9-1 Literary Texts—Literary Elements and the Short Story
Short Stories
§ “The Gift of the Magi” (O. Henry) (E)
§ “The Overcoat” (Nikolai Gogol) (EA)
§ “The Most Dangerous Game” (Richard Connell)
§ “The Kitchen Boy” (Alaa Al Aswany)
§ “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” (James Thurber) (EA)
§ “The Cask of Amontillado” (Edgar Allan Poe) (EA)
§ “The Black Cat” (Edgar Allan Poe) (EA)
§ “The Tell-Tale Heart” (Edgar Allan Poe) (EA)
§ “The Scarlet Ibis” (James Hurst)
§ “Everyday Use” (Alice Walker) (EA)
§ “The Minister’s Black Veil” (Nathaniel Hawthorne) (EA)
§ “How Much Land Does a Man Need?” (Leo Tolstoy)
§ Drinking Coffee Elsewhere: Stories// (ZZ Packer)
Informational Texts
None for this unit
Art, Music, and Media
Prompt: How do artists create visual narratives in photography and painting?
Art
§ Michelangelo, The Creation of Adam, Sistine Chapel (1482)
§ Sultan Muhammad, From a Khamsa of Nizami (1539-43)
§ Jacob Lawrence, On The Way (1990)
§ Emanuel Leutze, //Washington Crossing The Delaware (1851)
§ Pablo Picasso, Young Acrobat on a Ball (1905)
§ Tina Barney, Marina’s Room (1987)
§ Roy DeCarava, Untitled (1950)
Media
§ Brooklyn Bridge (documentary film, Ken Burns, director)
§ BMW short films (e.g., “Chosen,” Ang Lee, director)
9-2 Literary Texts—The Novel–Honor
Novels
Recommended
§ To Kill A Mockingbird (Harper Lee)
Alternate Selections
§ The Killer Angels (Michael Shaara) (E)
§ All Quiet on the Western Front (Erich Maria Remarque)
§ The Color Purple (Alice Walker) (IB)
§ Of Mice and Men (John Steinbeck) (EA)
§ Black Boy (Richard Wright)
Informational Texts
Additional Resources
§ Famous American Trials: “The Scottsboro Boys” Trials (1931-37) (University of Missouri-Kansas School of Law) (Note: This website contains primary and secondary source accounts of “The Scottsboro Boys” trial.)
Art, Music, and Media
Art (Photographs)
§ Dorothea Lange, selected photographs taken for the Farm Security Administration during the Great Depression
§ “America from the Great Depression to World War II: Photographs from the FSA-OWI, 1935-1945” (Library of Congress)
Media
§ To Kill A Mockingbird (1962) (Robert Mulligan, director)
9-3 Literary Texts—Poetry–Beauty
Poems
- “Ozymandias” (Percy Bysshe Shelley) (E)
- “The Raven” (Edgar Allan Poe) (E)
- “Sonnet 73” (William Shakespeare) (E)
- “Ode on a Grecian Urn” (John Keats) (E)
- “We grow accustomed to the Dark” (Emily Dickinson) (E)
- “Mending Wall” (Robert Frost) (E)
- “Homecoming” (Julia Alvarez) (EA)
- “Love Is” (Nikki Giovanni) (EA)
- “A Lemon” (Pablo Neruda) (EA)
- “Saturday’s Child” (Countée Cullen) (EA)
- “Dream Variations” (Langston Hughes) (EA)
- “In Time of Silver Rain” (Langston Hughes) (EA)
- “I Ask My Mother to Sing” (Li-Young Lee)
- “The Gift” (Li-Young Lee)
- “Phantom Limbs” (Anne Michaels)
- Psalm 96 (King James Bible)
- “Lord Randall” (Anonymous)
- “Campo di Fiori” (Czeslaw Milosz)
- “The Darkling Thrush” (Thomas Hardy)
- “Poetry” (Marianne Moore)
- “Elegy Written in A Country Churchyard” (Thomas Gray)
- “The Sound of the Sea” (Henry Wadsworth Longfellow)
- “I wandered lonely as a cloud” (William Wordsworth)
- “The Lady of Shalott” (Alfred, Lord Tennyson)
- “The Underground” (Seamus Heaney)
- “In Trackless Woods” (Richard Wilbur)
- “The Reader” (Richard Wilbur)
- “Walking Distance” (Debra Allbery)
- “Morning Glory” (Naomi Shihab Nye)
- Haiku selections
Informational Texts
Informational Text
- Excerpts from Faulkner in the University: Class Conferences at the University of Virginia 1957-1958 (William Faulkner, Frederick L. Gwynn, ed.)
- Excerpts from “Crediting Poetry,” the Nobel Prize Lecture, 1995 (Seamus Heaney)
Art, Music, and Media
Prompt: “What similarities can we find between great poems and masterpieces of other kinds?”
