AP English 12: Summer Assignment Instructor: Kate Hanlon E-mail: [email protected] Worth: 100 points Due: August 29, 2017
Welcome! I look forward to sharing an engaging, stimulating, and challenging academic experience over the next school year.
Overview: The purpose of this summer assignment is to expand your reading history to include works of literary merit. Many students write about these books for the exam in May. In addition, reading the works of disparate authors in different genres over the summer should give you a taste of our studies throughout the school year.
**I highly recommend you buy a copy of each book your read over the summer. You should be able to find used copies of these works at Powell’s or another local bookstore for a reasonable price. Find a copy of the work that has large margins because you will be writing in your book. However, you may check out books from the library; if you do, you will need to take copious notes in a notebook, instead of annotating the actual text.
TASK: READING------ANNOTATING------SHORT ASSIGNMENT------POETRY
#1: READING Choose and read two texts (one play, one novel), a “classic” and a “contemporary” (list below) . FICTION DRAMA CLASSIC CONTEMPORARY CLASSIC CONTEMPORARY Jane Austen (not Kingsley Amos Joy Kogawa Aeschylus Edward Albee Persuasion) Rudolfo Anaya Margaret Laurence William Congreve Amiri Baraka Charlotte Brontë Margaret Atwood Bernard Malamud Oliver Goldsmith Samuel Beckett Emily Brontë James Baldwin Katherine Mansfield Henrik Ibsen Anton Chekhov Kate Chopin Saul Bellow Bobbie Ann Mason Ben Jonson Lorraine Hansberry Colette Raymond Carver Carson McCullers Moliére Lillian Hellman Stephen Crane Willa Cather Toni Morrison(not William Shakespeare David Henry Hwang Charles Dickens (not Sandra Cisneros Beloved, or Sula) (not Hamlet, King Lear) David Mamet Tale of Two Cities) John Cheever Bharati Mukherkee Richard B. Sheridan Arthur Miller George Eliot Anita Desai Vladimir Nabokov Sophocles Sean O’Casey Henry Fielding Ralph Ellison Flannery O’Connor Oscar Wilde Eugene O’Neill Thomas Hardy Louise Erdrich Cynthia Ozick Harold Pinter Nathaniel Hawthorne William Faulkner Katherine A. Porter Luigi Pirandello Henry James F. Scott Fitzgerald Jean Rhys George Bernard Shaw D.H. Lawrence Ford Maddox Ford John Updike Sam Shepard Herman Melville E.M. Forster Luisa Valenzuela Tom Stoppard Leo Tolstoy Zora Neale Hurston Alice Walker Luis Valdez Mark Twain Kazuo Ishiguro Evelyn Waugh Tennessee Williams Edith Wharton James Joyce Cormac McCarthy August Wilson Maxine H. Kingston John Edgar Wideman Gabriel G. Márquez Virginia Woolf Ernest Hemingway Richard Wright Jeanette Winterson
#2: ANNOTATIONS Read each work actively. By actively, I mean keep a running conversation with the author by using a pen to mark the work. Highlight and underline significant passages, write detailed paraphrases, jot down intuitive reactions, and record acutely interpretive notes in the margins. If you feel strongly against marking the book, feel free to take notes in a notebook. However, make sure all pages #’s/quotes are clearly identified. How many annotations? A general estimate might be every ten pages in a work of fiction and every 5 pages in a work of drama. When composing these notes, focus on three major aspects of the work:
1. the style or the way the work is written
• diction [word choice] • syntax [phrase & sentence structures] • structure [arrangement of ideas & images within the whole work] • details [facts, observations, and incidents] • imagery [language used to communicate all sensory experience: visual, auditory, olfactory, gustatory, tactile, kinesthetic, organic] • tone [speaker’s attitude, emotional coloring, or moral view toward a subject] • figurative language [personification, simile, metaphor, symbol, irony]
2. the elements in the work
setting character descriptions [physical & psychological; motivations-goals] importance of title & epigraph conflict (s) important words, phrases, sentences, and passages motifs: repeated objects, images, words, or ideas
3. the themes or the major ideas presented in the work
subjects the author addresses & statements a author makes about those subjects questions the author poses & possible answers or lack of answers
#3: SHORT ASSIGNMENT: MAJOR WORKS DATA SHEET X2
FILL OUT ONE OF THESE SHEETS FOR EACH OF THE TEXTS YOU READ OVER THE SUMMER, FOR A TOTAL OF TWO SHEETS. SEE SAMPLE SHEET ATTACHED IF YOU HAVE QUESTIONS.
