Leaning Literary: May 2014

For the Final Exam Day

Read at least one article by G. K. Chesterton.
Consider reading any Sherlock Holmes story (optional).
Bring party goodness.
Bring a card to write a thank you to someone.
Take my course survey now, soon, or during class.
Consider the extra credit opportunities.

I am a shameless G. K. Chesterton enthusiast. If you want to know why, read a few of these quotations. If nothing there interests you, then you probably won't enjoy reading more of him.

I lead a monthly book club (to which you are most welcome to join!) in Watsonville that chiefly reads Chesterton. I wrote my master's thesis on Chesterton. He inspires me richly.

If you would like to learn a bit about him, here is some background:

God's Knight and Jester: G. K. Chesterton (1874--1936)

Chestertonia Often Found in Class:

Some Ideas on Mythology
For Midsummer

On Bottom the Weaver

"On Cheese"

"On Fragments" by G. K. Chesterton
In your notes, answer this question: How is bread and cheese invoked differently here than in the essay on cheese?

"The Blue Cross"

Sherlock Holmes and Father Brown

"A Piece of Chalk"

Notes on the Essay

G. K. C.: Essays and Criticism

What's Wrong

"The Wildness of Domesticity"

All Things Considered

"An Essay on Two Cities"!

Tremendous Trifles

Required reading at UCSC (at some point)
"A Piece of Chalk"

The Defendant
- "A Defense of Skeletons"
- "A Defense of Ugly Things"
- "A Defense of Baby-Worship"

A Kind of Spiritual Autobiography

G. K. C.: Poetry

G. K. C.: Stories and Novels

G. K. C.: The More Political Side: Distributism, History, etc.

Chesterton's Writing Chair

Extra Credit Opportunities

If you have had high grades all year (A's or high B's every quarter), you may leave your binder with me for extra credit:

Binder = 3 points

If you have awesome memorization cards, donate them to our worthy AP prep. cause:

Awesome note cards = 2 points

AP Literature Survey

Friends,

Please take 5-10 minutes to respond to my course survey to help me improve.

Thank you! Please click here for the online survey.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

The link up here will take you to the first of twelve adventures in the book. It's "A Scandal in Bohemia"... and Holmes is actually outwitted. Read any that you wish.

Conan Doyle was asked to list the stories he thought best. Here is his first list:

1. "The Adventure of the Speckled Band" (This one is a link to the tale!)
2. "The Redheaded League"
3. "The Adventure of the Dancing Men"
4. "The Final Problem"
5. "A Scandal in Bohemia"
6. "The Adventure of the Empty House"
7. "The Five Orange Pips"
8. "The Adventure of the Second Stain"
9. "The Adventure of the Devil's Foot"
10. "The Adventure of the Priory School"
11. "The Musgrave Ritual"
12. "The Reigate Squires"

Later, considering his short stories about Sherlock Holmes written after 1927, and reconsidering some written before that date, Doyle added seven more favorites.

1. "Silver Blaze"
2. "The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans"
3. "The Crooked Man"
4. "The Man with the Twisted Lip"
5. "The Greek Interpreter"
6. "The Resident Patient"
7. "The Naval Treaty"

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930)

Tuesday, 5/20

* Open

Kayley's Book
Comb Focus

* Articles: Chesterton!

What's Wrong: Read

"The Wildness of Domesticity"

The Defendant: Read

"A Defense of Skeletons"
"A Defense of Ugly Things"
"A Defense of Baby-Worship"

Tremendous Trifles

Required reading at UCSC (at some point)
"A Piece of Chalk"

All Things Considered

"An Essay on Two Cities"!

The Uses of Diversity

Essays: 1935-1936

Essays: 1929-1931

Essays: 1920-1922

* Thank you cards

* Party

HW: Article, thank you

Monday, 5/19/14

* Open

* Articles

* Thank you cards

* Party

HW: Article, thank you

Jacob's Heart Friday

Monday, 5/19/14

* Open

Per. 5: M.C. Scores
Per. 7: TTC and M. C. Scores

* Discussion

HW: One More Article!

Quo Vadis, Block Day

* Open

* Discussion #1

* Quiz Goodness

* Discussion #2

HW: Article #4

Wednesday, 5/14

* Open

Please vote for your commencement readers.

* Discussion

* Popular Yesterday and Today

Frederica Matthews-Greene (all articles here)

* Short Stories

HW: Quo Vadis Article #3

Where are you Going?

* Discussion

* Popular Today

Frederica Matthew-Greene (all articles here)

* Short Stories

HW: Quo Vadis Article #2

Peter Brueghel the Elder, 1565

Quo Vadis?

Where are you going?

We begin our discussion in the halls of Heorot:

Some Secular Schwager
Esolen:

HW: Read one (or more) quo vadis selection to share tomorrow in class.

AP Test: Importance of Your Earnest Good Humor

All the best, my friends.

When you're done, let's taste some British culture with Oscar Wilde, shall we?

Critical Approaches

This excellent distillation (of libraries of critical discourse) is originally from Dr. Carl Runon.

If you would like another review of basically the same material with a different organization, see Purdue.

