...Proving Hemingway Wrong Ernest Hemingway made a quote stating that all American writing came from “one book by Mark Twain, Huckleberry Finn” and that there was no American Literature before the book. Hemingway was wrong because, American Literature is written works that are created by utilizing the English language and based off of the culture and history of America. It is true that in the period before Huckleberry Finn, British and European writers influenced the majority of the literature produced. But, as America found its identity while settling in the new found land, so where the early American writers. Moreover, some of the literature produced before Huckleberry Finn is American Literature because it does contain the essential elements...
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...of ‘The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn’ to show what is revealed about characters and themes Huckleberry Finn is an American Novel written by Mark Twain which was published in 1885. It is one of the first books ever to be written in dialect. In this essay, I will be specifically focussing on the final chapter of the novel and will be showing how the language reveals key points about the characters and themes. Throughout the novel, Jim is constantly referred to as a ‘nigger’. However Huckleberry calls him by his real name, Jim. This shows how Huckleberry values Jim more as a person compared to other people. It shows how spending all this time together has made a special connection and bond between them. Jim has been a father figure to Huckleberry as well as a friend for the whole journey and it plays a powerful role in the novel. In the final chapter, it is very clear to see that Tom Sawyer is an imaginative individual who is adventurous, and is obsessed with wild plans taken from the plots of adventure novels. This is shown when Huck says “And then Tom he talked along and talked along, and says le’s all three slide out of here one of these nights and get an outfit, and go for howling adventures amongst the Injuns…” The use of the adjective ‘howling’ when describing the adventures shows how wild Tom is as a person and a character in the novel. He wants to experience the extreme and nothing less. It is obvious to us that Tom serves as a foil to Huckleberry. He shows Huck to be...
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...Course Number and Title: American Literature 1 Number of Credits: 3 Instructor Name: Sos Bagramyan Email Address: sbagramyan@aua.am Telephone Number: 51 27 69 Office Location: Paramaz Avedisian Building, 132W Office Hours: Tuesday and Thursday, 8am-9am Term/Year: Spring 2015 ENGL 120 – American Literature 1 This survey course introduces students to American literature from the beginning of European contact to the present, focusing on major authors and different literary genres. It examines the historical influences on the evolution of this body of literature and the construction of a distinct and complex American identity. Through close reading, class discussion and their own research and writing, students will explore how themes such as gender, race, class, spirituality, economics, and the environment play a role in the formation and evolution of the American experience Three hours of instructor-led class time per week. Required Materials: All readings are located in PDF format on our course’s Moodle page. Academic Integrity: All graded assignments must completed individually. Plagiarism is a serious offense, and any attempt to pass off another person's ideas and writings as your own will result in severe disciplinary measures, possibly expulsion from the university. This also applies to your Informal Responses, which should reflect your own understanding of the material and not simply repeat what I or your classmates have already said. Students are required...
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...EPISODE 1: (Chapters 1-6) – “Snapped: Life Changes in a Blink of an Eye” REPRESENTATIVE QUOTE: “Pap he hadn't been seen for more than a year, and that was comfortable for me; I didn't want to see him no more. He used to always whale me when he was sober and could get his hands on me; though I used to take to the woods most of the time when he was around.” (Chapter 3 – Pg. 14) CHARACTERS: • Huckleberry (Huck) Finn – protagonist, narrator, all around main character. • The Widow Douglas – takes (Huck) under her wing in hopes to better him. • Miss Watson – The Widow Douglas’ sister • Tom Sawyer – Huck’s fellow companion, first introduced in Mark Twain’s previous novel. • Jim – Miss Watson’s slave. • Pap – Huck’s alcoholic, racist, father. • Judge Thatcher – Works along side The Widow Douglas to protect Huck’s well – being. SETTING: The series of events in this episode unfold in the imaginary Mississippi River town of St. Petersburg, Missouri. The scenes unravel in the town where Huck resides with the Widow Douglas and the other housemates, and in the surrounding areas. PLOT OVERVIEW: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a follow-up to the book The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Huckleberry (Huck) Finn is a thirteen-year-old adolescent living a life of not knowing what is next. Huck was “adopted” by The Widow Douglas. The Widow Douglas strives to impart manners on Huck and to better him as a young boy. However, Huck was raised in a matter that completely contradicts his new procedures...
