On Grief...

As we're talking about a book called As I Lay Dying, we should think about what some of the stages of grief are. Take a look at this for more info.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kübler-Ross_model

Essay due Wednesday!!

Your essay is due on Wednesday!! Don't forget!! Make sure you have a copy, printed, and ready to go for class!! If you need help, email me.

Quiz Tomorrow

For the quiz tomorrow, you should know:

Characters, Plot, Setting of Barn Burning * several questions on this
Characters, Plot, Setting of As I Lay Dying, so far (and published when?) * the majority of questions on this
Faulkner's Nobel Speech -- (When and) What is Faulkner's purpose for writing?
Cubism and how does it relate?
Interior Monologues
Stream of Consciousness -- Define

Other random information you might want to know for the quiz:

Faulkner's grandfather's nickname was "The Old Colonel" -- (From the movie we watched)

Other novels by Faulkner include:
Absalom! Absolom!
Light in August
The Sound and the Fury
Go Down, Moses
The Hamlet
Requiem for a Nun
Intruder in the Dust

Over the break

I hope you enjoyed watching O Brother, Where Art Thou? Pretty awesome movie, huh? Makes you think, hmmm, should I feel bad for laughing at this dysfunctional family and their problems???

As I mentioned in class, your reading assignment is to read to page 176 by Monday. If you do not have a book, unfortunately, they have not come in. What I suggest to you is to borrow one from a local library or you can purchase one for approximately $12 new at your local Barnes and Nobel or Borders store. If you have problems or are not able to purchase your own copy, please email me any concerns and I will make sure you get a copy for class.

I want to forewarn you that you will have a quiz on Tuesday December 1, 2009 on what we have discussed in class and have read so far.

Ms. Moraites

Handouts

I have been working on adding the handouts to Google Docs for you to access if you are not in class or if you lose them in your wild travels as teenagers. So, without much adieu, here they are. I will be updating these more often for you.

Full text of "Barn Burning"
http://www.rajuabju.com/literature/barnburning.htm

Handouts:

Gatsby Wrap-Up
http://docs.google.com/fileview?id=0B1015hZr-WuRODEyNGQwZjMtODcyYi00NzI3LTgxMTItOGYyY2M5MmUxMWY0&hl=en

As I Lay Dying Intro Packet with Nobel Prize Speech
http://docs.google.com/fileview?id=0B1015hZr-WuRNmU2YjMzZGItYjk3NC00YjQzLThlM2EtYTVlNzZhOGI5ODg0&hl=en

Cubism and Interior Monologues
http://docs.google.com/fileview?id=0B1015hZr-WuRNGNkNzFjZjItOTA1YS00OGU3LWEwMWUtYTFiYWUzZGVjMGYx&hl=en

As I Lay Dying Discussion Handout
http://docs.google.com/fileview?id=0B1015hZr-WuRMDIxYzc0ZDUtOGEwNy00OTQ1LThiODItYTJiNjZlNTJiNzNi&hl=en

Comedy or Tragedy?

Southern Gothic:

Today we will be watching the film O Brother, Where Art Thou? in class.

How can we feel both comedy and tragedy at the same time?

Think about: What are the connections to As I Lay Dying?

Monday's Agenda

Because Friday's quiz and activity took most of the time, we will continue with discovering As I Lay Dying together on Monday. Sorry for those of you who were excited to share out what you had read! I really think taking the time to cover the characters/narrators will help you make a bit more sense out of what we are reading.

I just want to say that the stream of consciousness / interior monologues that you wrote were brilliant! I think the four of you that shared had fantastic interior monologues. -- Two of which were filled with poetic language and complex ideas while the other two exemplified the essence of fragmentation of thought, yet all were disconnected from the present reality. So, two different styles of writing that both accomplished the same thing. Awesome!

The handout given in class should give you even more clarification on what this type of writing looks like. Thank you for your contributions. That kind of participation is encouraged and those participation grades certainly will be boosted for those of you who frequently contribute in class in activities -- for example, this exercise, our in-classroom discussions, and the 5 minute free-write reflections that I will continue to have you write in class.

