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The Journey: Day 8 (Wednesday 15 February)

Read:

Finish Adventures of Huck Finn

Write:

Compose Paragraph 3 about passage 3 (revise previous pararagraph and submit all three paragraphs in class)

The Journey: Day 7 (Monday 13 February)

Read

AHF Chapters 26-37 (220-320)

Write

Draft your second analysis paragraph (on one of your chosen passages)

Find at least two more passages for your paper

 

My Draft: Here is my first draft of a first body paragraph--remember, this is a draft, not a perfect paragraph. But as we make fun of my paper over the next few classes, I hope you can develop a better sense of what I am looking for!

Colonel Sherburn’s speech exposes how false mythologies of Southern aristocratic masculinity that harmoniously blend aggression and communal responsibility in codes of honor contribute to social instability and violence in the ante-bellum South. Both Sherburn and the mob he single-handedly deflects symbolize Twain’s scorn for romanticized representations of Southern men. Sherburn cloaks his taunts of the mob at his door in the rhetoric of masculinity, mocking them for thinking they “had pluck enough to lynch a man.” Invoking the word “man” more than ten times in the next four paragraphs, Sherburn (and Twain?) link the degeneration of the South’s cultural institutions to cowardice. According to Sherburn, this pervasive cowardice infects courtrooms--where juries refuse to convict murderers “Because their afraid the man’s friends will shoot them in the back, in the dark” -- and the military, where men in an army become a mob because “they don’t fight with courage that’s born in them, but with courage borrowed from their mass and their officers.” These images of random Ku Klux Klan style violence and mindless, ideologically driven armies prefigure the coming Civil War and Reconstruction era, of course, but they also imply that the South’s crisis of violence has its roots in a dysfunctional patriarchy. Represented metaphorically by the play between “man” and “mob,” the noble Southern man degenerates into masked men who gather “southern style” to kill in the dark. Because it lacks “men,” Sherburn suggests, the South has mobs. Through Sherburn, Twain assaults a treasured post-war mythology of the Southern man as aristocratic and heroic, courageously defending values like honor, family, and country. We do not meet such men in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; instead, we meet a gallery of thieves, drunks, rogues, mobs, and ruthless killers who present such a terrifying vision of Southern masculinity that we can find hope only in the courage and dignity of a runaway slave and fourteen year old orphan.

The Journey: Day 6 (Wednesday 8 February)

Although we reviewed the assignment for Wednessday in class, here are some reminders for those who were there and some useful tools for those who were not.

Read:

AHF to page 219 (end of Chapter 25  )

Write

Choose a cultural tension from our handout

Find three passages from AHF that you think comment on that passage (look for passages rich with figurative / non-literal language

Pick one of those three passages to draft a paragraph about using the rubric as your guide. Here is a downloadable version of our rubric: Download Newhuckrubric

The Journey: Day 5 (Monday February 6)

Read and Annotate

Adventures of Huck Finn Chapters 8-14 (pages 45-155)

Browse Through Railton's Huck Finn Web Site and pick a section to report back on

Write

Find an image from Railton's site, print it out, and bring it to class to discuss.

 

 

 

Art: Do you recognize this image, it appears in both your text's notes and in Railton's site!

The Journey Day 4 (Wednesday Feb 1)

Read

Mark Twain: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Forward (XIX-XXVIII), Chapters 1-7 (1-44) and corresponding explanatory notes

Write

A post on Huck Finn Wiki

The Journey: Day 3 (Monday 30 January)

Read and Annotate:

Henry James: Intro and Daisy Miller

Write:

Post to the Daisy Miller Wiki by 9 AM on Monday 30 January: Daisy Miller Wiki

To receive credit for your work, you must print it out and bring it to class with you!

The Journey, Day 2 (1/25/2012)

To Prepare For Class

Order, if you have not already done so, the editions of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Chopin's The Awakening that you will need for this class.

Read the Course Syllabus

Read "The Things They Carried"

• annotate carefully focusing particularly on passages that use metaphor, metonymy, and imagery to create symbols for both individual characters and American culture
• find a Vietnam War photo--an example of photojournalism during the war--print it out, and bring it to class
• find a statistic about the Vietnam War, copy it down and bring that to class too.

Read "Do Not Go Gentle"

• annotate carefully focused on how Alexie uses metaphor, metonymy, and imagery to develop the story's symbolic structures
• Alexie is a bit of a celebrity--see if you can find some cool quotes and/or interesting info about him on the web. Copy something down or print it out and bring it to class with you.

  Here is a brief narrated powerpoint on figurative langauage and some of its terminology

Remember--to check out the poem of the day each day!