Readings: Unit Ten

This is your final “readings” lesson. Throughout the course, you have studied Creative Nonfiction, Fictional Short Stories, Poetry, Drama, and the Novel, and have considered — through a variety of approaches to literary interpretation — several important thematic dichotomies you’ve used to examine the readings for this course.

For the thematic essays, you had to choose unique readings to write about. Now, you will choose from among them all to write one of three types of Final Essays.
Introduction to Literature Course Readings 

• “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold” (1966) by Gay Talese
• “Letter from Birmingham Jail” (1963) by Martin Luther King, Jr.
• “True Colors” (1999) by Malcolm Gladwell
• “The Chase” (1987) by Annie Dillard
• “My Misspent Youth” (2001) by Meghan Daum
• “My First Time” (2021) by “Alejandra Alumna”
• Kate Chopin, “The Story of an Hour” (1894)
• Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Adventure of the Speckled Band” (1897)
• O. Henry, “The Gift of the Magi” (1905)
• James Thurber, “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” (1939)
• Eudora Welty, “A Worn Path” (1941)
• Shirley Jackson, “The Lottery” (1948) 
• James Baldwin, “Sonny’s Blues” (1957)
• Langston Hughes, “Thank You, Ma’am” (1958)
• Grace Paley, “A Conversation with My Father” (1972)
• Alice Walker, “Everyday Use” (1973)
• Andy Weir, “The Egg” (2009)
• William Shakespeare, “Sonnet 29: When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes” (1609)
• John Donne, “For Whom the Bell Tolls” (1624)
• William Blake, “The Lamb” (1789)
• Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Ozymandias” (1818)
• Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, “A Psalm of Life” (1838)
• Emily Dickinson, “Hope Is The Thing With Feathers” (1891)
• Rudyard Kipling, “If—” (1910)
• Robert Frost, “The Road Not Taken” (1916)
• Edgar Albert Guest, “To a Young Man” (1916)
• Mitchell Parish (for a melody by Hoagy Carmichael), “Stardust” (1927)
• William Carlos Williams, “This Is Just To Say” (1934)
• Langston Hughes, “Let America Be America Again” (1936)
• W. H. Auden, “Song No. XXX” (aka “Funeral Blues” or “Stop All the Clocks”) (1938)
• Dr. Seuss, “Horton Hears a Who!” (1954)
• Bob Dylan, “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall” (1963)
• John Lennon, “In My Life” (1965)
• Paul Weller, “Down in the Tube Station at Midnight” (1978)
• 2Pac (Tupac Amaru Shakur), “Dear Mama” (1995)
• Billy Collins, “The Lanyard” (1998)
• Amanda Gorman, “The Hill We Climb” (2021)
• Oedipus Rex (429 BC) by Sophocles
• The Proposal (1890) by Anton Chekhov
• Pygmalion (1946) by George Bernard Shaw
• Casablanca (1942) by Julius J. Epstein, Philip G. Epstein, and Howard Koch
• “Everything is Fine” (The Good Place, 2016) by Mike Schur
• Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen (1813)
• To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (1960)
• The Princess Bride by William Goldman (1973)

This assignment will require proper citations of the primary and secondary sources. The primary source is the creative text you’re analyzing or interpreting. Secondary sources are experts’ commentary on those sources, which you might cite to help explain and prove your points. You will need to search for FOUR experts’ opinions on the texts you choose — and quote, paraphrase, or summarize their findings to explain and prove your points.

Many of you already covered these topics in English Composition I and II, however, as a refresher, below is a listing of articles to help you refer to and cite them properly.

• On Paragraphs
• Quoting, Paraphrasing, Summarizing
• Avoiding Plagiarism
• Safe Practices
• MLA Style
• MLA- In-text Citations
• MLA- Formatting Quotations
• MLA- Works Cited Page
• MLA- Citing Books
• MLA- Citing Electronic Sources
• How to Write Masterful Topic Sentences for Essays
• How to Use Transition Sentences for Smoother Writing
• All About Transition Words

Please remember to take notes on all the readings and videos in the course, and use your notes to take a minute to review all your hard work, daily.

We’ve reached the end of our journey through literature.

In this final unit, it’s time to show what you’ve learned along the way.