I.	OBJECTIVISM: Literature is an independent object, free from the subjectivity of author and reader.
	A.	Formalism: The work is complete in itself, written for its own sake, and unified by its form--that which makes it a work of art.
		1.	New Criticism: The dominant literary criticism of the middle 20th century, New Criticism remains an important influence today. They attempt to demonstrate formal unity (or organic unity) by showing how every part of a work--every word, every image, every element--contributes to a central, unifying theme. (This is distinct from mechanical unity, the external, preconceived structure of rules that do not arise from the individuality of the work but from the type or genre.) New Critical analysis (or explication of the text) has become so universally accepted as the first step in understanding literature that it is almost everywhere the critical approach taught in introductory literature courses. New Critics' focus on theme or meaning as well as form means that for them literature is referential: it points to something outside itself, things in the real, external world, in human experience; thus, they do not question the reality of the phenomenal world or the ability of language to represent it.
	B.	Structuralism: Structuralists believe that literature is not referential, but rather the text is an independent aesthetic object that is detached from historical, social, or political implications.
	C.	Post-structuralism : The umbrella designation for any of several schools of criticism which, while depending crucially on the insights of science-based theory, attack the very idea that any kind of certitude can exist about the meaning, understandibility, or sharability of texts.
		1.	Deconstruction [Jacques Derrida]: takes the observations of structuralism to its logical conclusion--that semiotic differentiation in texts means they can ultimately have no stable, definite, or discoverable meaning.
II.	SUBJECTIVISM: any form of psychological and self-, subject-, or reader-centered criticism
	A.	Psychological Criticism: assumes that literature is the expression of the author's psyche, often his or her unconscious, and, like dreams, needs to be interpreted.
		1.	Freudian Criticism [Sigmund Freud]: asserts that the meaning of the literary work does not lie on its surface but in the psyche of the author.
		2.	Lacanian Criticism [Jacques Lacan]: language expresses an absence--words represent an absent object which cannot be made present.
		3.	Jungian Criticism [Carl Jung]: assumes humans share a collective unconscious which contains universal images, patterns, and forms of human experiences or archetypes, and that embedded in all literature is the central myth--the monomyth of the quest
	B.	Phenomenological Criticism: Critics of consciousness consider all the writings of an author as the expression of his or her mind-set.
	C.	Reader-response Criticism: the essence of the literary work does not exist on the page; it is only the text. The text becomes a work only when it is read, and no two readers receive exactly the same meaning from identical texts.
III	HISTORICAL CRITICISM
	A.	Dialogism [Mikhail Bakhtin]: Language (and literature) is a continuous dialogue, each utterance being a reply to what has gone before. The dialogic critic sees the work of literature as a part of the dialogue of the culture.
		1.	Sociological Criticism: Literature is one aspect of the larger processes of history, particularly those which involve people in social groups or as members of social institutions or movements. Sociological criticism attempts to relate what happens in texts to social events and patterns; the most important functions of literature involve the way that literature both portrays and influences human interactions.
		2.	Marxist Criticism [Karl Marx]: initially in the 19th century it was concerned with the way literary works would reveal the state of the struggle between classes in the historical place and moment. But in the 20th century, it shifted its focus to the role of perception and insisted that all use of language, including literary and critical language, is ideological.
		3.	Feminist Criticism: Strongly conscious that most of recorded history has given grossly disproportionate attention to the interests, thoughts, and actions of men, feminist thought endeavors both to extend contemporary attention to distinctly feminine concerns, ideas, and accomplishments and to recover the largely unrecorded and unknown history of women in earlier times.
	B.	New Historicism: Drawing on the insights of modern anthropology, it wishes to isolate the fundamental values in texts and cultures, and it regards texts both as evidence of basic cultural patterns and as forces in social and cultural change.
IV.	PLURALISM: Many of the critical perspectives seem to overlap and to approach literature from a combination of these perspectives is generally enriching
	A.	Pluralism (approaching literature from a mixture of perspectives) clearly will cause problems when the critic seems to be operating out of contradictory assumptions.
	B.	Yet pluralists contend that they make use of promising insights or methods wherever they find them and argue that putting together the values of different approaches leads to a more fair and balanced view of texts and their uses.
	C.	Opponents--those who insist on a consistency of ideological commitment--argue that pluralists are simply unwilling to state or admit their real commitments, and any mixing of methods leads to confusion, uncertainty, and inconsistency rather than fairness.

Wednesday, 5/7

* Open

Absent folks: quiz work

* Grading

TTC and Mnemonics
Iceberg (per. 4, 7)

* M. C.

Iceberg (per. 5)
Harrow-lines
Inconstant

* * AP Literature Strategy

1999 AP English Literature and Composition Released Exam

Extra Practice: 1987 AP English Literature and Composition Released Exam

HW: Exercise, review, rest, relax...and then meet the challenge energetically

Tuesday, 5/6/14: M. C.

* Open

* Mnemonics

* Essay Work

Review Heaney

* AP Literature Strategy

M. C. Work

Selections

* The most important things to do at this point

Exercise (run, jog, walk, bike, play soccer, etc...aerobic) after school today and tomorrow.
Review terms
Review previous AP exams that have answer keys and student essays (see below)

HW:

Extra Practice: 1987 AP English Literature and Composition Released Exam

Note on the Heaney Prompt

Hi friends,

One more thing: we will be discussing the Heaney poem and essay in class tomorrow. I will not be grading it as an essay but using it for discussion; therefore, if you work for 20 minutes (which means you would have your thesis, support identified, and first page written), you will have sufficient work to contribute to tomorrow's discussion. So work anywhere from 20 min. to 40 minutes tonight...and don't forget to learn two mnemonics.

All the best,

Mr. S

Review Your AP Exams if You Wish

2006