#4: POETRY:
Read FOUR (4) poems (attached to this document) and apply TPS-FASTT annotations. See sample sheet attached if you have questions.
The Author to Her Book
Thou ill-formed offspring of my feeble brain, Who after birth did’st by my side remain, Til snatched from thence by friends, less wise than true, Who thee abroad exposed to public view; 5 Made thee in rags, halting, to the press to trudge, Where errors were not lessened, all may judge. At thy return my blushing was not small, My rambling brat (in print) should mother call, I cast thee by as one unfit for light, 10 Thy visage was so irksome in my sight; Yet being mine own, at length affection would Thy blemishes amend, if so I could. I washed thy face, but more defects I saw, And rubbing off a spot, still made a flaw. 15 I stretched thy joints to make thee even feet, Yet still thou run’st more hobbling than is meet; In better dress to trim thee was my mind, But nought save homespun cloth in the house I find. In this array, ‘mongst vulgars may’st thou roam; 20 In critics’ hands beware thou dost not come; And take thy way where yet thou are not known. If for thy Father asked, say thou had’st none; And for thy Mother, she alas is poor, Which caused her thus to send thee out of door.
(1678)
“The Possessive” by Sharon Olds
My daughter—as if I owned her—that girl with the hair wispy as a frayed bellpull
has been to the barber, that knife grinder, and had the edge of her hair sharpened.
Each strand now cuts both ways. The blade of new bangs hangs over her red-brown eyes like carbon steel.
All the little spliced ropes are sliced. The curtain of dark paper-cuts veils the face that started from next to nothing in my body—
My body. My daughter. I’ll have to find another word. In her bright helmet she looks at me as if across a great distance. Distant fires can be glimpsed in the resin light of her eyes:
the watch fires of an enemy, a while before the war starts.
Sonnet 130
My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun; Coral is far more red than her lips’ red; If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun; If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head. I have seen roses damasked, red and white, But no such roses see I in her cheeks; And in some perfumes is there more delight Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks. I love to hear her speak, yet well I know That music hath a far more pleasing sound; I grant I never saw a goddess go; My mistress when she walks treads on the ground. And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare As any she belied with false compare.
William Shakespeare, 1564 - 1616
the Cambridge ladies who live in furnished souls the Cambridge ladies who live in furnished souls are unbeautiful and have comfortable minds (also, with the church's protestant blessings daughters,unscented shapeless spirited) they believe in Christ and Longfellow, both dead, are invariably interested in so many things— at the present writing one still finds delighted fingers knitting for the is it Poles? perhaps. While permanent faces coyly bandy scandal of Mrs. N and Professor D .... the Cambridge ladies do not care, above Cambridge if sometimes in its box of sky lavender and cornerless, the moon rattles like a fragment of angry candy
by e.e.cummings
Name
Major Works Data Sheet
Significance of opening scene or chapters Title: ______Author: ______
Date of Publication: ______
Genre: ______
List the major topics that this text addresses: Significance of closing scene or chapters
Description of the author’s style: An example that demonstrates the style:
Memorable Moments Moment Significance
Characters Name Role in the story Significance Adjectives
Settings Setting(s):List all significant settings Significance
Thematic Concerns Themes – Please list three How author addresses each theme
Name
Major Works Data Sheet
Significance of opening scene or chapters Title: ______Author: ______
Date of Publication: ______
Genre: ______
List the major topics that this text addresses: Significance of closing scene or chapters
Description of the author’s style: An example that demonstrates the style:
Memorable Moments Moment Significance
Characters Name Role in the story Significance Adjectives
Settings Setting(s): List all significant settings Significance
Thematic Concerns Themes – Please list three How author addresses each theme
The TPS-FASTT or “Types Fast” Method AP English
When faced with the sometimes daunting task of analyzing a poem, you will need to keep all of the following points in mind or risk a significant misreading:
Title Examine the title before reading the poem. Sometimes the title will give you a clue about the content of the poem. In some cases, the title will give you crucial information that will help you understand a major idea within the poem. For example, in Anne Bradstreet’s poem “An Author to Her Book,” the title helps you understand the controlling metaphor.