Music
- Giacomo Puccini, “Un bel di, vedremo” (Madama Butterfly, 1904)
- Giacomo Puccini, “O mio babbino caro” (Gianni Schicchi, 1918)
Art and Architecture
- Leonardo da Vinci, Mona Lisa (1503-06)
- Sandro Botticelli, The Birth of Venus (1486)
- Vincent van Gogh, Starry Night (1889)
- Michelangelo, David (1504)
- The Parthenon (447-432 BC)
- Frank Lloyd Wright, Frederick C. Robie House (1909)
- Chartres Cathedral (begun around 1200)
9-4 Literary Texts—Drama–Fate
Plays
- Romeo and Juliet (William Shakespeare) (E)
- Antigone (Sophocles) (E)
- Oedipus the King (Sophocles)
Informational Texts
Informational Text
- Excerpt on comedy and tragedy from Poetics (Aristotle)
Art, Music, and Media
Prompt: What similarities exist between how playwrights and painters depict tragedy?
Art
- Pablo Picasso, (1903)
- Caravaggio, The Death of the Virgin (1604-1606)
- Artemesia Gentileschi, Judith and Her Maidservant with the Head of Holofernes (1625)
9-5 Literary Texts—Epic Poetry–Heroism
Stories
- Mythology (Edith Hamilton)
Poems
- The Odyssey (Homer) (E)
- The Aeneid (Virgil)
- “The Lotos-Eaters” (Alfred, Lord Tennyson)
- Excerpts from “Endymion” (John Keats) (EA)
- “The Song of Hiawatha” (Henry Wadsworth Longfellow) (EA)
- Excerpts from the Ramayana (attributed to the Hindu sage Valmiki)
Informational Texts
Informational Text
- Excerpts from The Gold of Troy (Robert Payne)
- Excerpts from Odysseus in America: Combat Trauma and the Trials of Homecoming (Jonathan Shay)
- Excerpts from Goodbye, Darkness: A Memoir of the Pacific War (William Manchester)
- Soldier’s Heart: Reading Literature Through Peace and War at West Point (Elizabeth D. Samet)
- Operation Homecoming: Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Home Front in the Words of U.S. Troops and Their Families (Andrew Carroll, ed.)
- The Hero with a Thousand Faces (Joseph Campbell)
Art, Music, and Media
Music
- Henry Purcell, Dido and Aeneas (1689)
9-6 Literary Texts—Literary Nonfiction—Reflection (The Memoir, The Essay, and The Speech)
Memoirs
- One Writer’s Beginnings (Eudora Welty)
- A Childhood: The Biography of a Place (Harry E. Crews)
- Running in the Family (Michael Ondaatje)
- “A Four Hundred Year Old Woman” (Bharati Mukherjee)
- In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens (Alice Walker) (EA)
- The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts (Maxine Hong Kingston)
- “Learning to Read and Write” (Frederick Douglass) (EA)
- Notes of a Native Son (James Baldwin)
- “A Sketch of the Past” (Virginia Woolf)
Essay
- Excerpts from Life on the Mississippi (Mark Twain) (EA)
Informational Texts
Speeches
- “Second Inaugural Address” (E) and/or “The Gettysburg Address” (Abraham Lincoln) (E)
- “Address at the March on Washington” and/or “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” (Martin Luther King, Jr.) (E)
- Nobel Prize in Literature Acceptance Speech 1949 (William Faulkner) (EA)
- “Sinews of Peace Address” (Winston Churchill) and/or “Brandenburg Gate Address” (Ronald Reagan)
Essays
- “Politics and the English Language” (George Orwell) (E)
- “The Lost Childhood” (Graham Greene)
- Excerpts from The 100 Most Influential Books Ever Written: The History of Thought from Ancient Times to Today (Martin Seymour-Smith)
- “Lear, Tolstoy, and The Fool” (George Orwell)
- “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” (Clement Greenberg)
- “Preface to Lyrical Ballads” (William Wordsworth)
Art, Music, and Media
Prompt: How is a self-portrait like a memoir?
Art
- Vincent van Gogh, Self-Portrait (1889)
- Jan van Eyck, Self-Portrait (1433)
- Albrecht Durer, Self-Portrait at the age of 13 (1484)
- Leonardo da Vinci, (c.1513)
- Rembrandt van Rijn, Self-Portrait at an early age (1628)
- Rembrandt van Rijn, Self-Portrait at the Age of 63 (1669)
- Artemisia Gentileschi, Self-Portrait as the Allegory of Painting (1630s)
- Jacob Lawrence, Self-Portrait (1977)
- Gustave Courbet, The Desperate Man (self-portrait) (1843)
- Louisa Matthíasdóttir, Self-Portrait with Dark Coat (No Date)
- Francis Bacon, Self-Portrait (1973)
- Balthus, //Le roi des chats// (The king of cats) (1935)
- Pablo Picasso, Self-Portrait (1907)
