Student Zone

Mini-Poe welcomes you to Contemporary American Lit!

Refer to the syllabus for more details on the following compiled texts.

The Truman College Reader of Contemporary American Literature: Course Texts Compiled by Professor Benjamin Ortiz

Acker, Kathy. Empire of the Senseless. NY: Grove Weidenfeld, 1988. 3-19, 20-21, 26-42.

Alexie, Sherman. “Jesus Christ’s Half-Brother Is Alive and Well on the Spokane Indian Reservation.” The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven. NY: HarperPerennial, 1994. 110-129.

Beck. “Loser.” Mellow Gold. DGC/Bong Load Records, 1994.

Benton, Thomas. “My Secret Stash of Books on Tape.” The Chronicle of Higher Education 7 Jan. 2005 www.chronicle.com.

Berman, Marshall. “Modernity—Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow.” All That Is Solid Melts Into Air. NY: Penguin, 1982. 16-17.

Brooks, Gwendolyn. “We Real Cool: The Pool Players. Seven at the Golden Shovel.” www.poets.org. 1960. 24 Jan. 2005.

BTK. Poetry excerpts. America’s Most Wanted web site. 11 Dec. 2004. 13 Dec. 2004 www.amw.com.

Burroughs, William S. Naked Lunch: The Restored Text. Ed. James Grauerholz and Barry Miles. NY: Grove, 2001. 199-205, 207-210, 211-212, 3-38, 43-47, 51-58, 62-62-83, 110-113, 121-129, 136-141, 169-174, 182-196.

-----. Prologue and “Glossary.” Junky. NY: Penguin, 1977. xi-xvi, 153-158.

Butler, Octavia Estelle. “Bloodchild” and “Positive Obsession.” Bloodchild and Other Stories. NY: Seven Stories Press, 1996. 3-32, 125-135.

Carver, Raymond. What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. NY: Vintage, 1989.

DeLillo, Don. White Noise. NY: Penguin, 1985. 3-27, 35-46, 59-60, 64-75, 99-105, 109-163, 231-236, 322-326.

Díaz, Junot. Drown. NY: Riverhead, 1996.

Eagleton, Terry. “Introduction: What Is Literature?” and “The Rise of English.” Literary Theory: An Introduction. Minneapolis: UM Press, 1983. 1-16, 17-53.

Ellis, Bret Easton. American Psycho. NY: Vintage, 1991. 3-25, 30-39, 52-63, 111-115, 126-136, 148-152, 214-221, 370-380, 394-399.

Ellison, Ralph. “Prologue” and “Chapter 1.” Invisible Man. NY: Vintage, 1995. 3-14, 15-33.

Espada, Martín. “Imagine the Angels of Bread.” Imagine the Angels of Bread. NY: WW Norton, 1997.

Gilb, Dagoberto. “The Border Trilogy by Cormac McCarthy.” Gritos. NY: Grove, 2003. 114-121.

-----. “Look on the Bright Side.” The Magic of Blood. NY: Grove, 1993. 3-16.

Ginsberg, Allen. Photos of Burroughs. Naked Lunch. Dir. David Cronenberg. Criterion DVD, 1991.

Gómez-Peña, Guillermo. “Freefalling Toward a Borderless Future,” “News from Aztlán Liberado,” “Chicanost: Radio Nuevo Orden,” and “Glossary of Borderismos.” The New World Border: Prophecies, Poems & Loqueras for the End of the Century. SF: City Lights, 1996. 1-3, 72-75, 76-78, 240-245.

-----. Pocha Nostra web site. www.pochanostra.com.

King, Stephen. “The Man in the Black Suit.” Everything’s Eventual: 14 Dark Tales. NY: Pocket Books, 2002. 35-68.

Leyner, Mark. “i was an infinitely hot and dense dot,” “enter the squirrel,” and About the Author. My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist. NY: Vintage, 1993. 3-8, 47-55, 152-154.

Livatino, Mel. "City Colleges' course offerings a 'disgrace'." Chicago Sun-Times c.1987.

