Poetry

Discussion Anthology:

• W.H. Auden: "Musee des Beaux Arts"
• Elizabeth Bishop: "One Art"
• Philip Larkin: "This Be the Verse"
• E.A. Robinson: "Richard Cory" 
• Stevie Smith: "Not Waving but Drowning"
• Edmund Spenser: "My love is like to ice"
• William Carlos Williams: "This Is Just to Say"
• William Wordsworth: "The Solitary Reaper"; "A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal"

and

• Gerard Manley Hopkins: "Spring and Fall"

(You may find profiles of poets and other useful ancillary materials at websites maintained by The Academy of American Poets, The British Council, The Poetry Archive, and The Poetry Foundation)

Writer's Anthology:

• John Agard, "Listen Mr. Oxford don" (Watch & listen to Agard perform his poem)
• Elizabeth Bishop: "Filling Station"
• Jean Binta Breeze: "ordinary mawning"
• Gwendolyn Brooks: "a song in the front yard"
• Sharon Olds: "The Death of Marilyn Monroe"
• Adrienne Rich, "Aunt Jennifer's Tigers"
• Derek Walcott, from "The Schooner Flight" (for the purposes of this exercise, you may treat the first two stanzas of Section I, "Adios, Carenage," as a self-contained poem)
• Richard Wilbur, "Praise in Summer"

Other Materials

Interpretation:

• Steven Mailloux, "Interpretation"
• Peter Barry, "Reading the Lines"

Poetry:

• Helen Vendler: "The Play of Language: Implication" and "Constructing a Self"; "Describing Poems"
• Michael Meyer: Images; Figures of Speech; Symbol, Allegory, and Irony
  
  
• Helen Vendler, "Appendix 1: On Prosody"
• Supplementary/Complementary Handouts:
  • Guide to Prosody
  • A Short Glossary of Poetic Forms
  • How to Approach a Poem
• A case study: Alfred Corn, "Verse Forms (The sonnet)"

Fiction:

• Jeremy Hawthorn, "Analyzing Fiction"

Non-Fiction/Critical Essays:

• Making the Most of Your Reading (handout)
• Gerald Graff, Cathy Birkenstein, and Russell Durst. "'As a Result': Connecting the Parts" and "'But Don't Get Me Wrong': The Fine Art of Metacommentary" from They Say / I Say: The Moves That Matter in Academic Writing (with Readings), 2d ed.  New York: Norton, 2012.
• Other excerpts from Gerald Graff & Cathy Birkenstein, They Say / I Say, 2d ed. New York: Norton, 2010.
  

Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness:

Required Reading:

• Andrew Michael Roberts.  "Epistemology, Modernity, and Masculinity: 'Heart of Darkness.'"  Conrad and Masculinity.  New York: St. Martin's P, 2000.
  

And for your general edification, a collection of selected online resources:

• General:
  • Joseph Conrad Society
    
    
• British Colonialism and Imperialism:
• "The British Empire" (David Cody, The Victorian Web, National U of Singapore): see esp. "The British Empire: An Introduction"
• Two units from W.W. Norton's Topics Online (an online companion to the Norton Anthology of English Literature): "Victorian Imperialism" and "From Imperialism to Postcolonialism: Perspectives on the British Empire." Be sure to check out the various pull-down menus in the sidebars.
  
  
• Belgian Imperialism in the Congo:
  • Sadly,the exhaustive collections of texts from the early 20th-century Anti-Imperialist movement that Jim Zwick of Syracuse University assembled into one indispensible website, Anti-Imperialism in the United States, 1898-1935 (alternate description) vanished with his tragically untimely death in 2008. Among the collections housed there was Reforming the Heart of Darkness: The Congo Reform Movement in England and the United States, which included, among other documents, Conrad's response to Roger Casement's invitation to participate in the protest movement against abuses in the Congo. Some of these resources show up in various critical editions of Heart of Darkness, but others don't--so one fervently hopes that Zwick's heirs, colleagues, or graduate students will find a way to revive his important legacy. Michael Patrick Cullinane's Liberty and Anti-Imperialism is a fine start.
  • "Stereoviews of the Congo Free State and the Belgian Congo" (Jim Zwick, Stereoscopic Visions of War and Empire): early 20th-century photographs of colonial atrocities, published by the Congo Reform Association (defunct; see above)
    
