About the Book
This classic thematic anthology has long been hailed for its exceptionally rich collection of essays, memoirs, stories, poems, and plays, and for its ground-breaking inclusion of classic and contemporary images.
Renowned for the quality of its selections, The Conscious Reader presents over 150 readings representing a range of genres, a wide array of culturally diverse authors and fascinating topics, and a broad range of academic disciplines, including art, cultural studies, education, psychology, philosophy, politics, science, technology, and environmental studies. The works range from the classical—Plato's Crito—to the contemporary—Tony Kushner, Adam Gopnick, and Edwige Danticat. Brief, flexible apparatus includes an introduction to each theme and helpful headnotes, discussion questions, and writing assignments for each selection. Perhaps the most distinguishing feature of The Conscious Reader is its inclusion of a cutting-edge selection of fine art and photographs, designed to provoke discussion and analysis.
Table of Contents:
(* Marks New Selections).
Preface.
Art and Composition.
The Search for Self.
Notebook.
*Christopher Isherwood, Praetor Violet.
*James White, Influences.
Personal Reminiscences.
Annie Dillard, So This Was Adolescence.
Greg Graffin, Anarchy in the Tenth Grade.
Nancy Mairs, On Being a Cripple.
Jorge Luis Borges, Borges and I.
Alice Walker, Beauty: When the Other Dancer Is the Self.
Zora Neale Hurston, How It Feels To Be Colored Me.
Fiction.
Ernest Hemingway, Indian Camp.
Sandra Cisneros, Hips.
*Damon Marbut, Get Lost.
Poetry.
T. S. Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.
Dylan Thomas, The Force That through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower.
Denise Levertov, In Mind.
Anne Sexton, Her Kind.
Marianne Moore, The Mind Is an Enchanted Thing.
Theodore Roethke, The Waking.
Carl Dennis, The God Who Loves You.
Personal Relationships: Parents and Children.
Notebook.
*Aryeh Lev Stollman, Die Grosse Liebe.
*Ursula Melendi, All of Heaven for Love.
Personal Reminiscences.
Thomas Lynch, The Way We Are.
Judith Ortiz Cofer, Casa: A Partial Remembrance of a Puerto Rican Childhood.
Essays.
The Koran, Sura 12. Joseph.
Barbara Kingsolver, Somebody’s Baby.
Fiction.
Edwidge Danticat, selection from Breath, Eyes, Memory.
Patricia Highsmith, The Trouble with Mrs. Blynn, the Trouble with the World .
William Carlos Williams, The Use of Force.
Louise Erdrich, A Wedge of Shade.
*Elizabeth Spencer, Instrument of Destruction.
Poetry.
Bob Dylan, It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding).
Diane Di Prima, To My Father.
E. E. Cummings, My Father Moved Through Dooms of Love.
Sylvia Plath, Daddy.
Theodore Roethke, My Papa’s Waltz.
W. B. Yeats, Prayer for My Daughter.
Gwendolyn Brooks, Life for My Child Is Simple, and Is Good.
Personal Relationships: Men and Women.
Notebook.
*Leo Braudy, Arms and the Man.
Jared Diamond, What Are Men Good For?
Personal Reminiscences.
Andrew Sullivan, If Love Were All.
Essays.
Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.
D.H. Lawrence, Give Her a Pattern.
Virginia Woolf, The Angel in the House.
Margaret Atwood, Fiction: Happy Endings.
Fiction.
Kate Chopin, A Respectable Woman.
Carson Mccullers, The Sojourner.
Poetry.
William Shakespeare, When in Disgrace with Fortune and Men’s Eyes (Sonnet 29).
Me Not To the Marriage of True Minds (Sonnet 116).
William Blake, The Clod and the Pebble.
The Garden Of Love.
W.H. Auden, Lay Your Sleeping Head, My Love.
Rita Dove, Beauty and the Beast.
May Swenson, Women.
Gregory Corso, Marriage .
Mark Strand, The Marriage.
E. E. Cummings, I Like My Body When It Is With Your.
The Cultural Tradition: Popular Culture.
Notebook.
Gloria Steinem, Wonder Woman.
*Marina Warner, Fantasy’s Power and Peril.
Personal Reminiscences.
Bernice Reagon, Black Music in Our Hands.
*David Sedaris, The Women’s Open.
Essays.
Roger Ebert, Great Movies.
Dave Barry, The Internet.
*Rebecca Mead, You’ve Got Blog.
*Eric Schlosser, Fast Food Nation .
*Sarah Lyall, Germaine Greer’s `Cruelty TV’.
*David C. Barker, Talk Radio, Persuasion, and American Political Behavior.
Nick Hornby, I’m Like a Bird.
Randall Kennedy, The Protean N-Word.
Poetry.
Sonia Sanchez, A Poem for Ella Fitzgerald.
The Cultural Tradition: Art, the Artist, and Society.
Notebook.
V. S. Naipaul, Two Worlds: Nobel Lecture 2001.
Stephen King, selection from On Writing.
Ralph Ellison, On Becoming a Writer.