On Monday, we will really begin to dissect the first section of As I Lay Dying in small groups. (!!!!)

Ms. Moraites

Ms. Moraites' E-mail

Thanks for a great discussion today, and I hope you are enjoying reading the book and that I was able to shed light on a few things for you today. As you begin to think about the novel and start writing your papers, I encourage you to email me any questions or concerns about assignments or even drafts or outlines of your upcoming paper due. Basically, if you need me in any way, please let me know because I want to help you. I check my email constantly at home or on my iPhone, so I will/should respond quickly. :-)

You can email me at:

ms.moraites@gmail.com

Have a great weekend!
Ms. Moraites

As I Lay Dying 11/20/09

Agenda:

1. Intro to the characters -- who are they? Why so many perspectives??
2. Read first chapter aloud
3. Small group discussions

Homework:
Read to page 84 for Monday
Work on Essay due Dec 2nd

Faulkner Reading Assignment

Thank you for your discussion today!

Again, follow the handout's reading assignments. The assignments are due the day listed. If you did NOT read "Barn Burning" for today and respond in class, you are also expected to read it and turn in a response reflecting on the story for tomorrow.


You can access the full first reading assignment by going to the barnes and noble website. You MUST CREATE A Barnes and Noble ACCOUNT to have a full preview. Otherwise, you will not be able to read the whole assignment for tomorrow.

http://search.barnesandnoble.com/As-I-Lay-Dying/William-Faulkner/e/9780679732259/?itm=1&USRI=as+i+lay+dying

See you tomorrow! Be prepared to break up into small groups for discussion :-)

Literary Terms for quiz Fri. 11/20

You should know these terms for the short quiz tomorrow:

mood, narrative, oxymoron, paradox, parallelism (the rhetorical effect it has), antithesis, anaphora, parody, periodic sentence, personification, point of view, prose, repetition, rhetoric, rhetorical modes:

Exposition
Argumentation
Description
Narration


Link to Yoknapatawpha County--Extra Credit question

Extra Credit Question: Can you answer the trivia question posted on the blog?

Agenda for 11/18/09

1. Get As I Lay Dying from library
2. Watch video about Faulkner for background

Homework: Read "Barn Burning" and his Nobel Speech for tomorrow
Full text of Barn Burning online at http://www.rajuabju.com/literature/barnburning.htm

(and) for those of you who were not in class on Tuesday's wrap-up of the great novel The Great Gatsby, there is a one page reflection on the question assigned.

Wilderness of Childhood Essay Michael Chabon

The New York Review of Books

Volume 56, Number 12 · July 16, 2009
Manhood for Amateurs: The Wilderness of Childhood
By Michael Chabon

When I was growing up, our house backed onto woods, a thin two-acre remnant of a once-mighty wilderness. This was in a Maryland city where the enlightened planners had provided a number of such lingering swaths of green. They were tame as can be, our woods, and yet at night they still filled with unfathomable shadows. In the winter they lay deep in snow and seemed to absorb, to swallow whole, all the ordinary noises of your body and your world. Scary things could still be imagined to take place in those woods. It was the place into which the bad boys fled after they egged your windows on Halloween and left your pumpkins pulped in the driveway. There were no Indians in those woods, but there had been once. We learned about them in school. Patuxent Indians, they'd been called. Swift, straight-shooting, silent as deer. Gone but for their lovely place names: Patapsco, Wicomico, Patuxent.

A minor but undeniable aura of romance was attached to the history of Maryland, my home state: refugee Catholic Englishmen, cavaliers in ringlets and ruffs, pirates, battles, the sack of Washington, "The Star-Spangled Banner," Harriet Tubman, Antietam. And when you went out into those woods behind our house, you could feel all that history, those battles and dramas and romances, those stories. You could work it into your games, your imaginings, your lonely flights from the turmoil or torpor of your life at home. My friends and I spent hours there, braves, crusaders, commandos, blues and grays.
The Charles Bronfman Prize

But the Wilderness of Childhood, as any kid could attest who grew up, like my father, on the streets of Flatbush in the Forties, had nothing to do with trees or nature. I could lose myself on vacant lots and playgrounds, in the alleyway behind the Wawa, in the neighbors' yards, on the sidewalks. Anywhere, in short, I could reach on my bicycle, a 1970 Schwinn Typhoon, Coke-can red with a banana seat, a sissy bar, and ape-hanger handlebars. On it I covered the neighborhood in a regular route for half a mile in every direction. I knew the locations of all my classmates' houses, the number of pets and siblings they had, the brand of popsicle they served, the potential dangerousness of their fathers.

