeches, his acts, his treatment of oth- ers. Does Oedipus seem justified in afflicting himself with blindness? Does his punishment fit, or fail to fit, his supposed crime?

Critical Thinking and Writing by Lecture Each part of the three-part lectures is accompanied by Questions for Thinking and Writing. These questions help reinforce the content given in the lecture and provide helpful suggestions for research and writing. Students can respond to the questions directly on screen and have their re- sponses e-mailed to you.

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Writing and Research: Tools and Techniques

From formulating an original idea to citing sources, this section of MyLiteratureLab offers students step-by-step guidance for writing powerful critical essays and research papers. This section of the site can reinforce and augment the writing coverage in your text. Below is a brief description of what each section covers.

Overview