12Th Grade AP Timberline High School Summer Reading Instructions POSTCARDS from the AMERICAN DREAM Project

12th Grade AP Timberline High School Summer Reading Instructions POSTCARDS FROM THE AMERICAN DREAM Project

Instructions: This year’s summer reading project will be different from the “read two novels and blog about them” that I’ve assigned in the past. This year, you will read two books from the list below and create 3 digital or physical postcards for each. Yes- 6 TOTAL. Each postcard will include a cited quote from the novel and an image (photo, drawing, collage) that answers the following questions posed by the attached article by professor and writer Kevin Hayes, “Can the Great American Novel Exist?”

 What is the American Dream? How is it defined by the author? Characters?  How is this book a “national epic in prose?” How does it, “within the covers of a single volume… encapsulate the nation?” How does it act as a voice of a generation, its hopes, yearnings, struggles?  How does this book encompass "all the phases of our national life… New Yorker and Navajo, Virginia gentleman and Maine leper, Jew and Catholic, African-American and Italian immigrant, Molly Maguire and millionaire?”  How do the characters partake in the American idea that we can escape our pasts and forge new, self-determined identities? Is this possible, or does the past have a way of resurfacing?  Hayes states that “a truly great novel requires daring. To write The Great American Novel an author faces a double challenge. He or she must not only tell a story that encapsulates the nation but also tell it in a new way, inventing a mode and method of storytelling different from what other novelists have done before.” How is this novel daring? What innovative ideas or modes of storytelling does the author promote or use?

The Basics:  As you read, mark passages that speak to the above questions. Narrow it down to the best 3 per book.  Turn each passage/quote into a postcard: either a DIGITAL postcard using Instagram/Overgram, or an actual PHYSICAL postcard. The image on the postcard should be thoughtfully paired with the quote: it should reveal the quote’s deeper meaning/subtext, the emotional content of the quote, the imagery of the quote, the action of the quote, etc… The quote itself should be prominently displayed and cited on the front of the postcard. Instagram users: you can do this using Overgram or another free app that allows you to place text on an image to post to Instagram.  Include a brief explanation of how your postcard relates to one of the essential questions. If you have a physical postcard, you can simply write your explanation on the back. If you are using Instagram for this project, place your explanation as a comment when you post.

 Mail your physical postcards to school by August 31st. You can put them all in one envelope to save on mailing costs. The address is 6120 Mullen Rd. SE Lacey, WA 98503.  Post your digital postcards to Instagram as you complete them using the hashtag #aplitsullivan. You may use other hashtags as well. You may use your own Instagram account to do this: I will only look at the images with this hashtag- I will not look through anyone’s personal photos, nor do I have any desire to do so. If you are concerned about keeping your other photos private, you may set up a separate Instagram account for this project. Please post your real first and last name in the caption to earn credit.  I encourage you to comment on other students’ work when you see something you like or something thought-provoking.

Example: from The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien

AND NOW (DRUMROLL PLEASE)…THE BOOKS!

(All book reviews are reprinted from amazon.com)

EVERYBODY READS THE GREAT GATSBY In 1922, F. Scott Fitzgerald announced his decision to write "something new--something extraordinary and beautiful and simple and intricately patterned." That extraordinary, beautiful, intricately patterned, and above all, simple novel became The Great Gatsby, arguably Fitzgerald's finest work and certainly the book for which he is best known. A portrait of the Jazz Age in all of its decadence and excess, Gatsby captured the spirit of the author's generation and earned itself a permanent place in American mythology. Self-made, self-invented millionaire Jay Gatsby embodies some of Fitzgerald's--and his country's--most abiding obsessions: money, ambition, greed, and the promise of new beginnings. "Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter--tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther.... And one fine morning--" Gatsby's rise to glory and eventual fall from grace becomes a kind of cautionary tale about the American Dream.

It's also a love story, of sorts, the narrative of Gatsby's quixotic passion for Daisy Buchanan. The pair meet five years before the novel begins, when Daisy is a legendary young Louisville beauty and Gatsby an impoverished officer. They fall in love, but while Gatsby serves overseas, Daisy marries the brutal, bullying, but extremely rich Tom Buchanan. After the war, Gatsby devotes himself blindly to the pursuit of wealth by whatever means--and to the pursuit of Daisy, which amounts to the same thing. "Her voice is full of money," Gatsby says admiringly, in one of the novel's more famous descriptions. His millions made, Gatsby buys a mansion across Long Island Sound from Daisy's patrician East Egg address, throws lavish parties, and waits for her to appear. When she does, events unfold with all the tragic inevitability of a Greek drama, with detached, cynical neighbor Nick Carraway acting as chorus throughout. Spare, elegantly plotted, and written in crystalline prose, The Great Gatsby is as perfectly satisfying as the best kind of poem.

