July 25th meeting: recap.

I started the meeting yesterday by addressing the Invisible Cities responses, which I thought were very strong in general.  The writing was thoughtful and clear, and the selections were very interesting and worth attention.  I had a few suggestions for students who wanted to improve.  One thing to look for (and I commented on this in many responses) are opportunities to move beyond observing something in the text and making a bold assertion about it.  In other words, many students were very good at noticing patterns, objects loaded with symbolic value and extended metaphors, but what was missing was a statement about why these things matter in the text.  You don’t have to constantly be making pronouncements throughout your paper, but occasionally stop and make an assertion about why all of the things you are noticing are significant.  And try to phrase your assertion in a confident way.  Another skill you should try to employ is the ability to appear resourceful with the text.  What I mean is if you notice something interesting in a selection, connect what you have noticed to other parts of the book.  This shows that you have some command over the material.  In essence, you would be writing “I see something happening here, and it is similar to something happening early in the book, etc.”  Or: “Here is something that also appears later in the book in a different, modified form which changes the reader’s understanding of it.”   

Invisible Man, being the huge and complex book that it is, led us in many directions but all of them were illuminating.  We started by trying to establish a sense of how the novel is structured or how it develops.  It has the elements of a Bildungsroman (a coming of age story of gradual social, intellectual, moral or artistic development) so we looked for moments of intellectual and social awakening.  Students brought up crucial scenes such as the Invisible Man’s interview with Bledsoe, his not-so-relaxing drive with Norton, the revelation of what’s really in Bledsoe’s letter, and his speech at the eviction.  One student noted that many of these moments are revelations of systems of social power and control that are under the surface of the culture the Invisible Man lives in. 

Apart from discussing these scenes, we also tried to address the style of the book, which was a topic that we kept returning to, as the style is highly unusual.  Many students found the tone of the book “creepy,” unsettling, darkly comic, and sarcastic.  I noted that the author distances the reader from the Invisible Man from the outset: the tone is aggressive and ironic, and one of the first things we see the man do is beat someone else up, possibly to death.  So we’re not feeling to empathetic at the beginning.  But the most unusual thing about the novel, it seems, is the almost caricature-like size and prominence of the metaphors and symbols, and the fact that many of the scenes seem so outrageous that they can’t possibly be imagined as really happening.  This led us to a discussion on literary styles such as the sophisticated use of irony and the “grotesque,” something that became associated with southern literature.  The grotesque style generally blows up or exaggerates elements of what we might think of as “real life,” creating a sense of things being surreal, dream-like, bizarre or disorienting.  I made the point that the grotesque style, when done well, doesn’t avoid reality or “the truth” by making a mockery of it: often the author’s purpose is to reveal or expose a truth by exaggerating elements of everyday life.  The significance of things and the relationships between things aren’t changed; how we imagine or visualize them is changed, however.  Ellison appears to very consciously be doing this (can you really imagine a Battle Royal happening??  Or a scene like the Golden Day??).  Please keep this in mind if you are tempted to criticize the book for being unrealistic or unbelievable.  Instead, ask yourself what ideas or conflicts are being dramatized and how the strangeness of the narrative might be necessary to get them across.

We finished by trying to make assertive statements in response to questions I provided, such as why the Invisible Man is never named, how Ellison is critiquing Booker T. Washington’s vision of African American’s social advancement, and what to make of the Trueblood episode, among others.  These will carry over to next time.

We will need to have the next meeting on Monday, August 12^th from 10-12.  The assignment is exactly the assignment you were given for the first half of the novel.  See the blog post for that.  Talk about surreal: hold on to your seats for the second half of the book.  A big thank you to everyone who came to the meeting yesterday.

Next Meeting: Invisible Man, Chapters 1-15

Looks like our next meeting will have to be Thursday, July 25th.  I can meet earlier in the day, if it sounds good to you: 10-12.  Room 1222.  The reading will be Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, chapters 1-15.

The format for the assignment will be the same as with Invisible Cities, but with different focus areas.  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 attached rubric (in email) 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.

Thanks, and please write with any questions, Mr. Telles.

First Meeting: July 9th, Invisible Cities.

