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.
***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.
In your description, you mentioned someone who let go of the feeling of having to "get" the book. I realized I spent about half the book trying to understand what it really meant, and didn't gain much of an understanding until I encountered the conversations between Polo and Khan. I then found myself slightly lessening the grasp of my wanting to understand and just moving with the flow of the intense and intricate descriptions Polo gave of all the cities. The titles also confused me as well, but I gave up trying to solve that enigma about a couple sections in. I really enjoyed the conversations between Polo and Khan due to the variety of the things they spoke of, and how many of the things they spoke of could not actually be spoken, but only conceptualized through vague movements and simple words. I picked up on the bridge and stone passage and even chose it as one of mine to write about in the assignment. I felt as though this passage really distinguished the difference between the two men. Khan, and emperor, must look at his empire as a whole and have other men, like Polo, focus on the details so he won't have to. Although, Khan feels conflicted that if he doesn't at least know about the details then does he actually know the empire that has his name on it. I questioned throughout the book if Polo had even visited all of these cities, and all of the descriptions of the cities started sounding more and more similar. If there were more conversations between the two men instead of city descriptions I may have enjoyed the book more.
ReplyDeleteI definitely wasn’t expecting to like the book as much as I did because the constant shifting of cities and names and titles was too much to keep up with, but as mentioned it was easier to enjoy when I read it without overanalyzing its contents. Eventually certain cities stuck with me and I began to pick up on what I sensed as satire of the human race in some of the cities. In the city Valdrada he mentions how the people live as they feel they are being watched and it became apparent that they act and react with greater caution for fear that someone will see their actions in a reflection, just as Valdrada is reflected in the water surrounding it. An interesting concept that was hard to grasp was that every city was in fact Venice. How can this be so? I noticed how Marco Polo talked about different aspects of each cities whether it was the people, the architecture, or even the dead and I sensed similarities among some of the cities but many I could not relate back to Venice. That being said I am not well acquainted with the city of Venice.
ReplyDeleteI found the talks between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan much more difficult to understand than the cities themselves. How could they communicate without words? Did Khan interpret everything the way Marco Polo meant for things to be interpreted or did Marco want the Khan to interpret things for himself in order to somehow understand his empire?
Much could be thought into the literal interpretations of the intricate descriptions and vague dialogue in Invisible Cities. The fantastic and imaginative cities and the symbolic discussions have the ability to sway readers to be enveloped in the airy atmosphere of the novel as they turn from page to page. And to what is Italo Calvino leading the readers to believe? Perhaps this question is better answered when the entirety of the novel is seen as more of a representation of Calvino's more grandeur goal of displaying how differences of perspective and interpretation can affect the composition of the imagination and more specifically of thoughts. Moments in the narrative when Marco Polo is forced to display his discoveries to Kublai Khan through interpretive actions and symbolic choices, even to have Khan see the message in a different manner. While Marco Polo has been able to clearly communicate to Kublai Khan, the meaning is different to Khan. I see this as a primary goal of Invisible Cities, that talking and communicating is vital but the actual perception and interpretation, and there for meaning making, is the most important function of the mind for the human kind.
ReplyDeleteInvisible Cities left me guessing even when I finished reading it. The descriptions of the cities were vivid and full of imagery making you feel as though you were walking through the city yourself. The writing was very colloquial which is something I personally enjoy when reading a book with such vivid descriptions. The discussions between Polo and Khan also helped put many of the cities into perspective. The cities at first seem to amaze even the reader along with Kublai Khan. It's only later in the novel when the cities descriptions and Khan's conversations seem closer together making it seem as though the cities are meant only as distractions, meant to perplex Khan and the reader. Overall the experience of reading Invisible Cities left me questioning the existence of the cities which is just what Italo Calvino wants. He wrote the book to keep you guessing just as Polo kept Kublai Khan guessing.
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