“What is the reason you use me thus?
I loved you ever. But it is no matter.
Let Hercules himself do what he may,
The cat will mew, and dog will have his day.”
Act I, scene 1 of the 2008 David Tennant production in The RSC's Courtyard Theatre. Open up in YouTube to watch the entire production. Or, better yet, follow this link to watch the PBS broadcast.
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Friday, April 10 (1) - Sample research essays; Remember that there is a mandatory AP pre-administration session next Friday at 2PM. Over the weekend, read 1.1 of Hamlet. Read the corresponding section of this scene-by-scene analysis BEFORE you read Shakespeare's text. Consult no other reading guides; this is as good as it gets.
Rory Kinnear delivers the first of Hamlet's four major soliloquies. You might recognize the actor as Iago!
Monday, April 13 (2) - Hamlet 1.1; Who's there?; Presentation Assignment and Guidelines; Tonight, read 1.2. Again, read the scene-by-scene analysis, read the text itself, and then watch the corresponding scene of the David Tennant production. Make that your standard practice. As you read think about Claudius as a politician. See if you can spot 5 or 6 things Claudius does in his first few speeches that establishes himself as a political genius. Read Hamlet's first soliloquy ("Oh, that this too, too solid flesh would melt...") carefully. Then watch Rory Kinnear perform it (to the immediate right). What is it that is really bothering him about what has happened since his father's death? How would you describe the tone of his feelings? Detached, impassioned, rational, ironic, or what? (Boyer, SXU).
Tuesday, April 14 (3) - Hamlet 1.2; The focus of your reading should be on what you can gather about the nature of the relationship between Ophelia and Hamlet, rather than on that between Ophelia and Laertes. The, when Polonius enters, think more about the type of man who would utter these empty aphorisms, rather than the advice itself. How does Polonius violate his own advice?
Wednesday, April 15 (4) - Hamlet 1.3; During your reading tonight, give close attention to Hamlet's lines 23-36. What can they tell us about Hamlet's worldview at this point in the play? What is the effect of having the Ghost enter so immediately after that speech? And by the end of 1.5, what does Hamlet say he plans to do next? As we asked in relation to Iago, does Hamlet have a master plan at this point in the play, or is he improvising as he goes along?
Thursday, April 16 (5) - Hamlet 1.4-1.5; Claudius: Comment on the King's rhetorical prowess. Polonius: Prepared statements? R&G: Obsequious sycophants? Hamlet: How is the antic disposition made manifest textually? Notice shifts in verse and prose.
Friday, April 17 (6) - Hamlet 2.1-2.2.308 ("I am but mad north-north-west..."); Presentations begin (Ames and Wiatrek); After you read the remainder of 2.2 over the weekend, consider Hamlet's movements throughout "Oh, what a rogue and peasant slave am I?". How does Hamlet's attitude toward himself develop throughout the speech? Notice how, in the David Tennant production, Director Greg Doran decides to swap Hamlet's 2nd and 3rd soliloquies. We'll discuss this week!
Monday, April 20 (1) - ***After school: Make-up AP pre-registration*** Hamlet 2.2.309-2.2.526; Tonight, as you read 3.1, the scene with Hamlet's famous "To be or not to be" soliloquy, ask yourself the following: How do you account for Hamlet's sudden change in mood? He seemed energized at the end of 2.2, but now is melancholy once again. Do you think, maybe, that Hamlet is aware he is being spied on? Secondly, to what extent can Hamlet's treatment of Ophelia be seen as compassionate?
Tuesday, April 21 (2) - BIG ANNOUNCEMENT; Hamlet 3.1 (Spencer Chang and Tohme); Tonight, let your focus be on the aftermath of the play-within-a-play, noting Hamlet's confiding in Horatio and the way he is treating R&G. Dramatically, how does this scene work? What is its function in the play as a whole?
Wednesday, April 22 (3) - Hamlet 3.2 (Murphy and Rosales); We now move to a scene that you should be familiar with: You'll recall an in-class essay asking you to dissect Claudius' "O, my offense is rank." Let's look even closer at Claudius' attitude toward his actions, in addition to exploring the reasons Hamlet decides not to kill Claudius right then and there. It's more complicated than you might think.
