Plays and Playwrights under Consideration

Friday, March 12, 2010

Plays and Playwrights under Consideration

Two by Tennessee Williams:
The Glass Menagerie; A Streetcar Named Desire

Two by Arthur Miller:
Death of a Salesman; A View from the Bridge

Two Great Modern Comedies...
Neil Simon: Lost in Yonkers
Larry Shue: The Foreigner

Two Great Modern Dramas:
August Wilson Joe Turner’s Come & Gone
Margaret Edson: Wit.

... and Two Scenes from an All-American Musical:

GIRL CRAZY!! Act I (Day 2) -- Act II (Day 1)

Mr. Bratnober's Summer Reading List

Nonfiction:

The Battle Cry of Freedom, by James MacPherson

The Killer Angels, by Michael Shaara

Team of Rivals, by Doris Kearns Goodwin

Chief Joseph and the Flight of the Nez Perce, by Kent Nerburn

Comanches: a History of a People, by T.R. Fehrenbach

Fiction:

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, by J.K. Rowling

My Name Is Red, by Orhan Pamuk

Middlesex, by Jeffrey Eugenides

Shadow Tag, by Louise Erdrich

Sula, by Toni Morrison

Other possibilities include books by Tim O’Brien, John V. Fleming, James Joyce, and Norman Maclean.

American Play Presentations in April

Your fifteen-minute presentation should consist of the following:

A talk on the playwright: his or her life story; awards he or she has won; the era he or she lived in. (2 min.)

A talk on the style of the play. Is it realistic? Is it comic? What other plays does it remind you of??? How/Where does this play fit into American Lit.? (2-3 min.)

The context of your scene, within the larger scheme of the play: Set it Up!!! (1 min. Director??)

Your Scene!! – performed with élan!!! (6-8 minutes)

Follow-up: Q & A, handled with convincing skill and enthusiasm. Director & actors explain the decisions that went into the performance. (2 min.)

Fifteen Conventions to Uphold in Writing About Literature (1)

1. Compose sentences in the present tense (PT).
“Readers see how fully Huck matures.” (not ‘matured’)
“Huck fears for his life whenever his father drinks too much.” (not ‘feared’; not ‘drank’)

(Exceptions: (a) points about the author’s life; or (b) fictional events that precede the
book’s main narrative (e.g., “Pap mentions that Huck’s mother died many years ago.”)

2. Maintain a third-person viewpoint (3rd pers.) (‘One’, ‘they’, or ‘readers’; not ‘I’, ‘we’ or ‘you’)
“Readers can detect the Duke’s sarcasm.” (not ‘You’ or ‘We’)
“One would be hard-pressed to ignore the satirical attacks in Huckleberry Finn.” (not ‘You’)

3. Avoid the use of contractions (avoid contr.!).
“Huck should not assume that he is safe.” (not ‘shouldn’t’; not ‘he’s’)
“Huck cannot make up his mind about what is right.” (not ‘can’t’)

4. Uphold Honors English Eleven grammatical principles regarding Subject-Verb Agreement (SV-Agr.), Clear Pronoun Reference ( it ), and Parallel Structure (PAR).

5. Write out small & medium-sized numbers (spell #!!).
“Huck stays with the Grangerford family for at least four weeks.” (not ‘4’)
“The King and the Duke discover six thousand dollars in gold.” (not ‘$6,000’)

(Exceptions: Dates (“January 11, 1889”) and long numbers (‘17,485,332.39’).

6. Use MLA format: double-space; one-inch margins; numbered header; no title p.; 12-pt. font. (See the Online Writing Lab (OWL) at Purdue.) Include a Works Cited page in MLA format. (MLA)

7. Use concise, accurate internal citations to direct readers to relevant items in your Works Cited page. (Plain-English translation: Cite all your sources – do not engage in plagiarism.)

8. Block-indent quoted passages of four or more lines. Because block indentation implies quotation, additional quotation marks are redundant and thus incorrect (except to denote dialogue).

9. Avoid elaborate re-hashing of the plot. If you need to hug something, hug your thesis, not the plot.

10. Favor the active voice over the passive voice in sentence construction.
“Huck treats Jim with respect.” (not “Jim is treated with respect by Huck.”)
“Pap abuses Huck.” (not “Huck is abused by his cruel pap.”)

11. Write as though the book produces a given literary effect, not the author.
“Huckleberry Finn engages readers with its fine natural imagery.” (not ‘Twain engages…’)
“The Scarlet Letter weaves intricate symbolic patterns.” (not ‘Hawthorne weaves…’)

12. Avoid redundancy. (E.g., The phrase “throughout the entire novel” says the same thing twice.)

13. Literary authors do not quote: they write! Therefore, avoid statements like this one: “’I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately,’ quotes Henry David Thoreau.” Buzzer!! Wrong!!

14. Proofread by reading your paper aloud. If it sounds good, it probably is good (and vice versa).

15. "Simplify, simplify, simplify!" (HDT)

[1] Sources: Writing About Literature, by E.V. Roberts. Brief 11th Ed. (2005). The MLA Handbook, 6th ed. (2005). The Woodbury High School English curriculum (rev. 2006). Walden, by Henry David Thoreau (1850).

Term Paper in Literary Analysis

Compose a paper of four to five pages ~ typed and double-spaced ~ with one-inch margins. Respond to one of the following prompts.

I. Compare and contrast the way the setting contributes to the tone in Poe’s story “The Pit and the Pendulum,” and in Washington Irving’s story, “The Devil and Tom Walker.” Discuss quoted passages from each story as you develop your assertions about each author's use of setting – physical and chronological – to promote a tone.

II. Discuss Thoreau’s concept of time in relation to such elements as nature, humanity, America, and eternity. Analyze quoted passages from Walden to support your views.

III. Defend or reject the proposition that Melville’s Bartleby exemplifies Ralph Waldo Emerson’s notion of a “great” nonconformist (as in “(t)o be great is to be misunderstood” ~ RWE, in “Self-Reliance”). Discuss quoted passages from “Bartleby” and “Self-Reliance” to support your views.

IV. Choose 12-20 lines - either from Dickinson or from Whitman - and compose a detailed close reading analysis. Begin by quoting the lines. Then paraphrase the lines - i.e., put them into plain English. Then briefly discuss the meaning of the lines in relation to the poet's larger theme or themes (for Dickinson: death, consciousness, love, nature, and others; for Whitman: America, life & death, the sea, nature, poetry, the soul vs. the self, and others). Finally - and most importantly - show how details of language in your passage support the poet's larger themes. Discuss such details as word choices (diction), figurative language, comparison, analogy, and sound effects (alliteration, assonance, rhyme, et al.).

Whichever essay you choose, be sure to include close reading – that is, detailed analysis of language – to support your broader analysis of ideas. In other words, don’t become so lofty that you overlook essential details of a writer's style.

Good luck with this! I will post a calendar deadlines for the various drafts, peer editing sessions, and final submission. In class, we will carefully discuss MLA format, citation procedure, and academic honesty.

Honors English Eleven - American Literature - Woodbury H.S.

Friday, March 12, 2010