Matt Groening once did a great Life in Hell strip that took the form of a map of Bongo's neighborhood. At one end of a street that wound among yards and houses stood Bongo, the little one-eared rabbit boy. At the other stood his mother, about to blow her stack—Bongo was late for dinner again. Between mother and son lay the hazards—labeled angry dogs, roving gang of hooligans, girl with a crush on bongo—of any journey through the Wilderness: deadly animals, antagonistic humans, lures and snares. It captured perfectly the mental maps of their worlds that children endlessly revise and refine. Childhood is a branch of cartography.

Most great stories of adventure, from The Hobbit to Seven Pillars of Wisdom, come furnished with a map. That's because every story of adventure is in part the story of a landscape, of the interrelationship between human beings (or Hobbits, as the case may be) and topography. Every adventure story is conceivable only with reference to the particular set of geographical features that in each case sets the course, literally, of the tale. But I think there is another, deeper reason for the reliable presence of maps in the pages, or on the endpapers, of an adventure story, whether that story is imaginatively or factually true. We have this idea of armchair traveling, of the reader who seeks in the pages of a ripping yarn or a memoir of polar exploration the kind of heroism and danger, in unknown, half-legendary lands, that he or she could never hope to find in life.

This is a mistaken notion, in my view. People read stories of adventure—and write them—because they have themselves been adventurers. Childhood is, or has been, or ought to be, the great original adventure, a tale of privation, courage, constant vigilance, danger, and sometimes calamity. For the most part the young adventurer sets forth equipped only with the fragmentary map—marked here there be tygers and mean kid with air rifle—that he or she has been able to construct out of a patchwork of personal misfortune, bedtime reading, and the accumulated local lore of the neighborhood children.

A striking feature of literature for children is the number of stories, many of them classics of the genre, that feature the adventures of a child, more often a group of children, acting in a world where adults, particularly parents, are completely or effectively out of the picture. Think of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, The Railway Children, or Charles Schulz's Peanuts. Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy presents a chilling version of this world in its depiction of Cittàgazze, a city whose adults have all been stolen away. Then there is the very rich vein of children's literature featuring ordinary contemporary children navigating and adventuring through a contemporary, nonfantastical world that is nonetheless beyond the direct influence of adults, at least some of the time. I'm thinking of the Encyclopedia Brown books, the Great Brain books, the Henry Reed and Homer Price books, the stories of the Mad Scientists' Club, a fair share of the early works of Beverly Cleary.

As a kid, I was extremely fond of a series of biographies, largely fictional, I'm sure, that dramatized the lives of famous Americans—Washington, Jefferson, Kit Carson, Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, Daniel Boone—when they were children. (Boys, for the most part, though I do remember reading one about Clara Barton.) One element that was almost universal in these stories was the vast amounts of time the famous historical boys were alleged to have spent wandering with bosom companions, with friendly Indian boys or a devoted slave, through the once-mighty wilderness, the Wilderness of Childhood, entirely free of adult supervision.

Though the wilderness available to me had shrunk to a mere green scrap of its former enormousness, though so much about childhood had changed in the years between the days of young George Washington's adventuring on his side of the Potomac and my own suburban exploits on mine, there was still a connectedness there, a continuum of childhood. Eighteenth-century Virginia, twentieth-century Maryland, tenth-century Britain, Narnia, Neverland, Prydain—it was all the same Wilderness. Those legendary wanderings of Boone and Carson and young Daniel Beard (the father of the Boy Scouts of America), those games of war and exploration I read about, those frightening encounters with genuine menace, far from the help or interference of mother and father, seemed to me at the time—and I think this is my key point—absolutely familiar to me.