Richard Ford, Where Does Writing Come From?
David Bayles and Ted Orland, The Nature of the Problem.
Essays .
E.M. Forster, Art for Art’s Sake.
Margaret Atwood, Pornography .
E. L. Doctorow, Ultimate Discourse.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Playing Upon the Strings of Emptiness .
Aaron Copland, How We Listen To Music.
*David Dubal, The Essential Canon of Classical Music.
*Julian Johnson, Who Needs Classical Music?
*Cristian Amigo, Intervention #1: Musical Openings.
John Berger, Uses of Photography.
Fiction.
Willa Cather, The Sculptor’s Funeral .
Poetry.
Marianne Moore, Poetry.
Li-Young Lee, Persimmons .
*Cate Marvin, Ocean Is a Word in This Poem.
Walt Whitman, Poets to Come.
Science, the Environment, and the Future.
Notebook.
Henry David Thoreau, Why I Went Out Into the Woods.
Edward O. Wilson, A Letter to Thoreau.
Personal Reminiscences.
Freeman Dyson, Can Science Be Ethical?
Essays.
*Alan Tennant, Great Plains of the Arctic.
*Industrial Waste.
Gina Kolata, A Clone Is Born.
Matt Ridley, Free Will .
Niles Eldredge, Creationism Isn’t Science.
Sherry Turkle, Seeing Through Computers .
Andrew Grosso, The Individual in the New Age.
*Barbara Goldsmith, Obsessive Genius: The Inner World of Marie Curie.
*Shireen Lee, The New Girls Network: Women, Technology, and Feminism.
Poetry.
Walt Whitman, When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer.
Affonso Romano Desant’anna, Letter to the Dead.
Freedom and Human Dignity.
Notebook.
Martin Luther King, Jr., I Have a Dream.
*Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King.
Personal Reminiscences.
Arnie Kantrowitz, Growing Up Gay.
W. E. B. Du Bois, On Being Crazy.
Richard Wright, The Ethics of Living Jim Crow.
Essays.
Thomas Jefferson, The Declaration of Independence .
The Declaration of the Rights of Man.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Coffin Mott, Seneca Falls Convention.
Abraham Lincoln, The Gettysburg Address.
William Faulkner, Nobel Prize Award Speech.
George Orwell, The Principles of Newspeak.
Harriet Jacobs, The Women.
Chief Joseph, His Message of Surrender.
Chief Seattle, Speech on the Signing Of the Treaty of Port Elliott.
Plato, The Crito.
Mary Gordon, A Moral Choice.
Garry Wills, The Dramaturgy of Death.
Fiction.
William Faulkner, Dry September.
Poetry.
Reynolds Price, Tom, Dying of Aids.
Matthew Arnold, Dover Beach.
Mark Levine, About Face (A Poem Called “Dover Beach”).
*Anthony Hecht, Dover Bitch.
Globalism, Nationalism, and Cultural Identity.
Notebook.
*Adam Gopnik, The City and the Pillars.
*Anthony Shadid, Legacy of the Prophet .
*Elie Wiesel, Why I Am an American.
Personal Reminiscences.
Richard Rodriguez, Hispanic .
Essays.
*Howard Gardner, Leading Beyond the Nation-State .
*Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others.
Alice Kaplan, War on Trial .
James Baldwin, The Discovery of What It Means to Be an American.
Shelby Steele, On Being Black and Middle Class.
Carson Mccullers, Loneliness … An American Malady.
Niccolo Machiavelli, Of Cruelty and Clemency, and Whether It Is Better to Be Loved or Feared.
Thomas Merton, Love Can Be Kept Only By Being Given Away.
Poetry.
Wilfred Owen, Dulce et Decorum Est.
W. H. Auden, The Unknown Citizen .
*Ted Kooser, Prisoner from the Front.
*Katha Politt, Night Train.
Drama.
Tony Kushner, Homebody/Kabul.
*Ric Oquita, The History of Latin America.
*Ping Chong, L’histoire Chinoise .
The Examined Life: Education.
Notebook.
Malcolm X, A Homemade Education.
Anton Chekhov, The Bet.
Personal Reminiscences.
Edward Hoagland, A Last Look Around.
Helen Keller, Three Days to See.
Essays.
Bruno Bettelheim, The Child’s Need for Magic.
Reynolds Price, The Great Imagination Heist.
Noel Perrin, Science Fiction: Imaginary Worlds and Real-Life Questions .
*Joan E. Hartman, What We Did and Why We Did It.
Francine Prose, Bad Behavior.
Italo Calvino, Why Read the Classics?
Roland Barthes, The Death of the Author.
Lewis Thomas, Humanities and Science.
Kevin Finneran, The Merits of Meritocracy.
Catherine R. Stimpson, Learning To See the Miraculous.
*Geoffrey Nunberg, Teaching Students to Swim In the Online Sea.
Fiction.
Amy Tan, The Rules of the Game.
Poetry.
Langston Hughes, Theme for English B.
Ted Hughes, Hear It Again.
