Reverend Homer A. Barbee

Idea: Homer Barbee transforms the Founder into a mythological figure. Recount and analyze his speech to demonstrate the validity of this idea.

Idea: This transformation is designed to have an effect on the students at the college. Explain.

Idea: Barbee's blindness, noticed by the narrator only at the end of the speech, furthers Ellison's use of the motif of blindness and invisibility. What is Ellison suggesting about the the ideology preached by the college and Barbee, especially regarding its effect on the young men and women who attend the college.

AP Exam

If you need to pay for the test and have not done so, you MUST do so by tomorrow (Tuesday, 3/10) or you will not have a test ordered for you.

If this is a problem, I strongly recommend you communicate with Linda Vancil either by email or in person.

Her office is in the North main office

linda_vancil@ddouglas.k12.or.us

The Vet

1369: "My hole is warm and full of light"

With the exception of the narrator's grandfather who, despite his profound influence, only briefly appears, the vet is the first character who openly states his opposition to the established white power structure and the injustices of society. What is his history? What is suggested by how he now lives? What does he say to both the narrator and Norton? How do his statements inform our understanding of the issues and contradictions the narrator faces? Does the narrator take his words to heart?

The Booker T. Washington Statue at Tuskegee

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.

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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.