The thing that strikes me now when I think about the Wilderness of Childhood is the incredible degree of freedom my parents gave me to adventure there. A very grave, very significant shift in our idea of childhood has occurred since then. The Wilderness of Childhood is gone; the days of adventure are past. The land ruled by children, to which a kid might exile himself for at least some portion of every day from the neighboring kingdom of adulthood, has in large part been taken over, co-opted, colonized, and finally absorbed by the neighbors.

The traveler soon learns that the only way to come to know a city, to form a mental map of it, however provisional, and begin to find his or her own way around it is to visit it alone, preferably on foot, and then become as lost as one possibly can. I have been to Chicago maybe a half-dozen times in my life, on book tours, and yet I still don't know my North Shore from my North Side, because every time I've visited, I have been picked up and driven around, and taken to see the sights by someone far more versed than I in the city's wonders and hazards. State Street, Halsted Street, the Loop—to me it's all a vast jumbled lot of stage sets and backdrops passing by the window of a car.

This is the kind of door-to-door, all-encompassing escort service that we adults have contrived to provide for our children. We schedule their encounters for them, driving them to and from one another's houses so they never get a chance to discover the unexplored lands between. If they are lucky, we send them out to play in the backyard, where they can be safely fenced in and even, in extreme cases, monitored with security cameras. When my family and I moved onto our street in Berkeley, the family next door included a nine-year-old girl; in the house two doors down the other way, there was a nine-year-old boy, her exact contemporary and, like her, a lifelong resident of the street. They had never met.

The sandlots and creek beds, the alleys and woodlands have been aban- doned in favor of a system of reservations—Chuck E. Cheese, the Jungle, the Discovery Zone: jolly internment centers mapped and planned by adults with no blank spots aside from doors marked staff only. When children roller-skate or ride their bikes, they go forth armored as for battle, and their parents typically stand nearby.

There are reasons for all of this. The helmeting and monitoring, the corralling of children into certified zones of safety, is in part the product of the Consumer Reports mentality, the generally increased consciousness, in America, of safety and danger. To this one might add the growing demands of insurance actuarials and the national pastime of torts. But the primary reason for this curtailing of adventure, this closing off of Wilderness, is the increased anxiety we all feel over the abduction of children by strangers; we fear the wolves in the Wilderness. This is not a rational fear; in 1999, for example, according to the Justice Department, the number of abductions by strangers in the United States was 115. Such crimes have always occurred at about the same rate; being a child is exactly no more and no less dangerous than it ever was. What has changed is that the horror is so much better known. At times it seems as if parents are being deliberately encouraged to fear for their children's lives, though only a cynic would suggest there was money to be made in doing so.

The endangerment of children—that persistent theme of our lives, arts, and literature over the past twenty years—resonates so strongly because, as parents, as members of preceding generations, we look at the poisoned legacy of modern industrial society and its ills, at the world of strife and radioactivity, climatological disaster, overpopulation, and commodification, and feel guilty. As the national feeling of guilt over the extermination of the Indians led to the creation of a kind of cult of the Indian, so our children have become cult objects to us, too precious to be risked. At the same time they have become fetishes, the objects of an unhealthy and diseased fixation. And once something is fetishized, capitalism steps in and finds a way to sell it.

What is the impact of the closing down of the Wilderness on the development of children's imaginations? This is what I worry about the most. I grew up with a freedom, a liberty that now seems breathtaking and almost impossible. Recently, my younger daughter, after the usual struggle and exhilaration, learned to ride her bicycle. Her joy at her achievement was rapidly followed by a creeping sense of puzzlement and disappointment as it became clear to both of us that there was nowhere for her to ride it—nowhere that I was willing to let her go. Should I send my children out to play?

There is a small grocery store around the corner, not over two hundred yards from our front door. Can I let her ride there alone to experience the singular pleasure of buying herself an ice cream on a hot summer day and eating it on the sidewalk, alone with her thoughts? Soon after she learned to ride, we went out together after dinner, she on her bike, with me following along at a safe distance behind. What struck me at once on that lovely summer evening, as we wandered the streets of our lovely residential neighborhood at that after-dinner hour that had once represented the peak moment, the magic hour of my own childhood, was that we didn't encounter a single other child.