Paraphrase Paraphrase the literal action within the poem. At this point, resist the urge to jump to interpretation. A failure to understand what happens literally inevitably leads to an interpretive misunderstanding. For example, John Donne’s poem “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning” is about a man who is leaving for a long trip, but if it is read as a poem about a man dying, then a misreading of the poem as a whole is inevitable.
Speaker Who is the speaker in this poem? Remember to always distinguish speaker from the poet. In some cases the speaker and poet might be the same, as in an autobiographical poem, but often the speaker and the poet are entirely different. For example, in “Not My Best Side” by Fanthorpe, the speaker changes from a dragon, to a damsel, to a knight-none of these obviously are Fanthorpe.
Figurative Language Examine the poem for language that is not used literally. This would include, but is certainly not limited to , literary devices such as imagery, symbolism, metaphor, litotes, allusion, the effect of sound devices (alliteration, onomatopoeia, assonance, consonance, rhyme), and any other devices used in a non-literal manner.
Attitude (TONE) Tone, meaning the speaker’s ATTITUDE towards the SUBJECT of the poem. Of course, this means that you must discern the subject of the poem. In some cases, it will be narrow, and in others it will be broad. Also keep in mind the speaker’s attitude toward self, other characters, and the subject, as well as attitudes of characters other than the speaker.
Shifts Note shifts in speaker and attitude. Shifts can be indicated in a number of ways including the occasion of poem (time and place), key turn words (but, yet), punctuation (dashes, periods, colons, etc), stanza divisions, changes in line or stanza length, and anything else that indicates that something has changed or a question is being answered.
Title Examine the title again, this time on an interpretive level.
Theme First list what the poem is about (subject), then determine what the poet is saying about each of those subjects (theme). Remember, theme must be expressed as a complete sentence.
SAMPLE TPS-FASTT ANNOTATIONS T: A meditation on a 10th birthday, memories of turning 10. The first double digit number. On Turning Ten
The whole idea of it makes me feel P: This poem is about how the world changes when like I'm coming down with something, you turn ten, or get older: you must give up your something worse than any stomach ache imaginary world and live in the real world, which is or the headaches I get from reading in bad a loss for this speaker. light-- a kind of measles of the spirit, S: The speaker is someone older (“the headaches I a mumps of the psyche, get from reading in bad light”) looking back upon a disfiguring chicken pox of the soul. the moment they had to “grow up” and identifies this moment at the day they turned ten. You tell me it is too early to be looking back, but that is because you have forgotten F: the perfect simplicity of being one Metaphors: Compares turning ten to a series of and the beautiful complexity introduced by two. common childhood illnesses in the first stanza. But I can lie on my bed and remember every Pathetic fallacy: “…the late afternoon light./…never digit. fell so solemnly” At four I was an Arabian wizard. Personification: “all the dark blue speed drained out I could make myself invisible of it” by drinking a glass of milk a certain way. Hyperbole: “walk through the universe in my At seven I was a soldier, at nine a prince. sneakers” Metaphor: Compares youth (age 9) to being But now I am mostly at the window contained with “light”, perhaps the light of watching the late afternoon light. imagination, but now as an adult, when he faces Back then it never fell so solemnly difficulties in life (“the sidewalks of life”, ie: against the side of my tree house, sadness or realities of life), he bleeds. and my bicycle never leaned against the garage A: The tone changes from despair in the first as it does today, stanza, to nostalgia in the second stanza. Then the all the dark blue speed drained out of it. poem moves back to despair and loss in the 3rd stanza. This is the beginning of sadness, I say to myself, S: The shift is between the 2nd and 3rd stanza, with as I walk through the universe in my sneakers. the transition word “But now I am…” This shift It is time to say good-bye to my imaginary emphasizes the split between the past and the friends, present for the speaker, and highlights the tone time to turn the first big number. change from nostalgia to resigned loss.