Thursday, April 23 (4) - Hamlet 3.3 (Zaghrini and Cantu)
Monday, April 27 (6) - Hamlet 3.4 (Wager and Tellez)
Tuesday, April 28 (1) - Hamlet 4.1-4.3 (Busa and Wagner); Research essay instruction
Wednesday, April 29 (2) - Hamlet 4.4 (Alvarez and Sunny Chang); Research essay instruction; Read closely over the next two days (we're off tomorrow for surveys). Here's what I told Alan to focus in on: Dramatically, what does 4.5 do? 4.4 finishes with a great, dramatic heroic couplet from Hamlet (“From this time forth my thoughts be bloody or be nothing worth!”). I’m energized and on the Hamlet train at this point, ready to see him do something, and then we are moved to this scene with Ophelia, from/about whom we have not heard in some time. What’s the dramatic goal there?
GERTRUDE “So full of artless jealousy is guilt,/It spills itself in fearing to be spilt.”4.5.20 EXPLAIN THEMATICALLY!
What would you do with 4.6 if you were a director? And lastly, I used to hate 4.7, thinking it dragged on and on needlessly, simply to give the actor playing Hamlet a much needed rest! The play Mr Volding directed this spring weeded the scene down to 2 lines and I thought it was the best version of it I’d ever seen. But the more I read it, the more I think this scene is up there with 3.3 of Othello (in which Iago moves Othello from one side of the earth to the other). Do a comparative analysis of the manipulation techniques of Claudius and Iago. Are these characters more similar than we think?
Thursday, April 30 (3) - STUDENT PERCEPTION SURVEYS (NO CLASS)
Friday, May 1 (4) - Hamlet 4.5-4.7 (Grothues)
Monday, May 4 (5) - AP EXAM Instruction
Tuesday, May 5 (6) - AP EXAM Instruction
Wednesday, May 6 (1) - AP EXAM in AM - We will have class during period 5! Hamlet Catch-up
Thursday, May 7 (2) - Hamlet 5.1 (Hernandez)
Friday, May 8 (3) - Hamlet 5.2 and Course Conclusion
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Study Links
"6 reading habits from Harvard"
Achebe, "The Truth of Fiction"
Questions for analyzing novels
“In reading exam papers written by misled students, of both sexes, about this or that author, I have often come across such phrases — probably recollections from more tender years of schooling — as ‘his style is simple’ or ‘his style is clear and simple’ or ‘his style is beautiful and simple’ or ‘his style is quite beautiful and simple.’ But remember that ‘simplicity’ is buncombe. No major writer is simple. The Saturday Evening Post is simple. Journalese is simple. Upton Lewis is simple. Mom is simple. Digests are simple. Damnation is simple. But Tolstoys and Melvilles are not simple..."
-Nabokov, Lectures on Russian Literature
Due Dates
Monday, May 4 - Final research essay
Your research text selections.
General Literary Terms
allegory, allusion, anachronism, arete, bildungsroman, canon, characterization, chiasmus, close reading, conceit, diction, epiphany, epistolary novel, fable, fabliaux, frame narrative, genre, irony, leit-motif, metafiction, mood, motif, novel, novella, poetry, prose, satire, symbol, tone, verisimilitude, verse
Elements of Fiction
character, climax, conflict, denouement, dialogue, dynamic character, foil, narration, plot, point of view, suspense, tension, unity, unreliable narrator
Poetic Terms
alexandrine, alliteration, anapest, apostrophe, assonance, ballad, blank verse, caesura, canticle, canto, carpe diem, consonance, contrapasso, couplet, dactyll, elegy, end rhyme, english sonnet, enjambment, epic, epic simile, free verse, half rhyme, heroic couplet, imagery, in medias res, internal rhyme, lyric, metaphysical, meter, ode, pastoral, pathetic fallacy, personification, prosody, quatrain, rhyme, slant rhyme, sonnet, sprung rhythm, stanza, terza rima, verse
Drama Lingo
blank verse, catastrophe, catharsis, chorus, comedy, deus ex machina, dialogue, drama, hamartia, hubris, metadrama, miasma, mimesis, monologue, peripeteia, stasimon, strophe, tragedy, tragic flaw, tragic hero
Rhetorical Devices
a priori, anadiplosis, anaphora, antithesis, apophasis, asyndeton, hyperbole, parallelism, parataxis, pathos, polysyndeton, procatalepsis, stychomythia, synesthesia
Figures of Speech
catachresis, euphemism, idiom, metaphor, metonymy, oxymoron, paradox, personification, simile, synecdoche, synesthesia
The setting for William Shakespeare's 'Hamlet' can be viewed and interpreted in many ways. In this short film, director Richard Eyre, designer Vicki Mortimer and author Colin Bell discuss some of the ways the space in which 'Hamlet' exists has been brought to life on the stage of the National Theatre.