Even if I do send them out, will there be anyone to play with?

Art is a form of exploration, of sailing off into the unknown alone, heading for those unmarked places on the map. If children are not permitted—not taught—to be adventurers and explorers as children, what will become of the world of adventure, of stories, of literature itself?


Copyright © 1963-2009, NYREV, Inc. All rights reserved. Nothing in this publication may be reproduced without the permission of the publisher. Please contact web@nybooks.com with any questions about this site. The cover date of the next issue will be December 17, 2009.

Great Gatsby Discussion questions

Pre-Reading

1. Why are we still reading a book written in the 1920's? What gives a book its longevity?
2. How was the 1920's a reaction to WWI?
3. Some people think that having money leads to happiness. Do you agree? Why or why not? What are the advantages or disadvantages of being wealthy.
4. What is the "American Dream"? Where did it originate, and how has it changed over the centuries?
5. Have you ever wanted to relive a moment from your past, to redo it? Describe the situation. How and why would you change the past?


Chapter 1

1. Notice how many times Fitzgerald uses the words hope, or dream. Why does he do this?
2. Nick starts the novel by relaying his father's advice "Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone, just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had." List Nick's advantages. Does he reserve judgement in the novel?
3. Pay attention to time. What is the day and year during the first scene at Daisy's house?
4. Describe Nick. What facts do you know about him, and what do you infer about him? What kind of a narrator do you think he will be?
5. What image does the author use to describe Jordan Baker? What does it mean?
6. How does Nick react to Jordan?
7. What does Tom's behavior reveal about his character?



Chapter 2

1. Describe the "valley of ashes." What does it look like and what does it represent?
2. Describe Mr. Wilson and Myrtle. Do they seem to fit into the setting?
3. What more have you learned about Nick in this chapter? Is he similar or different than the people he spends his time with?
4. Describe the violent act Tom comitted against Myrtle. What does this reveal about him?



Chapter 3

1. Pay attention to Nick's judgements. What do they reveal about his character that he does this (especially in relation to his opening comments)?
2. Describe Gatsby the first time Nick sees him.
3. What rumors have been told about Gatsby? Why does Fitzgerald reveal rumors rather than fact?
4. What does Nick think of Gatsby after meeting him?
5. How is Gatsby different from his guests?
6. Why does Nick choose to share his thoughts and feelings with Jordan?
7. Nick thinks he's one of the few honest people he knows, why? Do you think he is honest?


Chapter 4

1. List all of the rumors told about Gatsby.
2. Why does Fitzgerald list all of Gatsby's party guests?
3. Why does Gatsby tell Nick about his life? Do you believe Gatsby? Does Nick?
4. What role does Meyer Wolfsheim play in the novel? Why is there so much focus on his nose and what does this tell you about Fitzgerald's politics?
5. What does Jordan's story of Daisy's marriage reveal about Daisy?
6. Why did Gatsby want Daisy to see his house?
7. Nick says, "There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy and the tired." What does Nick mean? How does each character in the novel fit into this schema?


Chapter 5

1. Why does Gatsby deliver so many goods and services to Nick's house?
2. Describe the effect of rain on the plot.
3. Why does Gatsby offer Nick work? How does Nick feel about this?
4. Explain the significance of the green light.
5. Why does Gatsby get so many phone calls? What does this say about him?


Chapter 6

1. How truthful was Gatsby when he relayed the story of his life to Nick? Why does Fitzgerald tell the story of Jay Gatz now?
2. Describe the meeting of Tom and Gatsby. What does this meeting reveal about them?
3. Why did Daisy and Tom find Gatsby's party loathsome?
4. How did Gatsby measure the success of his party?
5. When Nick told Gatsby that "you can't repeat the past", Gatsby replied, "Why of course you can!" Do you agree with Nick or Gatsby?



