“For me there is only one human side. Full stop!”
Back to this week's assignments -->
Things Fall Apart Summer Reading Assignment
Monday, August 18 (3) - Things Fall Apart Opening Paragraphs; Course introduction; By tomorrow, be sure to register on turnitin.com. Read Achebe, "The Truth of Fiction" and review these questions for analyzing novels. You were asked to compile a list of themes; please bring those to class tomorrow. Finally, you need to purchase copies of Greene's The Power and the Glory, Conrad's Heart of Darkness, and Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment. Refer to the list on the right for the correct editions. Notice that the P&G is due on October 6. There will be an in-class essay (more on the format in due course).
Tuesday, August 19 (4) - Course introduction, cont. For tomorrow, read "6 reading habits from Harvard".
Wednesday, August 20 (5) - Oral Tradition in Things Fall Apart; Why English?;Things Fall Apart; Heed Nabokov's words, below, and reread through Chapter 5 by tomorrow. 1. Pay particular attention to the way the story unfolds. What does the narrator choose to tell you, and when? 2. How are the characters described -- that is, what types of characteristics are valued by the narrator? So, I don't want you to describe Okonkwo and Unoka, but to be able to tell us, for instance, why physical descriptions of characters usually appear before qualities of the mind. 3. What are the core values of this culture? 4. Notice what types of things are not described in the novel.
Thursday, August 21 (6) - Things Fall Apart; Be sure to have reread through Chapter 9 by tomorrow. Misters Zaghrini, Wagner, and Murphy are to come prepared with discussion questions pertaining to Chapters 6-9. Misters Hernandez, Chang (Sunny), and Wager should bring us ideas to think about as we reread Chapters 10-13 by Monday.
Friday, August 22 (1) - Things Fall Apart; Also, read the selections of the following two chapters that I've marked: Prose, Reading Like a Writer. Read at least through Chapter 13 of Things Fall Apart by Monday, but you are required to finish rereading the entire novel by Wednesday (Pace as you like). Below are things to think about as you read 10-13:
Hernandez: Notice the false blind obedience of Ekwefi. What insight does that give us into the Igbo culture?
Chang: Significance to the juxtaposition of the funeral and Okonkwo's gun exploding?
Wager: Notice the evil in the story. What do the Igbo people fear, and why?
Monday, August 25 (2) - Return drafts; Grading notes and Revision assignment; Sample paragraphs (good and bad); TFA; Due tomorrow: Read this essay that thinks in topics, noting in the margins the function of each paragraph. Does it respond to the previous paragraph? Does it establish information or define terms necessary to understand the rest of the essay? By Wednesday, read "The Missionaries" in your edition of TFA (pgs 400-410).
Tuesday, August 26 (3) - Getting beyond the five paragraph essay; Sample Essays on TFA
Wednesday, August 27 (4) - Things Fall Apart;
Thursday, August 28 (5) - Evidence, close reading, paragraph development using TFA; Over the weekend, Read this document on style and pages 360-361 in your edition of TFA (from "It is usually through..." to "...the collective security of Umuofia.") Bring 3 hard copies of your second draft on Tuesday.
Friday, August 29 (6) - Mass of the Holy Spirit - NO CLASSES (probably)
Due Dates
Things Fall Apart Revision - Wednesday, September 3
Read The Power and the Glory by Monday, October 6
"Scholars of Igbo studies call this the principle of complementary dualities. Nothing is absolute and alone. Our philosophical thoughts equip us to see man and woman, life and death, water and fire, secular and spiritual and, so forth.
Igbos have a firm grasp of the abstract. It is true that Igbos talk mainly in proverbs. Now we know that proverbs and analogies are there to help you transmit complex ideas with the human language. Our ancestors did all these bestowing on us certain immutable truths we can feel and connect harmoniously with. One such truth is predestination. Another is will power. Between these polarities the concept of "chi" makes sense.
Even if man is predestined to die, the Igbo believe one can through conscious effort and good deed delay his death and even alter its circumstances. I believe that is what Professor Donatus Nwoga had in mind when he asserts that "Things not only form and act in dualities, it is also possible for forms of reality to change both within the same type of reality and from one type of reality to another. 'No condition is permanent' does not only operate within the social system, but also at the ontological level" (1984 Ahiajoku Lecture, Owerri).
Using the medium of the inadequate English language, my closest definition of chi is that it is one's guardian spirit bestowed on him at birth by Chukwu (God). You excel or fail only with the consent of your chi.
An Igbo believes he can achieve the impossible as long as his chi does not accept defeat. He believes he can build rocket if he works hard and if his chi approves of his efforts (Igbos actually built functional rockets within a seven-month research and production period during the 1967-1970 Biafran/Nigerian war). Coming to South Africa with little more than a traveling bag, he believes he can make it with the blessings of his chi."
- Chigachi Eke, MAN AND HIS ''CHI'': THE IGBO OF WEST AFRICA
“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
AP Jargon
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, 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
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
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
Things Fall Apart Links
Achebe on the writer's responsibility
Slate, The Amazing Story behind Things Fall Apart
Achebe and the African Novel, from The New Yorker
“... 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.