English 1302 Online Readings (Service Learning)

You are not required to read any of the author, YouTube, audio, or video links. 

Required Short Stories

Willa Cather: "Paul's Case" (YouTube audio)

Amy Tan: "Two Kinds" (YouTube audio)

Kate Chopin: "Story of an Hour" (YouTube audio)

Tim O'Brien: "The Things They Carried" (Chapter One) (YouTube audio)

John Updike: "A&P" (YouTube audio with short intro)

ZZ Packer: "Brownies" (pp. 1-16); (YouTube audio)

Required Poetry (for Paper Two Only)

• Sandra Cisneros: "Loose Woman" (YouTube audio)

• Emanuel Xavier: "Urban Affection"

Optional Short Story Readings 

• Ursula K. Le Guin: "The Ones who Walk Away from Omelas" (audio)

• "A Village After Dark" by Kazuo Ishiguro

• Kevin Broccoli: “The Boy in the Pink Tuxedo” (YouTube audio) --don't choose for Paper One

• “With the Beatles” by Haruki Murakami

• "The Shawl" by Cynthia Ozick

• Anzia Yezierska: “America and I” 

• "The Disappearance of Elaine Coleman" by Stephen Millhauser

• Martha Salinas: "The Scholarship Jacket" (don't use for Paper One)

• John Kennedy Toole: Confederacy of Dunces (Chapter One, parts I-III) audio

• Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: "Birdsong"

• "The Paper Menagerie" by Ken Liu 

• Joyce Carol Oates: "Where are you Going, Where Have You Been?"; audio

•  “Sweetness” by Toni Morrison 

• "The Lesson" by Toni Cade Bambara

• "He" and "The Jilting of Granny Weatherall" by Katherine Anne Porter

• "The Red Convertible" by Louise Erdrich

• "This is What it Means to Say Phoenix, Arizona by Sherman Alexie

• "Judy in Her Good Robe" by T Kira Mahealani Madden

• “Cathedral” by Raymond Carver

• "To Room Nineteen" by Doris Lessing

• "Say Yes" by Tobias Woolf

• Alice Walker: "Everyday Use"

• Zora Neale Hurston: "The Conscience of the Court"

• "My Escape from Slavery" by Frederick Douglass (audio)

• “The Veldt” by Ray Bradbury

• “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson

• Kate Chopin: "Desiree's Baby”

• Charlotte Perkins Gilman: "The Yellow Wallpaper"

• Hemingway Ernest: "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place"

•  William Faulkner: "Dry September" 

• Edgar Allan Poe: "Cask of Amontillado" (YouTube audio)

• Ralph Ellison: "Battle Royale"; "King of the Bingo Game" (DON'T USE THIS STORY UNTIL LINK RESTORED)

• Edwidge Danticat: "Night Women" (YouTube audio--begins at 3:27) --DON'T USE THIS STORY UNTIL LINK RESTORED

Optional Protest Poetry (for Paper Two)

Tato Laviera: "lady liberty"(audio) 

Nikita Gill: "They Will Ask Us in the Future How it Happened"

Harryette Mullen: "We are not Responsible"

Blas Manuel De Luna:"Bent to the Earth"

Dick Gregory: "Shame"

Oscar Casares: Big Jesse, Little Jesse

Matthew Olzmann: "Letter Beginning with Two Lines"

Nikki Giovanni: "Rosa Parks"

Juan Felipe Herrera: "Poem by Poem"

Patrick Kavanaugh: "Conflict"

Allen Ginsberg: "America"

Maya Angelou: "The Caged Bird"

Langston Hughes: ""Freedom Train";  "I Look at the World"

Lorna Dee Cervantes: "Beneath the Shadow of the Freeway"

Derek Walcott: "A Far Cry from Africa"; "the Glory Trumpeter"

William Blake:  "London"

P. B. Shelley: "England in 1819"

Elizabeth Barrett Browning: "The Cry of the Children"

Protest Songs (for Paper Two only)

Bruce Springsteen: "Streets of Minneapolis"

"Okie from Muskogee" by Merle Haggard

"I Can't Breathe" by Gabriella Wilson

Hank Williams Jr.: "A Country Boy Can Survive"

Grace Slick: "White Rabbit"

Bob Dylan: "The Times They are A-Changin'" 

"Hotel California" written by Don Felder, Don Henley, and Glen Frey

Fifty of the Greatest Protest Songs 

Twenty of the Best Protest Songs in History

Social Justice Songs by Female Artists

Country Protest Anthems

2025 Protest Songs