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...LITERARY ANALYSIS PAPERS *The thesis statement is one of the (if not the) most important parts of your paper—think of it as the foundation of a house—if your foundation is weak and poorly constructed, what do you think happens to the house? *The thesis statement is the announcement of your analytical argument that you intend to make and prove in the duration of your paper. It is a road map for the paper—it tells the reader what to expect from the rest of the paper. *It should be placed somewhere in the Introduction of your paper—Many like to put it as the last sentence(s) of their Intro which is fine. *Successful thesis statements provoke thought and should read beautifully. *Your thesis statement should include two parts: WHAT and WHY. *WHAT: What claim are you making about the text? *WHY: Why should we care? Why is your claim important? Your thesis should answer the “so what?” question. *A thesis statement is usually, but can be more than, one sentence long. Examples of Literary Thesis Statements: * “Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn is a great American novel.” *What’s wrong with this thesis statement? *An opinion about the book, not an argument. * “In Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain develops a contrast between life on the river and life on the shore.” *Better? How so? What is still missing? *Doesn’t answer the “so what?” question—what is the point of the contrast? What does the contrast signify? * “Through its contrasting river and shore scenes, Twain’s Huckleberry Finn suggests that...
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...should remain at the heart of your work. Of course, the task of staying focused on your main idea may not be as easy as it seems. In addition, you will need to carefully handle other elements of the essay, such as the introduction, supporting evidence and conclusion. When dealing with a literature essay, you should offer a debatable argument about a literary work. For example, simply stating that “Mark Twain’s ‘Adventures of Huckleberry Finn’ is about the adventures of a young protagonist,” will not suffice as a debatable issue. You will need to produce a more focused and opinionated topic. Your personal stance, which will appear in the form of your essay’s thesis statement, can aim to analyze character development, debate the effectiveness of writing techniques employed by the author or even draw comparisons between multiple literary works. You must be imaginative and clear when brainstorming your thesis. After your thesis statement is in place, you will use the body of the essay to support your stance using facts and examples from the text. Direct quotes from the text can be especially useful as you try to persuade your audience. Finally, the conclusion of the essay will bring all of your evidence and main points together. However, you will also need to proofread and edit your work in order to make a novel essay complete. Structure of a Novel Essay The following presents the basic structure of most essays and the functions of...
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...Advanced Placement English Language and Composition Advanced Placement English III First Six Weeks – Introductory Activities: ▪ Class rules, expectations, procedures ▪ Students review patterns of writing, which they will imitate throughout the course: reflection, narration and description, critical analysis, comparison and contrast, problem and solution, and persuasion and argument. ▪ Students review annotation acronyms, how to do a close reading, literary elements and rhetorical devices. Students also review the SOAPSTONE (subject, occasion, audience, purpose, speaker, tone, organization, narrative style and evidence) strategy for use in analyzing prose and visual texts along with three of the five cannons of rhetoric: invention, arrangement and style. ▪ Students learn the format of the AP test, essay rubric and essay structure. ▪ Students take a full-length AP test for comparison purposes in the spring. Reading: The Scarlet Letter – Nathaniel Hawthorne Writing: Answer the following question in one paragraph. Use quotes from the novel as evidence. Some readers believe that the elaborate decoration that Hester embroiders on the scarlet letter indicates her rejection of the community’s view of her act. Do you agree or disagree? Explain your position using evidence from the text. (test grade) Writing: Write a well-developed essay addressing the following prompt. Document all sources using MLA citation. Compare Hester to a modern...
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...Chapter 1 Summary The narrator speaks of his grandparents, freed slaves who, after the Civil War, believed that they were separate but equal—that they had achieved equality with whites despite segregation. The narrator’s grandfather lived a meek and quiet life after being freed. On his deathbed, however, he spoke bitterly to the narrator’s father, comparing the lives of black Americans to warfare and noting that he himself felt like a traitor. He counseled the narrator’s father to undermine the whites with “yeses” and “grins” and advised his family to “agree ’em to death and destruction.” Now the narrator too lives meekly; he too receives praise from the white members of his town. His grandfather’s words haunt him, for the old man deemed such meekness to be treachery. The narrator recalls delivering the class speech at his high school graduation. The speech urges humility and submission as key to the advancement of black Americans. It proves such a success that the town arranges to have him deliver it at a gathering of the community’s leading white citizens. The narrator arrives and receives instructions to take part in the “battle royal” that figures as part of the evening’s entertainment. The narrator and some of his classmates (who are black) don boxing gloves and enter the ring. A naked, blonde, white woman with an American flag painted on her stomach parades about; some of the white men demand that the black boys look at her and others threaten them if they don’t...