Chapter 7

1. Who is Trimachio? Explain how this describes Gatsby.
2. Describe Daisy and Gatsby's new relationship.
3. Compare George Wilson and Tom. What did each man learn about his wife and how did they each react?
4. If Daisy says she's never loved Tom, is there someone whom she thinks she loves?
5. Describe the fight between Gatsby and Tom. What do these men think of each other? How are they similar and how are they different?
6. What was significant about Nick's 30th birthday?
7. What do you think Tom and Daisy were saying to each other in the kitchen? Do you think that Tom knew Daisy was driving the "death car"? Why, why not?
8. At this point, how would you end the novel?


Chapter 8

1. How does Fitzgerald achieve a melancholic mood in the beginning of this chapter?
2. How are seasons used in constructing this novel?
3. Who is Dan Cody and what is his significance in Gatsby's life?
4. How does Nick's statement "You're worth the whole bunch put together" show a change in Nick from the beginning of the novel?
5. How does T. J. Eckleberg affect Mr. Wilson?



Chapter 9

1. Why did Nick take care of Gatsby's funeral?
2. How was Jay Gatz's childhood schedule consistent with the adult Gatsby's behavior?
3. Who attended Gatsby's funeral? How and why is this significant?
4. What is the purpose of Nick's last meeting with Jordan?
5. Why does Nick call Tom and Daisy "careless people"?


Post Reading

1. Does this novel have villains and heroes? Why, why not? If yes, who fits into these categories and why?
2. Nick is both part of the action and acting as an objective commentator. Does this narration style work? Why, why not?
3. How did Fitzgerald use weather to reflect the mood of the story?
4. Again, why are we still reading a book written in the 1920's? What gives a book its longevity? And which of its themes are eternal in the American psyche.

AP Packets/Great Gatsby

Play Roaring Twenties game
www.mccord-museum.qc.ca/en/keys/games/game_0_1920s/

Great Gatsby Treasure Hunt

www.huffenglish.com/gatsby/gatsbyhunt.html

Journal Prompts:

1. “Write about the American Dream? What is it and what does it mean to you? What are your dreams for the future?” “If money was not an issue…What effect would wealth have upon the dreams that you wrote about earlier?”
2. “How do you feel about the characters that you have met in the Great Gatsby so far? Do any of the characters remind you of anybody that you know? How have the female characters been portrayed so far? ”
3. “Literature often reflects the time period in which it is created. What have you learnt or did you already know about the period in which The Great Gatsby was written?”
4. “What are your impressions of Gatsby? Do you believe the account of his past? Why/Why not? Given Daisy's story, what do you think will happen next in the novel?”

5. “Have you ever wanted to repeat the past? How realistic do you think Gatsby's dream is?”
6. “What is great about the Great Gatsby? What are your opinions of Gatsby now that you have finished the novel? How great was he and why?”
7. “The Great Gatsby is a novel about … Avoiding a simple plot summary, discuss what you think the novel we have just read is really about. What is Fitzgerald trying to do in his book?”

Fri. 11/6 AP Packet Great Gatsby

Go over AP Multiple Choice

AP Packet Essay #3 DUE MONDAY

Read Great Gatsby to page 102 for TUESDAY!

The Great Gatsby

Agenda:


The Roaring Twenties!

Break into groups of approx. 4 people and work on creating a portrait of images, videos, icons, and info for your topic.

Ms. Moraites' portrait of the 1920s http://wallwisher.com/wall/gatsbyand1920s


*American Society of the 1920s http://wallwisher.com/wall/per9amersociety

*The American Dream http://wallwisher.com/wall/per9amerdream

*The Lost Generation – F. Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda http://wallwisher.com/wall/per9lostgen

*Art Movements of the 1920s http://wallwisher.com/wall/per9arts20s


Share with the class the highlights of your topic.

Homework:
1. Continue to read
2. What emerging theme do you see in The Great Gatsby? Post an answer on the wall link below:

http://wallwisher.com/wall/themesofgatsby

AP Packet #2 Read Question #1 in packet #2

Read Question #1 in packet #2

Begin working on a 40 minute essay

Packet multiple choice questions due FRIDAY