Booker T. Washington and the Atlanta Exposition Speech

Here.

Louis Armstrong: (What Did I Do to Be So) Black and Blue?

Invisible Man Reading Questions

Read Prologue and answer these questions.

1.     The notion of “invisibility” is clearly going to be an important part of the novel. Make an early attempt to define what the narrator means by being “invisible”. What is the effect of the title lacking “the” or “an”? How do the motifs of light and darkness begin to fit into all of this?

2.     Who is Louis Armstrong? How does the narrator feel about him and his music? His song “What Did I Do to be So Black and Blue” leads the narrator into a kind of reefer-induced vision. What is “Weltschmerz” (9)? What about the stories he “hears”?

3.     The “Prologue” ends with an often paradoxical discussion about “action” and “responsibility” (13-14). What seems to be his general message?

White Noise Timed Writes

I believe I have graded everything submitted. If you do not have a score in the gradebook, it is up to you to make-up the timed write or resubmit it. Take care of this immediately.

Here is the translation of your score in the gradebook to an AP score. (This scale will shift upward as we move towards the test and get more practice.)

7-9 = 50
   6 = 48
   5 = 45
   4 = 42
   3 = 38
   2 = 35

Waiting for Godot: Read and Links

Read Act 1 for next class

Though Godot contains all the wit and whimsicality of Murphy (minus a great deal of the old pedantry), it has one new ingredient — humanity. The novel and the play both tell us that human suffering is comic and irrational (" absurd" in the fashionable jargon), but only Godot reads like the work of a man who has actually suffered. …Even if it added nothing to Murphy, Godot would still be remarkable by the mere fact of being a popular play on an unpopular theme... Its author has achieved a theoretical impossibility — a play in which nothing happens, that yet keeps audiences glued to their seats. What’s more, since the second act is a subtly different reprise of the first, he has written a play in which nothing happens, twice. . . . About the only thing Godot shows consistent respect for is the music-hall low-comedy tradition.

• Vivian Mercier, on Waiting for Godot, in "The Uneventful Event" in The Irish Times (18 February 1956), p. 6.

.....


Review of First NYC performance, 1956

A Study Guide from A Noise Within Theater

Godot and Comedy and the Cartoon Network

Wondering what a professional analysis of White Noise reads like?

Then read this essay.

Advice from the results of the 2012 AP Free Response Questions

We are going to start looking more closely at the writing part of the Literature AP Exam as the second semester unfolds. The writing techniques we have been attempting to master in the first semester - which are the foundations of all good analytic writing - will be applied more directly to the exam itself.

The link below gives brief, official analysis of the overall results of the test taken by students in 2012, focusing on the line of analysis the question intended students to pursue, where students were successful, and where they missed the mark. We will review this document as we begin practicing the three different types of questions this semester, beginning with the open style question, #3.

Follow this LINK to view the guide.

ATE Paragraph and Claim Assignment

"The Airborne Toxic Event"
Authors often use major plot events to represent larger ideas and issues. What happens exactly, and how the characters react, and the events that result often help to illustrate the theme and point of a work as a whole. With this in mind, discuss the significance of “The Airborne Toxic Event” as an example of a plot event that serves the purpose of communicating Delillo's message in White Noise. (15 minutes)

Claims:

1. The supermarket remains a source of comfort and reassurance for Jack, but Delillo suggests that the security he feels there may be illusory and that Jack, at times, has a sense of that superficiality (159-162).
2. The post-ATE sunsets function as a symbol of the paradoxical nature of Jack and Babette’s life in the postmodern consumerist society they inhabit (162).
3. Knowledge, especially if validated by authority - whether trivial, forecasted, scientific, or hypothetical - is a source of controversy, confidence and anxiety (163, 166-169).
4. Devise and define your own claim about Babette and Dylar.

Reading Schedule and Final

1/19 (A) and 1/22 (B) through page 230
Final: AP Practice Multiple Choice
Finish Reading White Noise for First Day of Semester 2

Reading

Be through
the end of Chapter 26
on page 193
for Wednesday and Thursday.