SOME SUGGESTED FIRST WEEK READINGS
“Superman and Me” by Sherman Alexie [print copies of this reading are available for classroom use] [reading questions]
“City Limits” by Colson Whitehead
“Active Reading” by Brogan Sullivan
“Teaching to the Text Message” by Andy Selsberg
“What Are the New Literacies?” by Kyle D. Stedman
“Story in Harlem Slang” by Zora Neale Hurston
“The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language (Excerpt)” by Steven Pinker
“Reading Rhetorically” by Malea Powell
“How To Read Like a Writer” by Mike Bunn
Choose an Article from the NYTimes.com website and Activate your CUNY Pass
COMMONLY ASSIGNED FYW ESSAYS
Diane Ackerman, The Brain on Love
Nicholas Carr, Is Google Making Us Stupid?
Barbara Ehrenreich, Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America
Lars Eighner, My Daily Dives in the Dumpster
Loren Eiseley, How Flowers Changed the World. Reading Questions
Nikki Giovanni, Campus Racism 101
Malcolm Gladwell, The Order of Things
Ernest Hemingway, When You Camp Out Do It Right
Martin Luther King, I Have a Dream
Martin Luther King, Letter From Birmingham Jail
Paule Marshall, To Da-duh, In Memoriam
Mencken, The Penalty of Death.
George Orwell, Shooting an Elephant
Lewis Thomas, The Technology of Medicine
Mark Twain, Two Views of the River
“Should Writers Use They Own English” by Vershawn Ashanti Young [reading/writing assignment]
NEW YORK CITY
Chris Ruen, “The Ironic Nature Walk”
Joe Queenan,”Eight Reasons New York Is Better”
“City Limits” by Colson Whitehead
TECHNOLOGIES AND LITERACIES
“A Rhetorical View of Writing” by the WIDE Research Center Collective
Nicholas Carr, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”
Clay Shirky, “Does the Internet Make You Smarter?”
Toby Litt, “The Reader and Technology”
ESSAYS BY CITY TECH STUDENTS
City Tech Writer is an annual publication of distinguished student written written across the disciplines at City Tech. Instructors are strongly encouraged to consider teaching some of the many excellent essays published in this journal. Current and past issues can be accessed on the English Department website. A selection of CTW essays indexed by theme and genre can be accessed here and is available in print in N512.
CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT
King, Martin Luther, “Letter From Birmingham Jail” http://www.stanford.edu/group/King/frequentdocs/birmingham.pdf
Lemann, Nicholas, “The Long March: What the civil-rights movement looked like when it was still happening” http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2003/02/10/030210crat_atlarge
BIOLOGY
Charles Darwin, “On the Origin of Species” http://darwin-online.org.uk/content/frameset?itemID=F373&viewtype=text&pageseq=1
Steven Jay Gould, “Darwinian Fundamentalism” http://www.nybooks.com/articles/1151
Steven Jay Gould, “Evolution as Fact and Theory” http://www.stephenjaygould.org/ctrl/gould_fact-and-theory.html
Furbank, P. N., “Perspective: Altruism, Selfishness, and Genes” http://www.threepennyreview.com/samples/furbank_su08.html
“CLASSIC” ESSAYS
R. W. Emerson, “Nature” http://www.rwe.org/?option=com_content&task=view&id=107&Itemid=42
Martin Luther King
http://kingencyclopedia.stanford.edu/encyclopedia/documents_contents.html
Karl Marx, “The Communist Manifesto” http://www.anu.edu.au/polsci/marx/classics/manifesto.html
Plutarch’s Essays http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/p/plutarch/essays/complete.html
Jonathan Swift, “A Modest Proposal” http://www.uoregon.edu/~rbear/modest.html
Henry David Thoreau, “Civil Disobedience” http://thoreau.eserver.org/
COLONIALISM AND POSTCOLONIALISM
Achebe, Chinua. “An Image of Africa” http://www.cis.vt.edu/modernworld/d/Achebe.html
ECONOMICS AND PUBLIC POLICY
Mary Graham, “The Information Wars” http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200209/graham
Karl Marx, “The Communist Manifesto” http://www.anu.edu.au/polsci/marx/classics/manifesto.html
Robert Reich, “Secession of the Successful” http://www-personal.umich.edu/~gmarkus/secession.html
FICTION
Jonathan Baumbach, “The Story” http://brooklynrail.org/2006/05/lastwords/the-story
Susan Daitch, “Contents of a Censor’s Outbox” http://www.brooklynrail.org/2006/05/fiction/contents-of-a-censors-outbox
Kim Edwards, “Thirty-Six Exposures” http://www.jstor.org/stable/4384928
Mary Gaitskill, “Description” http://www.threepennyreview.com/samples/gaitskill_w09.html
Daboberto Gilb, “About Tere Who Was in Palomas” http://www.jstor.org/stable/4384977
Marías, Javier, “Interpreters of Lives” http://www.threepennyreview.com/samples/marias_w09.html
FOOD
Pollan, Michael. “You Are What You Grow”
Pollan, Michael. “Unhappy Meals”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/28/magazine/28nutritionism.t.html?ref=books