IN ADDITION TO THE GREAT GATSBY, READ ONE OF THE FOLLOWING:

THE BRIEF WONDROUS LIFE OF OSCAR WAO by JUNOT DIAZ It's been 11 years since Junot Díaz's critically acclaimed story collection, Drown, landed on bookshelves and from page one of his debut novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, any worries of a sophomore jinx disappear. The titular Oscar is a 300-pound-plus "lovesick ghetto nerd" with zero game (except for Dungeons & Dragons) who cranks out pages of fantasy fiction with the hopes of becoming a Dominican J.R.R. Tolkien. The book is also the story of a multi-generational family curse that courses through the book, leaving troubles and tragedy in its wake. This was the most dynamic, entertaining, and achingly heartfelt novel I've read in a long time. My head is still buzzing with the memory of dozens of killer passages that I dog-eared throughout the book. The rope-a-dope narrative is funny, hip, tragic, soulful, and bursting with desire. Make some room for Oscar Wao on your bookshelf--you won't be disappointed.

THE THINGS THEY CARRIED by TIM O’BRIEN A finalist for both the 1990 Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, The Things They Carried marks a subtle but definitive line of demarcation between Tim O'Brien's earlier works about Vietnam. In this book he seems less interested in the war itself than in the myriad different perspectives from which he depicts it. The narrator of most of these stories is "Tim"; yet O'Brien freely admits that

3 many of the events he chronicles in this collection never really happened, but just because a thing never happened doesn't make it any less true. The real Tim O'Brien quietly boarded the bus to Sioux Falls and was inducted into the United States Army. But the truth of "On the Rainy River" lies not in facts but in the genuineness of the experience it depicts: both Tims went to a war they didn't believe in; both considered themselves cowards for doing so. Every story in The Things They Carried speaks another truth that Tim O'Brien learned in Vietnam; it is this blurred line between truth and reality, fact and fiction, that makes his book unforgettable.

ON THE ROAD by Jack Kerouac Though Jack Kerouac began thinking about the novel that was to become On the Road as early as 1947, it was not until three weeks in April 1951, in an apartment on West Twentieth Street in Manhattan, that he wrote the first full draft that was satisfactory to him. Typed out as one long, single-spaced paragraph on eight long sheets of tracing paper that he later taped together to form a 120-foot scroll, this document is among the most significant, celebrated, and provocative artifacts in contemporary American literary history. It represents the first full expression of Kerouac's revolutionary aesthetic, the identifiable point at which his thematic vision and narrative voice came together in a sustained burst of creative energy. It was also part of a wider vital experimentation in the American literary, musical, and visual arts in the post-World War II period.

A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley Aging Larry Cook announces his intention to turn over his 1,000-acre farm--one of the largest in Zebulon County, Iowa--to his three daughters, Caroline, Ginny and Rose. A man of harsh sensibilities, he carves Caroline out of the deal because she has the nerve to be less than enthusiastic about her father's generosity. While Larry Cook deteriorates into a pathetic drunk, his daughters are left to cope with the often grim realities of life on a family farm--from battering husbands to cutthroat lenders. In this winner of the 1991 National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, Smiley captures the essence of such a life with stark, painful detail.

Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides "I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974." And so begins Middlesex, the mesmerizing saga of a near-mythic Greek American family and the "roller-coaster ride of a single gene through time." The odd but utterly believable story of Cal Stephanides, and how this 41-year-old hermaphrodite was raised as Calliope, is at the tender heart of this long-awaited second novel from Jeffrey Eugenides, whose elegant and haunting 1993 debut, The Virgin Suicides, remains one of the finest first novels of recent memory. Eugenides weaves together a kaleidoscopic narrative spanning 80 years of a stained family history, from a fateful incestuous union in a small town in early 1920s Asia Minor to Prohibition-era Detroit; from the early days of Ford Motors to the heated 1967 race riots; from the tony suburbs of Grosse Pointe and a confusing, aching adolescent love story to modern-day Berlin. Eugenides's command of the narrative is astonishing. He balances Cal/Callie's shifting voices convincingly, spinning this strange and often unsettling story with intelligence, insight, and generous amounts of humor…when you get to the end of this splendorous book, when you suddenly realize that after hundreds of pages you have only a few more left to turn over, you'll experience a quick pang of regret knowing that your time with Cal is coming to a close, and you may even resist finishing it-- putting it aside for an hour or two, or maybe overnight--just so that this wondrous, magical novel might never end. --Brad Thomas Parsons