It seems only yesterday I used to believe T: The title dramatizes the event of turning ten and there was nothing under my skin but light. makes it symbolic for the loss (of innocence, If you cut me I could shine. imagination) inherent in growing up. But now when I fall upon the sidewalks of life, I skin my knees. I bleed. T: Collins believes that growing up often requires children to give up their imagination and accept the realities of life—both the joyful and sad times. Imagination can make life more exciting, but also shelter you from sadness or life’s difficulties.
By Billy Collins
Name
Sample Major Works Data Sheet
Significance of opening scene or chapters Title: Of Mice and Men Introduces differences between characters through Author: John Steinbeck indirect characterization. Setting: creates foreshadowing for when/where Lennie Date of Publication: 1929 should go when/if he gets in trouble again. Conflict: tells us how and why Lennie gets in trouble. Genre: Fiction
List the major topics that this text addresses: Friendship Significance of closing scene or chapters Loyalty The Great Depression The ending is tense as George needs to find Lennie Migrant workers before Curly. We also feel George’s sadness at having Disability to kill his best friend; Lennie’s death feels inevitable Loneliness and necessary and his death recalls the parallel Outcasts between George/Lennie and Candy and his dog. The setting circles back to the beginning, creating a tight structure, similar to a play or a parable. Steinbeck ends with dialogue that demonstrates Carlson as cold and uncaring. George, however, may find a new friend in Slim.
Description of the author’s style: An example that demonstrates the style: Lyrical descriptions, vivid imagery “On the sandy bank under the trees the leaves lie deep and so crisp that a lizard makes a great skittering if he
runs among them” (1)
“’ The hell with what I says. You remember about us Realistic dialect, colloquialisms goin’ into Murray and Ready’s, and they give us work cards…?” (5) Biblical allusions Curly’s wife as temptress, who leads George and Lennie off the path of their Eden-like dream. Memorable Moments Moment Significance When Lennie crushes Curly’s hand. The first time we really see Lennie’s brute strength and realize the danger he poses. It offers satisfying revenge
against the bully and antagonist, Curly.
Characters Name Role in the story Significance Adjectives George Protagonist, Caretaker The “average” or “everyman” Lonely, loyal, smart Lennie George’s companion who manages to connect to Disabled, loyal, strong another person. Candy Friend to George, Lennie Old, injured, outsider Lennie becomes a friend due to Slim Leader, “prince of the his disability. An outsider due to Leader, intelligent Curly ranch” disability Belligerent, tough Curly’s Antagonist Candy is the catalyst for the Lonely, frustrated Wife Outsider, temptress possibility of the ranch. Candy= outsider due to age/disability. Tough, lonely Crooks African-American stable hand Curly and his wife are antagonists—they thwart the dream. Curly’s wife is also an outsider due to her gender. Crooks is an outsider. Settings Setting(s):List all significant settings Significance Ranch in Soledad, California. “Soledad” means lonely in Spanish. Steinbeck understood that one result of the depression was that people became disconnected and untrusting; George and Lennie’s relationship is unique, valued, but ultimately doomed during this time period. Steinbeck wants to highlight the difficult life of the migrant worker, and demonstrate the impossibility of the American Dream for the working class. Thematic Concerns Theme Key Words – Please list three How author addresses each theme key word (or author’s opinion of the theme key word)
Steinbeck believes that innocence—as symbolized by Lennie Innocence Smalls—cannot survive the harsh world of competition and loneliness of the Great Depression.
Of Mice and Men demonstrates the importance of friendship Loneliness to alleviate hardship and loneliness.
Outsiders Steinbeck shows the impossibility of attaining the American Dream if you are an outsider, that is, if you are not a white, fully abled man.