Required Course Texts
The Little Brown Handbook, 11th edition
Vocabulary Workshop (Level H)
Literature: An Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, Drama, and Writing, 11th edition
Killgallon, Sentence Composing for College
Austen, Persuasion, Oxford World's Classics, ed. James Kinsley and Deidre Shauna Lynch
Conrad, Heart of Darkness, Oxford World's Classics, ed Cedric Watts
Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment: Pevear & Volokhonsky Translation (Vintage Classics)
Greene, The Power and the Glory
Wharton, The Age of Innocence (Norton Critical Edition)
Students should also expect to purchase a few paperback titles at my discretion.
Suggested Reading
Stanley Fish, How to Write a Sentence
E.M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel
David Mikics, Slow Reading in a Hurried Age
Francine Prose, Reading like a Writer
James Wood, How Fiction Works
“... one cannot read a book: one can only reread it. A good reader, a major reader, an active and creative reader is a rereader. And I shall tell you why. When we read a book for the first time the very process of laboriously moving our eyes from left to right, line after line, page after page, this complicated physical work upon the book, the very process of learning in terms of space and time what the book is about, this stands between us and artistic appreciation. When we look at a painting we do no have to move our eyes in a special way even if, as in a book, the picture contains elements of depth and development. The element of time does not really enter in a first contact with a painting. In reading a book, we must have time to acquaint ourselves with it. We have no physical organ (as we have the eye in regard to a painting) that takes in the whole picture and can enjoy its details. But at a second, or third, or fourth reading we do, in a sense, behave towards a book as we do towards a painting. However, let us not confuse the physical eye, that monstrous achievement of evolution, with the mind, an even more monstrous achievement. A book, no matter what it is - a work of fiction or a work of science (the boundary line between the two is not as clear as is generally believed) - a book of fiction appeals first of all to the mind. The mind, the brain, the top of the tingling spine, is, or should be, the only instrument used upon a book.”
- Nabokov, Lectures on Literature
Below are 5 of my annotated pages from various texts and 1 of David Foster Wallace's copy of DeLillo's Players. The pages of the texts that you will be working with most closely should look just like these.
The College Board's official course description:
An AP English Literature and Composition course engages students in the careful reading and critical analysis of imaginative literature. Through the close reading of selected texts, students deepen their understanding of the ways writers use language to provide both meaning and pleasure for their readers. As they read, students consider a work’s structure, style and themes, as well as such smaller-scale elements as the use of figurative language, imagery, symbolism and tone.
Strake Jesuit's official course description:
In AP Lit & Comp. you will learn to read like an artist-critic, studying texts not only for their development of themes and cultural ideas but also for their technical mastery and innovations. How do writers employ language to create texts that engage their cultural moment and literary history in rich, often ambiguous ways? Why is first-person the right choice in A Farewell to Arms? Why so many disease images in Hamlet? What makes Joyce's sentences so terribly beautiful? You will read literature from a variety of genres and periods, always with an eye to unlocking its deeper mysteries. To read well you will first unlearn bad habits. No longer will quick reading, that nervous skim before class, do. No. You will learn to read slowly, to savor each sentence, each line, each paragraph or stanza for its multiple meanings, its suggestions, its silences. In time, you will learn the wisdom of Nabokov's remark that you can only re-read a book. Your writing assignments will be frequent and varied, from one-page response essays due the day of a reading, to longer, more formal essays of evaluation and analysis, to expository and creative pieces. Always, you will learn to sharpen your thinking and hone your writing, to give both an edge gained only by rethinking and rewriting. You will have conferences with me before and after essays are due. You will edit each other's essays for argument and style. And you will revise, revise, revise. This class offers an intensive reading experience and a full-on writing workshop.
If you do not mind (even if you do mind) bring in the Killgallon text on each day 5.