unit 3: prose fiction 2
MEETING 9: ivan ilyich, chapter 1
(1) How did each reading go? How long did they take you? What are your impressions of reading Tolstoy? Share your passage that’s emblematic of Tolstoy’s style, according to Nabokov.
(2) Let’s make a list together of the various responses to Ivan Ilyich’s death. What is Tolstoy showing us at the outset? Are there structural advantages to beginning his novella after Ivan has already died? What do we learn about Ivan?
(3) Let’s perform a close reading of the two paragraphs on pages 3-4 as a group. How does Tolstoy’s play with perspective?
(4) Plot, discourse, point of view / perspective, literary detail. Put all of these elements into conversation with one another.
At the end of class, I’ll set your short story process essay.
Homework:
Read Chapters 2 and 3 of The Death of Ivan Ilyich. Messrs. Chimata, Le, Cogan, Condron, Nedwed, and Graham will team-teach with me those chapters. Readers, can you find examples of the narrator disapproving of Ivan Ilyich’s decisions?
MEETING 10: ivan ilyich, chapters 2 and 3
Sentence 1 of chapter 2 outlines the thesis of the latest section: “The past history of Ivan Ilyich’s life was most simple and ordinary and (therefore) most terrible.” How does Tolstoy prove it? What details pulse to help him make his case?
Practice MCQ
Homework: Read chapters 4-7.
MEETING 11: ivan ilyich, chapters 4-7
The Great Ignatian Challenge
Shakespeare
Chapter 4 begins Ivan’s descent into despair. I suppose this is a dumb question, but I’m going to ask it anyway: Why would he be so surprised to learn that he’s going to die? Isn’t that a basic, though awful, truth about our lives that we all learn from a young age? Where does he get off being so outraged?
Walk us through Ivan’s earliest responses to the news. What passages stand out in chapters 4 and 5? Why is he so cruel to Praskovya?
I imagine we’ll want to spend the most time today on chapter 6. To support our thinking about the opening of chapter 6, I’d like to watch a key 5 minutes of Professor Shelly Kagan’s lecture on the unbelief that our body really will someday die. What insulates us such a reality?
Chapter 7: “Mercy, sir.”
FRQ3: What is it and how to approach it
Homework:
(1) Finish Ivan Ilyich. Take your time. Enjoy it. It’s really beautiful.
(2) Steps 1 and 2 in the SS Process Essay procedure
MEETING 12: ivan ilyich, chapters 8-12
The end of Ivan Ilyich
FRQ3: What is it and how to approach it
Homework:
(1) Complete the sample prose MCQ. Answers in reverse (11-1): bcdceadcabc
(2) Steps 1 and 2 in the SS Process Essay procedure
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MEETINGs 1/ 2: solzhenitsyn, free-indirect style
Here is Solzhenitsyn’s Harvard Commencement Address in 1978. I encourage you watch if you have time.
Welcome to unit 3, a challenging but rewarding unit that will prepare us for our largest project of the year—the reading of War and Peace. In this unit, we’ll balance 5 or 6 shorter works of fiction, a handful of David Lodge chapters, 3 written assignments, AP-style MCQs, and our usual cyclical work. Stay on top of your reading; continue to participate in class; take good notes; give yourself enough time to write your assignments. Learn to work hard not just for this class but for next year as well.
I’ll start class today. Please listen to a few riffs on Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich to get us started. I’ll ask you guys to discuss any of them that interest you or any others that come to mind. Most of today’s class will find us meandering about the novel.
Riffs: Ivan and Alyosha are names from classic Russian works of fiction. Are they a nod to those classics? | What solace does work provide? | If former prisoners are in control, why do they treat the prisoners as they do? | Is the novel a theodicy? |Are we meant to see Shukhov as heroic? | What does the narrator’s short reflection at the end contribute to the rest of the novella? Why tabulate the last 3 days? | Why does the story seem so foreign as a narrative? What components are conspicuously missing? | What are the features of the novel? | Page 49
Key point from the end of meeting one: Third-person narrators rely on three types of discourse to allow us access to a character’s interior space: direct, indirect, and free-indirect. Here’s the handout from class.
Key point from the end of meeting two: One sign of a writer’s skill and command is the artistic concentration of language: with an image, a figure, a symbol, or a detail, a writer makes abstract ideas concrete. Images evoke sensory experience; figures transfer something intangible to something tangible; symbols pack a noun with plurality of meaning; details root meaning in the concrete world of the story. Which of the four does Solzhenitsyn rely on most?
Homework after meeting 2:
(1) Study for your next vocabulary and sentence composition assignment.
(2) Read Chapter 9 in the David Lodge text, “The Stream of Consciousness”. In what ways is stream of consciousness narration similar to free-indirect style?
(3) Read and annotate James Joyce’s short story “A Painful Case,” which I’ve provided to you as a handout. Annotate? Yes, annotate, specifically with an eye to the narration styles. Note moments of direct, indirect, free-indirect, and even what’s close to stream of consciousness. How do the styles allow the narrator to inflect the emotions of the characters?
MEETING 3: joyce, “a painful case”
The Anatomy of 50 Great Sentences: [C]
After the vocabulary quiz, we’ll pass through the phases of our first story from Dubliners, which I’ve identified as follows: (1) The ordinary, ordered existence of Mr. James Duffy, (2) Mrs. Sinico wears away at the rough edges of Mr. Duffy’s character, (3) Mr. Duffy exiles himself from life’s feast, (4) Mrs. Sinico’s suicide, (5) “A Painful Case”, (6) Mr. Duffy’s response, (7) Phantom Hand and Epiphany
Key points from today’s class:
(1) Setting can amplify our understanding of and even have an impact on a character’s interior life.
