July 25th Meeting Re-Cap

Hi Everyone:

Let me start by setting a date for our next meeting: it looks like the best time will be Friday, August 8^th, 8-10 a.m. in room 2209.  There is a chance that the school will be cleaning out room 2209 at that time, and if so, I will post something known as a “sign” to redirect you to another room (or utility closet).  The assignment is the same as last time (see previous post for instructions), only you will focus on chapters 16 to the end.  For those ambitious students who want to look up some of the more oblique allusions in the book, it may be helpful to do a quick search of The Communist Party in America in the 30s-50s, and it may also be helpful to look up Marcus Garvey.  **For those who couldn’t make it to our last meeting, please remember that you must also comment on these posts with your own thoughts to contribute to the conversation and I still need your papers emailed to me.** Finally, let me just remind students to practice making bold assertions in your responses: make sure you try to nail down why your observations matter.  When you are pointing something out that you notice in your passages, imagine someone over your shoulder asking “so what?”  And then answer that person! 

In our last meeting I started by reviewing our first meeting and then moved into a brief but important discussion of literary theory.  Mainly, I tried to very quickly describe the Structuralist movement and the Post-Structuralist (or Post-Modern) movement and their concerns and values.  I talked about Structuralism as a movement that encompassed literary studies, linguistics, and other sciences such as anthropology, and then made the point that the New Criticism movement, which came out of structuralism, is very closely aligned to what the AP exam values.  Any student that wants to get a good sense of the AP’s general approach to writing and reading would do well to look into the New Critical movement, I would argue.  Post-Modernism, and its attendant “lenses” of criticism, was discussed as a reaction to structuralism’s tendency to centralize and standardize reading and writing, and also as a reaction to Structuralism’s insistence on de-contextualizing an object of art from the conditions of its creation.  I suggested that some students may be interested in exploring some of these lenses as part of their long-term research project in the second half of the year.

Reactions to Ellison’s Invisible Man were slow to come at first, but once we started to try to make sense of the strangeness of the narrative then students felt free to speak.  We noted that the narrative is very unusual in the way that it rides the line between “realism” and “surrealism” in a very fluid way, creating a kind of hyper-reality in which, as one student put it, the events of the narrative may seem absurd but they are still “true” to experience.  For instance, a “battle royal” is unimaginable in “real” world, but what is dramatized in the scene – the crowd of wealthy white people entertained by the sight of black teens fighting, the scrambling for money, the mix of barbarism, commerce and sex – is a kind of amplified version of certain truths in life.  So the reader, as one student noted, is always attentive to symbolism and metaphor, more so than an average novel.

As a group we tried to pull out some of the major threads of meaning or tension in the book by comparing quotes, and we settled on some overarching ideas: the problem of identity (how to assert one’s own or how others try to impose one upon you), the tension between one’s private and public self, the idea of power-sources being buried within larger structures of power (invisible or undetected), the idea of cultural equality or individual wholeness being endlessly deferred (i.e. the Golden Day, “keep him running”), and the very problematic role of women in the novel, which we did not get a chance to really talk about.  These ideas become even more complicated in the second half of the book, and I can’t wait to talk to everyone about them.  Next time, we will try to close read a few passages in order to see how Ellison structures the book in a way that compliments its major themes.  Thank you again to those who came, Mr. Telles.

July 11 Meeting Recap

Hi Everyone,

I'll start by addressing the upcoming meeting and detailing the work for those who did not make it to the meeting.  In order to keep an even pace throughout the summer, it looks like our next meeting will have to be July 25th, 8-10 am, in room 2209.  The early time slot seemed agreeable to most students.  This time we will discuss chapters 1-15 of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man.  The assignment for these chapters is very similar to the last assignment.  Here are the retooled directions:

Description: This assignment is a hybrid which combines the skill of responding to a passage in an exploratory and provisional way (as in the traditional quotation response journal) and something approaching the more focused and formal skill of the AP-style passage response (Question 2) on the AP Literature exam.  Use the rubric that you were given before the end of the school year to guide you through the shorter quotation responses.  The same rubric is applicable to the longer portion of the assignment, only rather than including personal connections and open-ended questions, you should maintain your focus on what is being asked of you in the directions.

Directions:

Part One:  After reading chapters 1-15 of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, respond to four passages from throughout the text.  Try to choose passages that do one of two things: 1) In preparation for the bildungsroman unit during the school year, try to choose passages that advance, complicate, or illuminate the main character's social, intellectual, or creative development.  In other words, what are the big moments of change and what do they reveal?  OR 2)  Try to select passages that contain things that seem to jump out of the narrative as highly unusual, grotesque, uncomfortable or incongruous.  Try to make some sense out of these things or make connections to the larger story.

As always, Keep in mind these fundamental questions: why does your passage matter so much, and how does your passage function on its own and in relation to the rest of the book?  Each response has a 60 word minimum.

Part Two:  Write one longer response to a passage, around 300-500 words.  You simply want to choose a passage that exemplifies one of the two threads above but seems especially important.

***For those who did not make it to the meeting last Friday, please read my description of the discussion below and write a 300-500 word contribution in the comment section.

Some highlights of our discussion on Friday, July 11:

The twenty-or-so students who came to the discussion last Friday responded positively to the book (which wasn't the general reaction of the last few years' students) and everyone seemed as though they had really turned the book over in their minds quite a bit.  I started the meeting by briefly talking about the differences between AP Language and AP Literature, what the AP Literature test looks like and the kinds of skills the College Board values, and I discussed some of their central mantras (tying technique to meaning, dwelling in complexity, balancing the part with the whole).  As a way of getting at both sides of the equation, we started the discussion of the book by thinking about meaning and moved on to try to make some assertions about the writer's technique (which was cut off by time and we'll return to next meeting).

One student noted that she simply enjoyed the inventiveness of the book: she said that, at a certain point, she let go of the feeling of having to "get" everything and just allowed the book to work its magic.  Other students wondered about how and why the titles of each subsection of the book relates to the city being described.  Sometimes the connection was clear, such as in the "Cities and Desire" sections, but what was being suggested in titles like "Thin Cities" and "Cities and Signs" was less clear.  When asked what the bigger tensions of the book are, or what the "plot" is, students suggested some conflicts which seem central to the book as a whole: the motivating forces of "fear" and "desire" as the foundation of human invention, the cyclical nature of human culture (social roles and social constructs repeating), the tension between keeping things integrated and the fear of corruption and disintegration (which is Khan's great problem), the problem of whether or not one should take a wide view of life (the bridge) or get lost in the details (the stones), and the very complicated problem of language (language can never fully communicate experience because it is imprecise, but it can also create its own experience because of the possibility for play and invention).

We were cut off during group work in which we started to try to examine how Calvino's narrative works on a sentence by sentence level, but we'll return to that next time.  Thank you so much to everyone who came, Mr. Telles.