english 3, summer 2025
MEETING 3: “Sonny’s blues”, day 1
We’ll begin today with your vocabulary quiz and then set the words for list two.
After the quiz, we can turn to “Sonny’s Blues.” I’d like one of you to start our discussion with an opening thought: Is there a detail that struck you or that you don’t understand? Is there a line you found interesting or powerful? Is there a character you don’t really understand?
Then, I’d like to perform a close-reading of the first few paragraphs. Do you see Baldwin setting up ideas he returns to later? What are we to make of the narrator, anyway? Have your opinions about him taken shape?
Thesis 1: The real difference between Sonny and the narrator in “Sonny’s Blues” is that, while the narrator follows a more traditional path in life, Sonny improvises an existence. In fact, it’s the story’s main motif of music that serves as a metaphor for the story’s larger theme about living: While the narrator plays the right notes laid out for him by life’s composer, Sonny relies on his own and finds more meaning in an ability to improvise, living life one note at a time just as he does when he plays jazz in Harlem’s nightclubs.
Topic sentence 1: The narrator’s encouragement of his brother to follow a more typical and practical path in life shows more about his own stubbornness and his inability to adapt and follow his own path.
Topic sentence 2: In contrast, the novel uses Sonny’s love for music to suggest an alternative path in life, one focused on improvising and adapting to what life throws his way, playing life’s notes he feels are right.
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Thesis 2: Whereas both characters in “Sonny’s Blues” remain in the darkness at the end of the story, Sonny is the only brother who manages to find comfort and happiness in that darkness. The narrator, as shown by his reliance on contrasting images of and references to darkness and light, struggles to be at peace with where he is in the world, always wishing he was somewhere else. James Baldwin’s short story shows, despite what we might hope, the grass is not always greener on the other side, and that real happiness lies where we are if only we allow ourselves to see it.
Topic sentence 1: While it may seem like the narrator finds comfort and happiness in seeing his brother prosper at the end of the story, the story’s references to light and dark actually show he remains just as unhappy as he was at the beginning, still unable to break free from the life he resents in Harlem.
Topic sentence 2: Likewise, while it appears Sonny finally finds his place in the light at the end of the story, he actually rejects the light and rather, unlike his brother, learns how to live a happy life in both the literal and metaphorical darkness.
Homework:
(1) Prep Vocabulary List 2.
(2) Finish James Baldwin’s short story “Sonny’s Blues”.
(3) Begin your argumentative body paragraph assignment. We’ll look at a few of your drafts in class on Monday.
MEETING 2: learning to interpret, day 2
Today we’ll begin by finishing the first sentence composition exercise that we started yesterday. I’ll ask a few of you to put your sentences up on the board. Then, after analyzing a few movie stills, I’ll ask you to write a few sentences of interpretation using our first sentence patterns.
Take a few minutes before the first break to compare your first vocabulary list with a partner and quiz each other on your words in preparation for tomorrow’s quiz.
Recall the process we used to work through “A Clean, Well-lighted Place”. We’ll use the same process today with a second Hemingway story, “Cat in the Rain”. Which character from the two stories are you drawn to? Consider using that character to make a claim for your first writing assignment of the semester. Which character seems the most sympathetic? Which is most despicable? Why? What details in the story lead you to believe what you believe?
We’ll use an effective body paragraph to review the basic parts of the body paragraph.
At the end of class, if there’s time, you may begin your reading of “Sonny’s Blues”.
Homework:
(1) Study for Vocabulary Quiz 1.
(2) Read James Baldwin’s short story “Sonny’s Blues”, pages 122-middle of 139, stopping at the break in the page.
MEETING 1: learning to interpret, day 1
Hopper, “Nighthawks,” often thought to have been inspired by Hemingway’s “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place”
“If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about, he may omit things that he knows, and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. A writer who omits things because he does not know them only makes hollow places in his writing.” (Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon)
How do we know whether or not a writer does know what’s beneath the surface. How can a writer like Hemingway reveal the other 7/8 of what’s going on with just the 1/8 above the surface?
Take, for example, this passage from The Sun Also Rises, wherein two men, the protagonist and his friend, have a simple conversation while fishing. Bill tries to show Jake what exactly?
William Faulkner, Hemingway’s contemporary and fellow writer, once said of Hemingway, “He has no courage, has never crawled out on a limb. He has never been known to use a word that might cause the reader to check with a dictionary to see if it is properly used.”
James Joyce once remarked: "He [Hemingway] has reduced the veil between literature and life, which is what every writer strives to do. Have you read “A Clean Well-Lighted Place”?...It is masterly. Indeed, it is one of the best short stories ever written...”
Let’s read together “A Clean Well-Lighted Place”.
Sentence Composition: Complex and Compound Sentences
Set Vocabulary Assignment.
Homework:
(1) Register on turnitin.com. Class ID: 48899661, Enrollment Key: Magis
(2) Familiarize yourself with the course policies on the course description and syllabus.
(3) Prep your first vocabulary list.