Marcus, Greil. Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1990. 1-7.

-----. Prologue excerpt. Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock ’n’ Roll Music. 3rd. Rev. Ed. NY: Dutton, 1990. 4-7.

McInerney, Jay. “It’s Six A.M., Do You Know Where You Are?” The Paris Review Book of Heartbreak, Madness, Sex, Love, Betrayal, Outsiders, Intoxication, War, Whimsy, Horrors, God, Death, Dinner, Baseball, Travels, The Art of Writing, and Everything in the World Since 1953. Eds. Paris Review. NY: Picador, 2003. 345-352.

McLemee, Scott. “Literary Reading is Declining Faster Than Before, Arts Endowment’s New Report Says.” The Chronicle of Higher Education 9 July 2004 www.chronicle.com.

----. “What is Plagiarism?” The Chronicle of Higher Education 17 Dec. 2004: A9.

Myers, B.R. “A Bag of Tired Tricks.” The Atlantic Monthly May 2005: 115-120.

O’Connor, Flannery. “A Good Man Is Hard to Find.” The Complete Stories. NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1971. 117-133.

Ortiz, Benjamin. “Free-Verse Fight Club: Do-It-Yourself Arts Organizing at the San Antonio Poetry Slam.” Punk Planet Issue 41. Feb. 2001: 90-95.

Paglia, Camille. Preface and “Sex and Violence, or Nature and Art.” Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence From Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson. NY: Vintage, 1991. xiii, 1-39.

Parisi, Joseph. “Poetry and the Embarrassment of Riche$.” Common Review 3.3 (2004): 15-21.

Perdomo, Willie. “Nigger-Reecan Blues.” Where a Nickel Costs a Dime. NY: WW Norton, 1996.

Piñero. Dir. Leon Ichaso. DVD/Miramax, 2000.

Piñero, Miguel. “A Lower East Side Poem.” The Latino Reader. Eds. Harold Augenbraum and Margarite Fernández Olmos. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997. 337-338, 349-350.

Plath, Sylvia. Excerpts and “A Biographical Note” by Lois Ames. The Bell Jar. NY: Perennial, 1999. 1-13, 24-31, 127-131, 140-145, 158-169, 247-264.

Public Enemy. “Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos.” It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back. 1988. www.publicenemy.com. 24 Jan. 2005.

Rodriguez, Richard. Preface, “The Triad of Alexis de Tocqueville,” and “Hispanic.” Brown: The Last Discovery of America. NY: Viking, 2002. xi-xv, 1-31, 103-123.

Russell Simmons Presents Def Poetry on HBO. 2001-2004.

SlamNation: The Sport of the Spoken Word. Dir. Paul Devlin. 1998.

Solomon, Andrew. “The Closing of the American Book.” New York Times 10 July 2004 www.nytimes.com.

Tate, Greg. “I’m White: What’s Wrong With Michael Jackson,” “The Devil Made ’Em Do It: Public Enemy.” Flyboy in the Buttermilk: Essays on Contemporary America. NY: Simon & Schuster, 1992. 95-99, 123-128.

Taylor, Charles. “Let’s Save Literature From the Literati.” Salon.com 14 July 2004.

The 2000 National Poetry Slam. Dir. Paul Devlin. Poetry Slam Inc., 2001.

Wallace, David Foster. “A Radically Condensed History of Postindustrial Life,” Signifying Nothing,” and “Octet.” Brief Interviews With Hideous Men. Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1999. 0, 75-81,131-160.

-----. “E UNIBUS PLURAM: Television and U.S. Fiction.” A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments. Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1997. 21-82.

White, Curtis. The Middle Mind: Why Americans Don’t Think for Themselves. SF: HarperCollins, 2003. 14-17, 52-60, 61-66.

Young, Elizabeth. “The beast in the jungle, the figure in the carpet: Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho.” Shopping in Space: Essays on America’s Blank Generation Fiction. NY: Grove Press, 1992. 85-122.

Posted by Benjamin at August 25, 2005 04:08 PM