Friday

Unit Goal:

Students will be able to write an analysis of “any” poem of literary merit connecting a variety of literary devices – including tone, poetical structure, figurative language, diction, syntax, etc. – with the poem as a whole and be able to write a timed-AP analysis essay scoring in the upper half on the AP rubric.

4 – On an AP poetry prompt the student can successfully answer the prompt and write an essay scoring a 7 or higher on the AP rubric.

3 – On an AP poetry prompt the student can successfully answer the prompt and write an essay scoring a 5 or higher on the AP rubric.

2 – On an AP poetry prompt the student cannot successfully answer the prompt and write an analysis essay.  Student scores 3-4 on the AP rubric.

1 -  Student is unable to write an analysis essay.

Today, I want to discuss  "The Death of the Hired-Man", "Home Burial".  But first let's revisit"The Colonel" and talk about Literary Theories, and Introductions to Essays.  

Essay on "The Second Coming"

Things to think about when we discuss "The Death of the Hired-Man"

A) Overall meaning - make sure your thesis reference the overall meaning of the poem, section, or text.  

B) Titles of poems.  

C) Form or structure or where the poem breaks structure

D) Tone

E) Literary Devices - allusion, symbol, metaphor, syntax, enjambment, 

F) Speaker/story

G) Literal level vs. analysis

Literary Theories (from X.J. Kennedy and Dana Gioia's Literature: An Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, and Drama) 

Formalist Criticism: This approach regards literature as a unique form of human knowledge that needs to be examined on its own terms." All the elements necessary for understanding the work are contained within the work itself. Of particular interest to the formalist critic are the elements of form-style, structure, tone, imagery, etc.-that are found within the text. A primary goal for formalist critics is to determine how such elements work together with the text's content to shape its effects upon readers.

This is also called, “New Criticism” and was especially promoted by T.S. Eliot. 

Biographical Criticism: This approach "begins with the simple but central insight that literature is written by actual people and that understanding an author's life can help readers more thoroughly comprehend the work. "Hence, it often affords a practical method by which readers can better understand a text. However, a biographical critic must be careful not to take the biographical facts of a writer's life too far in criticizing the works of that writer: the biographical critic "focuses on explicating the literary work by using the insight provided by knowledge of the author's life. Biographical data should amplify the meaning of the text, not drown it out with irrelevant material."

Historical Criticism: This approach "seeks to understand a literary work by investigating the social, cultural, and intellectual context that produced it-a context that necessarily includes the artist's biography and milieu." A key goal for historical critics is to understand the effect of a literary work upon its original readers.      

Gender Criticism: This approach "examines how sexual identity influences the creation and reception of literary works." Originally an offshoot of feminist movements, gender criticism today includes a number of approaches, including the so-called "masculinist" approach recently advocated by poet Robert Bly. The bulk of gender criticism, however, is feminist and takes as a central precept that the patriarchal attitudes that have dominated western thought have resulted, consciously or unconsciously, in literature "full of unexamined 'male-produced'      assumptions." Feminist criticism attempts to correct this imbalance by analyzing and combatting such attitudes-by questioning, for example, why none of the characters in Shakespeare's play Othello ever challenge the right of a husband to murder a wife accused of adultery. Other goals of feminist critics include "analyzing how sexual identity influences the reader of a text" and "examining how the images of men and women in imaginative literature reflect or reject the social forces that have historically kept the sexes from achieving total equality." 

 Reader-Response Criticism: This approach takes as a fundamental tenet that   "literature" exists not as an artifact upon a printed page but as a transaction between the physical text and the mind of a reader. It attempts "to describe what happens in the reader's mind while interpreting a text" and reflects that reading, like writing, is a creative process. According to reader-response critics, literary texts do not "contain" a meaning; meanings derive only from the act of individual readings. Hence, two different readers may derive completely different interpretations of the same literary text; likewise, a reader who re-reads a work years later may find the work shockingly different. Reader-response criticism, then, emphasizes how "religious, cultural, and social values affect readings; it also overlaps with gender criticism in exploring how men and women read the same text with different assumptions." Though this approach rejects the notion that a single "correct" reading exists for a literary work, it does not consider all readings permissible: "Each text creates limits to its possible interpretations."

Deconstructionist Criticism: This approach "rejects the traditional assumption that language can accurately represent reality." Deconstructionist critics regard language as a fundamentally unstable medium-the words "tree" or "dog," for instance, undoubtedly conjure up different mental images for different people-and therefore, because literature is made up of words, literature possesses no fixed, single meaning. According to critic Paul de Man, deconstructionists insist on "the impossibility of making the actual expression coincide with what has to be expressed, of making the actual signs [i.e., words] coincide with what is signified." As a result, deconstructionist critics tend to emphasize not what is being said but how language is used in a text. The methods of this approach tend to resemble those of formalist criticism, but whereas formalists' primary goal is to locate unity within a text, "how the diverse elements of a text cohere into meaning," deconstructionists try to show how the text "deconstructs," "how it can be broken down into mutually irreconcilable positions." Other goals of deconstructionists include (1) challenging the notion of authors' "ownership" of texts they create (and their ability to control the meaning of their texts) and (2) focusing on how language is used to achieve power, as when they try to understand how a some interpretations of a literary      work come to be regarded as "truth." 

From Lance Balla:

1.  Do not rewrite all or part of the prompt.  The AP Reading subjects readers to over 1200 essays, so they yearn for an introduction that does not have the same phrase that they have read almost a thousand times already.  You can get your thesis across effectively without reusing the words that are on the page, and the reader will think that you are an original thinker.

2.  Make sure that you include the title of the book and the author’s name.  You know what novel you are going to discuss; share that with your reader!  Also BE SURE TO UNDERLINE THE TITLE OF THE NOVEL YOU ARE DISCUSSING! Remember to give the reader every reason to believe you are a competent writer.

3.  Provide some context for you discussion.  As you jump into your discussion make sure you provide some clues as to who or what you are about to discuss.  For example, rather than merely saying “Codi, blah, blah, blah...”, say “Codi, the young woman who is the central character in Kingsolver’s novel Animal Dreams..”.

4.       PROVIDE A THESIS THAT IS CLEAR, CONCISE AND SOMEHOW RESPONDS TO THE PROMPT!  It is critical that you provide a specific direction in your introduction.  You do that by making certain you have a thesis. Remember that your thesis needs to specifically respond to the prompt.

5.  Avoid the “Carl Sagan” introduction.  Carl Sagan, one of the more interesting people to come along in a while, had a show called “Cosmos.”  In that show he would often say “For billions and billions of years, man has (insert whatever we have wondered about here)...”  As young writers you sometimes have a tendency to try and prove your thesis is important by claiming that it addresses some struggle that has been occurring for generations.  Avoid this impulse.  Get to the discussion of your novel immediately; do not worry about vast, unsolvable issues.

6.  Do not talk about “the Reader” and the effect a passage may or may not have on “the Reader”.  It is best not to try and speak for all of the people who have ever read a particular passage.  It is your task to discuss the effect a literary device has within the given passage; do not discuss its “effect on the reader.”

7.  Avoid wild speculation and official judgment.  Do not speculate as to how a book may have been interpreted had not certain events occurred (sounds obvious, but you would be surprised how often it happens.)  Also, unless you are asked to comment on the quality of a novel, which never happens on the AP exam, avoid singing its praise (i.e. “Kingsolver’s brilliantly written masterpiece of modern fiction...”) or dismissing it.  If you are writing about a novel it is assumed that it is a novel of literary merit.