The Huffington Post Can The Great American Novel Exist?

Kevin Hayes, Professor, Author Posted: 03/15/2012 4:24 pm

To write The Great American Novel: such has been the goal of American authors for over a century. In recent years, the phrase has been applied to no other novel more frequently than Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections. To be sure, Franzen's is a fine novel. Speaking about the book, Lisa Simpson said, "It makes me feel better about my own family." A story of social realism about an upper middle class Midwestern family in tatters, The Corrections is ultimately quite conservative in terms of both its literary approach and subject matter, however. Can the phrase only be applied to realistic novels that attempt to capture the mainstream American experience? Or can it be applied to other novels that are more diverse in terms of either subject matter or literary approach?

Writing my new book, A Journey through American Literature, I asked myself similar questions. To answer them, I did some research and discovered precisely when the phrase, "The Great American Novel," was invented. As the copywriters at Sheldon and Company, a New York publisher, sought ways to promote Rebecca Harding Davis's 'Waiting for the Verdict' in 1867, they came up with "The Great American Novel." The first published advertisement for this novel represents the phrase's earliest known usage. The book partly justifies the advertising copy in terms of its broad geographic scope and its willingness to broach major issues facing the United States after the Civil War. Waiting for the Verdict intertwines two love stories: one about a Northern abolitionist of illegitimate birth, and an aristocratic Southerner and slaveholder, the other about a small-minded preacher's daughter, and a biracial surgeon who passes as white. In other words, the very first novel ever called The Great American Novel was a story of cultural diversity.

Though Waiting for the Verdict, aesthetically speaking, was not the major novel it was supposed to be, its advertising copy had a lasting impact on American literary culture. The appeal of the copywriters' phrase is easy to understand. The desire for a literary work commensurate with the greatness of the United States stretches back to late eighteenth- century efforts to create a national epic poem. During the final third of the nineteenth century, the novel was emerging as the foremost genre of American literature. The Great American Novel, as it was starting to be defined, would be a national epic in prose. Within the covers of a single volume, it would encapsulate the nation.

Years later, Davis herself indicated what The Great American Novel should involve. She suggested that it should encompass "all the phases of our national life." It should include New Yorker and Navajo, Virginia gentleman and Maine leper, Jew and Catholic, African-American and Italian immigrant, Molly Maguire and millionaire. In short, Davis insisted that The Great

American Novel must incorporate diversity. Despite her suggestions, she was not necessarily upholding The Great American Novel as an ideal. She called it "that much longed-for monstrosity."

Yet the phrase continued to be applied to mainstream works into the twentieth century. In her 1920 essay "The Great American Novel," Edith Wharton expressed frustration with the ongoing popularity of Sinclair Lewis's Main Street. Set in Gopher Prairie, Minnesota, 'Main Street' is a send-up of small town, Midwestern America. Despite Lewis's satirical edge, his portrayal strongly influenced stereotypes about the United States around the world and, to Wharton's chagrin, reinforced the notion that The Great American Novel should be set in small town America, that it "must always be about Main Street, geographically, socially, and intellectually." Instead, Wharton suggested that The Great American Novel need not be set in the center of the United States. It could be set anywhere in the world or in the imagination. From Wharton's perspective, the only requirement for The Great American Novel is that it be written by an American.

To the suggestions of Rebecca Harding Davis and Edith Wharton, I would add one additional requirement. The Great American Novel should not only be diverse in terms of its subject but also in terms of its aesthetics. A truly great novel requires daring. To write The Great American Novel an author faces a double challenge. He or she must not only tell a story that encapsulates the nation but also tell it in a new way, inventing a mode and method of storytelling different from what other novelists have done before. Novelists with the ambition, talent, and daring to accept this challenge come along only once or twice a century.