(2) As Mrs. Sinico reorients Mr. Duffy to a greater reality about himself, the 3rd-person narrator increases free-indirect style, mirroring Mr. Duffy’s increased emotional intelligence.
(3) The short story often relies on exactitude and careful placement of detail. “A Painful Case” relies heavily on sound and silence as an objective correlative to aid our understanding of Mr. Duffy.
Homework:
(1) Read “Epiphany” in David Lodge’s The Art of Fiction, pages 146-8.
(2) Read and annotate James Joyce’s short story “Araby” in the Dubliners packet.
MEETING 4: joyce, “araby” and “eveline”
David Lodge says that an epiphany is any passage in which “external reality is charged with a kind of transcendental significance for the perceiver.” He goes on to say that some might seem like an anticlimax, a moment of defeat or frustration. That seems right in Dubliners. What’s the realization in the epiphanic anticlimax in both “A Painful Case” and “Araby”?
In the second half of class today, we’re going to read “Eveline” in five sections, in a style writer George Saunders recommends for approaching a new story for the first time. Divide your text as I indicate, and we’ll begin.
Why pair “Araby” and “Eveline” together? What do they have in common stylistically? What do they have in common thematically? Select a lens through which you can view both of Joyce’s stories. Work together to make a claim that differentiates the stories thematically.
MEETING 5: joyce, dubliners
Today we’ll finish our discussion of all three stories from Dubliners. Then I’ll set your next essay assignment of the semester.
We’ll review what we covered about prose analysis in Unit 1 and apply a prompt to a passage from James Joyce novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. We’ll finish an MCQ set over the same passage.
Homework:
(1) Begin work on your untimed prose analysis.
(2) Read James Baldwin, “Sonny’s Blues”. It’s in the Baldwin anthology sent to you over the summer.
MEETING 6: baldwin, “sonny’s blues” 1
In the first half of class, we’ll look at a sample prose analysis from your packet.
The Anatomy of 50 Great Sentences: [I]
An opening thought about “Sonny’s Blues”? What are the biggest stylistic differences between Baldwin and Joyce? What does Baldwin do to shape our impressions of the narrator? What are those impressions at various points in the story?
Homework:
(1) Continue work on your prose analysis. Note the new universal deadline of October 17 (I forgot we’re off Wednesday).
(2) Recall David Lodge, “Time-Shift”. Identify a section of Lodge’s chapter that helps you better understand why Baldwin flashes back and forward in the way he does in “Sonny’s Blues”.
(3) Read David Lodge, “Repetition”. Then return to the first 5 paragraphs of “Sonny’s Blues”: Do as Lodge says by marking the syntactic and lexical repetitions Baldwin presents to you. To what thematic end do the repetitions and rhythms persist?
MEETING 7: baldwin, “sonny’s blues” 2
Let’s begin with David Lodge’s “Repetition” chapter. I’m going to bring one of you to the board to walk us through his Hemingway passage. How do the opening paragraphs of “Sonny’s Blues” work in a similar way? What are the grammatical and lexical repetitions that reveal an unspoken idea that the story will explore? In “Another Country,” it’s death; what is it in “SB”?
Let’s work through a few key episodes in the middle of the story: 109-111, 114-115, 119-127.
Should we have time at the end of class, we can put a few of your prose analyses on the board.
Homework:
Prepare for the next vocabulary and sentence composition quiz.
MEETING 8: v/sc quiz; baldwin, “sonny’s blues” 3
After the quiz, I’ll set the next two vocabulary lists and sentence patterns. Please note that we’ll skip the next Day 1 and have a quiz on sets 5 and 6 on November 12 and 13. To compare loose and periodic sentences, we’ll briefly turn to the 50 Great Sentences packet: [K], [R], [BB], [KK], [F], [S], [JJ], [PP], and [TT].
Re-read silently to yourself the final moments of “Sonny’s Blues”. What are you struck by in the final moments? How does the end of the story tie together the loose strings Baldwin dangled throughout the story? Do you think the narrator achieves an epiphany at the end of the story? If so, what is it? What does the allusion to Isaiah at the end of the story reveal about the Baldwin’s thoughts on suffering?
Homework:
(1a) Read Chapter I of Tolstoy’s novella The Death of Ivan Ilyich. The slim volume was provided to you in your textbook delivery. If for some reason you do not have it, you can find one in the study room of the library.
(1b) After reading Chapter I, consider the following quote from Vladimir Nabokov from his lectures on Tolstoy: “One peculiar feature of Tolstoy’s style is what I shall term the ‘groping purist.’ In describing a meditation, emotion, or tangible object, Tolstoy follows the contours of the thought, the emotion, or the object until he is perfectly satisfied with his re-creation, his rendering. This involves what we might call creative repetitions, a compact series of repetitive statements, coming one immediately after the other, each more expressive, each closer to Tolstoy’s meaning. He gropes, he unwraps the verbal parcel for its inner sense, he peels the apple of the phrase, he tries to say it one way, then a better way, he gropes, he stalls, he toys, he Tolstoys with words.”
(1c) Read Chapter I again, more slowly and lovingly this time, with Nabokov’s quote in mind: Can you find an emblematic passage of Tolstoy “unwrapping the verbal parcel” or “peeling the apple of the phrase”? Enjoy the gift, guys, of being able to read this amazing novella in small sections slowly; Tolstoy has much to show us.