Hi Everyone:

I started the meeting with a general overview of the course and made distinctions between AP Literature and AP Language.  Much of this information will be repeated during the first weeks of the school year, but it is all worth repeating.  Generally, many of the skills of reading and argumentation which are covered in AP Language are transferable to this course, only because of the nature of the material that you will be reading, your general approach will need to be re-calibrated a bit.  You will still be trying to make bold assertions, working on a polished and formal style of writing, and moving fluidly between analyzing the parts of a work of literature and the whole of it -- tying technique to meaning.  The material, however, will often break with convention rather than use it, and it will also leave you on the doorstep of a deep, insoluble human problem rather than trying to convince you of the truth of one's position.  It is not your job to solve the problem or smooth it over!  Just make an assertion about how the writer explores this problem or reveals this problem in a unique way.

After talking briefly about the elements of the AP Literature test itself and the ways in which the class in not just a test-prep class, we got into the book.  I asked the class to share their general impressions of the book, and many students were very honest and insightful about their impressions.  One student immediately noted that she was captured by the book in the beginning but became a bit worn down by what seemed like repetition: often she found herself wondering where she had read something before and she couldn't differentiate much between the cities.  Many students agreed with her.  I then posed the question of whether or not this is deliberate on the part of the author.  The question then is one of authorial control, which is always useful to ask: is the author actually in control of something that may seem like an accident to the reader?  Some students defended the repetition as integral to the story by noting how certain motifs or patterns (inversions, dualities, etc.) and themes such as the deceptiveness of one's perception and the idea of regeneration are in line with repetition in the novel.  Other students noted that the stories had a unique structure: the stories seem to be arranged according to their own general concerns (desire, fear, waste) and some stories seem to have a "base word," as one student called it, around which the city in the story organizes itself.  One student noted simply and elegantly that the stories are just entertaining to read because they are so inventive and imaginative, regardless of whether or not one can make sense of them. 

From here students each shared a small passage that they selected and said a few words about why they chose the passage.  Students were to listen carefully for any connection to one of their own passages and to then share the connection and then their passage.  The intent of the exercise is both to hear how and why students selected certain passages and to then examine the threads that connect each passage to get a sense of what the novel is up to.  Here are some of the threads (conflicts) that emerged:

• is language invasive / harmful or illuminating?
• is memory to be trusted or is it an invention?
• is it more important to keep moving and exploring or to consolidate, conserve, set up boundaries?
• should one dwell on details or contemplate the whole of something?
• should one use experience to search for answers or simply take in experience for its own sake?
• how do we know what is real when everything is bound up in perception?

At this point I asked the students to think about some of these conflicts and try to construct a "provisional" thesis.  They did this in pairs.  The leading question was simply "What is the deepest, most essential conflict here, and why should it matter to the average person?"  Although the second part of the question caused some consternation, the responses to the first part were great beginnings: our creations are a response to fear and desire, our inventions are have their own reality, our experience and memory are bound up in the relativity of perception, and the contemplation of the details of life (and stories) help to pull us out of denial.

There is one thing that we did not get to.  I wanted to discuss the language of the novel: it doesn't sound like a typical novel, so what is the actual language doing to achieve this effect and why?  What's going on with the vocabulary, the syntax, the pacing or cadence of the sentences? 

Thanks for reading, and I'll publish another post to prepare for the next meeting.  *** If you could not make it to yesterday's meeting, please respond to some element of this post in the comment box below.***  You can disagree with something, extend the discussion, or introduce something wholly new. 100-200 words.  Thanks again, Mr. Telles.

Meeting Tomorrow

Just a reminder that we're meeting tomorrow from 1-3, probably in Ms. Paganetti's room.  I'll put a sign on the language office door.  Also, it looks like I'll be able to push the time earlier for the next meeting.

For those who can't make it: a recap of the meeting will appear on this blog in the three days following the meeting.  Before the next meeting, please respond in the comment box to some of the ideas that your classmates have put on the table: extend the discussion, disagree respectfully, let one idea take you to another, or introduce a new idea.  About 100-200 words is good.  Thanks, Mr. Telles.