  • Jean Muteba Rahier, "The Ghost of Leopold II: The Belgian Royal Museum of Central Africa and Its Dusty Colonialist Exhibition" (Research in African Literatures 34:1 [Spring 2003]--HSU users only)
    • A 2005 exhibit at the Royal Museum, "Memory of Congo" (the exhibit site is sometimes broken--but see also articles from the BBC, the New York Times, and the Times of London)
      
      
• Heart of Darkness in context: some related contemporary texts:
• Rudyard Kipling, "The White Man's Burden" (1899) (alternate site).
  • Another of Jim Zwick's first-rate websites, "The White Man's Burden' and Its Critics" (part of Anti-Imperialism in the United States, 1898-1935) is also defunct (see above)--but for additional context on Kipling, I highly recommend Patrick Brantlinger's essay "Kipling's 'The White Man's Burden' and Its Afterlives" (English Literature in Transition 50:2 [2007]; HSU users only) and/or Erin L. Murphy's "Women's Anti-Imperialism, 'The White Man's Burden,' and the Philippine-American War." See also:
  • "The White Man's Burden" and American Anti-Imperialist League (Wikipedia)
  • Contextualizing Anti-Imperialism 1898-1905 and Documents of the American Anti-Imperialist League (Michael Patrick Cullinane, Liberty and American Anti-Imperialism)
  • Mark Twain, "To the Person Sitting In Darkness"
    • Prologue by Kurt Jacobsen
    • Text of the essay
    • Wikipedia entry
• Mark Twain, King Leopold's Soliloquy: A Defense of His Congo Rule (1905). The copy of this text that used to reside at Jim Zwick's Mark Twain's Anti-Imperialist Writings: A Guide to Online Resources is gone (see above), but a PDF facsimile of the original is available at the American Museum of Natural History's useful "Congo Expedition: 1909-1915" site
• H. Rider Haggard, She (1885) and King Solomon's Mines (1885) (alternate edition): two "pulp" adventure novels set in Africa, aimed at adolescent boys
• Edgar Rice Burroughs, Tarzan of the Apes (1912) (Google Books)
  
  
• Heart of Darkness in context: some related modern-day texts:
  • Greg Grandin, "The Right Quagmire: Searching History for an Imperial Alibi" (Harper's Magazine, December 2004)
  • Geoffrey Galt Harpham, "The Depths of the Heights: Reading Conrad with America's Soldiers" (War, Literature, and the Arts: International Journal of the Humanities 20.1 [2009])
    
    
• Other Resources (Africa and Heart of Darkness)
  • "Africa and Africans in Conrad's Heart of Darkness" (Candice Bradley, Lawrence U) 
  • Excerpt from Chinua Achebe and Robert Lyons's book, Another Africa (Salon November 1998) (the original version of this article, richly illustrated with photos from the book, has been deleted)
  • "River of Life: Congo Odyssey" (NPR): multimedia website for the Fall 2010 radio series reported by Ofeibea Quist-Arcton (start by clicking "View Introduction" in the upper lefthand corner; then move along to the "History and Heritage" tab in the righthand column and click "Read the Story" when that section appears in the middle panel)
    
    
• Other Resources (History Repeats Itself Department):
  • Patrice Lumumba:
    • Wikipedia entry
    • Independence Cha-Cha: The Story of Patrice Lumumba (YouTube): Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3
  • Human Rights Watch, "The Curse of Gold" (surprise, surprise multinationals go after Congolese natural resources; human rights atrocities and other horrors ensue)
    • An introduction to HRW's exposé and a related 60 Minutes report
  • Françoise Vergès, "Xenophobia and the Civilizing Mission" (OpenDemocracy 13 May 2011)