Correction...

The two essays are due tomorrow, 30 April: Thursday.

Two Essays due this Wednesday!

Question 1 (Suggested time—40 minutes)

Read the following passage carefully. Considering such literary elements as style, tone, and diction, write a well-organized essay that examines the speaker’s view of bad carpentry work.

We recently had a carpenter build a few things in our house in the country. It’s an old house, leaning away from the wind a little; its floors sag gently, like an old mattress. The carpenter turned his back on our tilting walls and took his vertical from a plumb line and his horizontal from a bubble level, and then went to work by the light of these absolutes. Fitting his planks into place took a lot of those long, irregular, oblique cuts with a ripsaw that break an amateur’s heart. The bookcase and kitchen counter and cabinet he left behind stand perfectly up-and-down in a cockeyed house. Their rectitude is chastening. For minutes at a stretch, we study them, wondering if perhaps it isn’t, after all, the wall that is true and the bookcase that leans. Eventually, we suppose, everything will settle into the comfortably crooked, but it will take years, barring earthquakes, and in the meantime we are annoyed at being made to live with impossible standards.

From “Assorted Prose.”

Question 2 (Suggested time—40 minutes)

Read the following passage carefully. Then, write a well-written essay in which you discuss the manner in which the narrator shows the setting of the barn quickly diminishing Rusty’s presence.

A barn, in a day, is a small night. The splinters of light between the dry shingles pierce the high roof like stars, and the rafters and crossbeams and built-in ladders seem, until your eyes adjust, as mysterious as the branches of a haunted forest. David entered silently, the gun in one hand.... The smell of old straw scratched his sinuses.... the mouths of empty bins gaped like caves. Rusty oddments of farming — coils of baling wire, some spare tines for a harrow, a handleless shovel — hung on nails driven here and there in the thick wood. He stood stock-still a minute; it took a while to separate the cooing of the pigeons from the rustling in his ears. When he had focused on the cooing, it flooded the vast interior with its throaty, bubbling outpour: there seemed no other sound. They were up behind the beams. What light there was leaked through the shingles and the dirty glass windows at the far end and the small round holes, about as big as basketballs, high on the opposite stone side walls, under the ridge of the roof.

From the story “Pigeon Feathers.”

MLA Bibliography cards

Your MLA bibliography cards are now due 20 May, Wednesday. I am hereby postponing this Friday's deadline, so that you may focus all your studies towards passing every AP Exam that you have challenged!

May the Force Be With Us!

In Peace,
Whyte

Here's another way to better

understand what Hesse is talking about: check out the Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path...

The Feminine and Masculine Journeys...

The Feminine Journey

Act 1: Containment
1. The Illusion of the Perfect World
2. The Betrayal or Realization
3. The Awakening—Preparing for the Journey

Act 2: Transformation
4. The Descent—Passing the Gates of Judgment
5. The Eye of the Storm
6. Death—All is Lost

Act 3: Emergence
7. Support
8. Rebirth—The Moment of Truth
9. Full Circle—Return to the Perfect World

The Masculine Journey

Act 1: Challenge
1. The Perfect World
2. Friends and Enemies
3. The Call

Act 2: Obstacles
4. Small Success
5. Invitations
6. Trials

Act 3: Transformation
7. Death—A Fork in the Road
8. Awaken or Rebel
9. Victory or Failure

Specific research resources...

Many of you have inquired about specific book titles from the three required Philosopher/Artists. Amongst many of their works, here are some:

Campbell, Joseph. Myths of Light.
Campbell, Joseph. Occidental Mythology.
Campbell, Joseph. Oriental Mythology.
Campbell, Joseph. Pathways to Bliss.
Campbell, Joseph. The Hero with a Thousand Faces.
Campbell, Joseph. The Inner Reaches of Outer Space.
Campbell, Joseph. Mythic Image.
Campbell, Joseph. The Power of Myth.
Campbell, Joseph. Thou Art That.
Campbell, Joseph. Transformation of Myth Through Time.
Goethe, JW. Faust: Part 1.
Jung, Carl. Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious.
Jung, Carl. Man and His Symbols.
Jung, Carl. Memories, Dreams, Reflections.
Tsu, Lao. Tao Te Ching.

Works Cited and Research...

You must use the following three artists in your research:

Campbell, Joseph
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang
Jung, C.G.

Philosophers to consider:

Descartes, René
Kant, Immanuel
Nietzsche, Friedrich
Schopenhauer, Arthur
Swedenborg, Emanuel

Poets to consider:

Blake, William
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor
Emerson, Ralph W.
Joyce, James
Keats, John
Mann, Thomas
Paz, Octavio
Shelly, Percy Bysshe
Wordsworth, William
Yeats, William

AP Practice Exam...

To be held tomorrow, 10 Friday at 3P.M.

On Research

Folks, run a Google search on literary themes. There's plenty out there to research. Make sure that you have an idea for your research direction tomorrow!

Some Literary Themes:

Ambition
Beauty
Betrayal
Courage
Duty
Fear
Freedom
Happiness
Jealousy
Loneliness
Love
Loyalty
Past
Perseverance
Prejudice
Prejudice
Time

Friday

How would you be able to identify a particular genre from an AP Literature passage?
—Themes, word choice, style, symbols, content, religion, class, gender?...

1. English Literary Renaissance
Elizabethan-The Age of Playwrights
Jacobean
Metaphysical poets
Cavalier poets
2. Commonwealth
3. Restoration

4. Age of Reason
The Age of Prose
The Satirists
5. Romanticism
6. Victorianism
The Rise of the Novel
Realism
Naturalism
Existentialism
Impressionism
7. Modernism
Cubism
Stream-of-consciousness
Surrealism
8. Post-modernism
Multiculturalism
Feminism

Consider the span of Rahel’s life, the good, the ugly, and the sublime. Then, in a well-written essay, examine the ways in which Rahel must confront and return to her past, her family, and to her native India in order to discover some sense of redemption and peacefulness for herself.