by James Joyce
We've identified these texts as great options for text pairings based on similar themes, literary devices, topic, or writing style. Supplement your lesson with one or more of these options and challenge students to compare and contrast the texts. To assign a paired text, click on the text to go to its page and click the "Assign Text" button there.
Excerpt from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
- Mark Twain
This excerpt is from Twain's most famous novel, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. In it, Tom Sawyer starts the “Tom Sayer Gang” and makes Huck and the rest of his friends swear an oath.Pair “Excerpt from the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” with “Araby” to show students how growing up can change the way we relate to other people.
- Katharine Weber
Katharine Weber (b. 1955) is a contemporary American non-fiction writer and novelist. In this story, a young girl is asked to babysit--but the job turns out to be different than she expected.Pair “Sleeping” with “Araby” and ask students to compare these two coming-of-age stories.
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
- T.S. Eliot
“Prufrock” was written by Eliot in the years leading up to WWI and was published in 1914 during what is referred to as the period of modernism. The poem is a dramatic interior monologue of an urban man, stricken with feelings of isolation and an incapability for action. Prufrock laments his physical and intellectual inertia, the lost opportunities in his life and lack of spiritual progress, of weariness, regret, embarrassment, longing, emasculation, a sense of decay, and an awareness of mortality.Pair “Araby” with “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” and ask students to analyze the thematic similarities, and compose with an original definition of Modernist literature.
When You Are Old
- William Butler Yeats
In William Butler Yeat's “When You Are Old,” a speaker asks someone to reflect on their life and on lost love in their old age.Pair “Araby” with “When You Are Old” and ask students to compare the speakers’ perspectives on unrequited love. How do both narrators feel about love and the objects of their affections?