Visser, Margaret. “Introduction” to Much Depends on Dinner
Wallace, David Foster. “Consider the Lobster”
http://www.gourmet.com/magazine/2000s/2004/08/consider_the_lobster.html
Papproth, Matthew. “Confronting the Uncomfortable: Food and First-Year Composition”
https://wac.colostate.edu/books/pathways/chapter17.pdf
LANGUAGE AND CULTURE
H.L. Mencken (1880–1956). “The Influence of Webster” The American Language. 1921. http://www.bartleby.com/185/32.html
George Bernard Shaw, Excerpt from Essay on Spelling and the English Language http://www.fortunecity.com/victorian/vangogh/555/Spell/shaw-pref2.html
Fan Shen, “The Classroom and the Wider Culture: Identity as a Key to Learning English Composition” http://wendang.baidu.com/view/3ea3108884868762caaed5df.html
Noah Webster’s “An Essay on the Necessity, Advantages, and Practicality of Reforming the Mode of Spelling and of Rendering the Orthography of Words Correspondent to Pronunciation” http://sites.google.com/site/citytechcollegewriting/essays-and-articles/noah-webster
MEMOIR
Greil Marcus Spring 2008 Memoir: Tied to History http://www.threepennyreview.com/samples/marcus_sp08.html
Michael Holroyd Winter 2005 Symposium on Memory http://www.threepennyreview.com/samples/holroyd_w05.html
Gary Shteyngart Spring 2004 “Memoir: The Mother Tongue Between Two Slices of Rye”
http://www.threepennyreview.com/samples/shteyngart_sp04.html
TECHNOLOGY
Stewart Brand, “Is Technology Moving Too Fast?” http://longnow.org/essays/technology-moving-too-fast/
Lawrence Lessig, Free Culture http://www.free-culture.cc/freecontent/
URBAN STUDIES
Greenblatt, Stephen Winter 2007 Symposium on Berlin http://www.threepennyreview.com/samples/greenblatt_w07.html
Web-Based Resources by Author
Darwin, Charles http://darwin-online.org.uk/
Descartes, Rene. Tr. John Veltch. Meditations on First Philosophy. http://www.wright.edu/cola/descartes/mede.html
R. W. Emerson http://www.rwe.org/
Martin Luther King
Karl Marx http://www.marxists.org
Plutarch’s Essays http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/p/plutarch/essays/complete.html
Henry David Thoreau http://thoreau.eserver.org/
Woolf, Virginia http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/w/woolf/virginia/w91d/#chapter1
Essay and Literature Collections on the Web
III. Essay and Literature Collections on the Web
60 Essays (See below for complete list of authors and titles) http://grammar.about.com/od/60essays/a/essayscontents.htm
100 Classic Essays http://grammar.about.com/od/classicessays/CLASSIC_ESSAYS.htm
Smithsonian Folkways Collection http://www.folkways.si.edu/TrackDetails.aspx?itemid=44499
Language and Society http://www.pbs.org/speak/education/
Civil Rights http://mlk-kpp01.stanford.edu/index.php/encyclopedia/documents_contents http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/eyesontheprize/index.html
Literature Collections on the Web
Library of America: Open Access Short Story Collection
http://storyoftheweek.loa.org/p/stories-sorted-by-author.html
Project Gutenberg (US) (works in the public domain in the US, primarily those published before 1923)
http://www.gutenberg.org
Project Gutenberg (Australia) (works in the public domain in Australia, which include works by authors who died before 1955)
National Academies Press (publishes reports and books issued by the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, the Institute of Medicine, and the National Research Council)
http://www.nap.edu/
Internet Archive (offers free access to a wide collection of books in the public domain, as well as books available through a creative commons license)
http://www.archive.org/details/texts
Online Books Page at The University of Pennsylvania
http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/
Perseus Digital Library (digital collection of texts related to the history, literature and culture of the Greco-Roman world)
http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/
Celebration of Women Writers (University of Pennsylvania)
http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/edgeworth/belinda/belinda.html
American Verse Project
http://quod.lib.umich.edu/a/amverse/
American Studies Project at The University of Virginia
http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/hypertex.html
Literature.org: An Online Library of Literature
http://www.literature.org/
Bartleby.com (fiction, poetry, and nonfiction in the public domain as well as reference books)
http://www.bartleby.com
Academy of American Poets
www.poets.org
Poetry Society of America
www.poetryfoundation.org
Electronic Poetry Center/SUNY Buffalo
Open Educational Resources via the City Tech Library
