extra work for American literature course.

Reading allows you to get to the essentials of life, to cut through the mental static of the McJobs you suffer through to pay your car note, the fleeting satisfaction of the great shoes you bought at Nine West, and the empty sensations of screaming at the villain of the month on the idiot box, be it the behemoth with makeup on WWF, or the latest ruler of a small nation that dares to disagree with us.

As Walt Whitman, a poet you will come to know in the course, noted in the 1870s, "No great poem or other literary or artistic work of any scope, old or new, can be essentially consider'd without weighing first the age, politics (or want of politics) and aim, visible forms, unseen soul, and current times, out of the midst of which it rises and is formulated" ( ___).