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...AHS RESEARCH MANUAL 2011 Student: __________________________ TERESA STERCHI KIM BROWN AHS LIBRARY CONTENTS PREPARATION OF THE RESEARCH PAPER........................................................1 SELECTING AND LIMITING THE TOPIC............................................................1 PREPARING A WORKING BIBLIOGRAPHY AND EVALUATING SOURCES…………….2 READING AND TAKING NOTES........................................................................3 DEVELOPING A WORKING OUTLINE/PLAN…………………………………………………….5 DOCUMENTING AND CITING SOURCES USING MLA STYLE……………..……………..7 WRITING THE PAPER…………………………………..…………………...........................18 MLA STYLE OF PARENTHETICAL/IN-TEXT CITATIONS………………………………….19 PLACING CITATIONS IN THE PAPER…………………………………………………………..21 FORMATTING AND TYPING THE REPORT USING THE MLA STYLE…………………26 TYPING THE WORKS CITED PAGE AND SAMPLE TITLE PAGE..........................29 PREPARATION Research is the process of gathering information from different sources on a particular topic. In daily life students may research buying a song on the Internet, buying a new MP3 player, an iPod, or any other product of interest. At school, students may have to research a historical topic, an author or literary work, or a contemporary issue and present their findings in a paper, PowerPoint presentation, or in a movie format. All of this is part of the process of asking questions, looking at the available information, and coming to a conclusion based...
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...AHS RESEARCH MANUAL 2011 Student: __________________________ TERESA STERCHI KIM BROWN AHS LIBRARY CONTENTS PREPARATION OF THE RESEARCH PAPER........................................................1 SELECTING AND LIMITING THE TOPIC............................................................1 PREPARING A WORKING BIBLIOGRAPHY AND EVALUATING SOURCES…………….2 READING AND TAKING NOTES........................................................................3 DEVELOPING A WORKING OUTLINE/PLAN…………………………………………………….5 DOCUMENTING AND CITING SOURCES USING MLA STYLE……………..……………..7 WRITING THE PAPER…………………………………..…………………...........................18 MLA STYLE OF PARENTHETICAL/IN-TEXT CITATIONS………………………………….19 PLACING CITATIONS IN THE PAPER…………………………………………………………..21 FORMATTING AND TYPING THE REPORT USING THE MLA STYLE…………………26 TYPING THE WORKS CITED PAGE AND SAMPLE TITLE PAGE..........................29 PREPARATION Research is the process of gathering information from different sources on a particular topic. In daily life students may research buying a song on the Internet, buying a new MP3 player, an iPod, or any other product of interest. At school, students may have to research a historical topic, an author or literary work, or a contemporary issue and present their findings in a paper, PowerPoint presentation, or in a movie format. All of this is part of the process of asking questions, looking at the available information, and coming to a conclusion based...
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...A Guide to Writing the Literary Analysis Essay I. INTRODUCTION: the first paragraph in your essay. It begins creatively in order to catch your reader’s interest, provides essential background about the literary work, and prepares the reader for your major thesis. The introduction must include the author and title of the work as well as an explanation of the theme to be discussed. Other essential background may include setting, an introduction of main characters, etc. The major thesis goes in this paragraph usually at the end. Because the major thesis sometimes sounds tacked on, make special attempts to link it to the sentence that precedes it by building on a key word or idea. A) Creative Opening/Hook: the beginning sentences of the introduction that catch the reader’s interest. Ways of beginning creatively include the following: 1) A startling fact or bit of information Example: Nearly two hundred citizens were arrested as witches during the Salem witch scare of 1692. Eventually nineteen were hanged, and another was pressed to death (Marks 65). 2) A snatch of dialogue between two characters Example: “It is another thing. You [Frederic Henry] cannot know about it unless you have it.” “ Well,” I said. “If I ever get it I will tell you [priest].” (Hemingway 72). With these words, the priest in Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms sends the hero, Frederic, in search of the ambiguous “it” in his life. 3) A meaningful quotation (from the book you are analyzing...
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...NORTH AMERICAN FICTION BRIEF INTRODUCTION: Before starting our study of American Fiction we must understand what American Literature is in itself and which pieces of writing we can include within this label. It is believed that when a piece is written in North America, more precisely in the USA, it would automatically be given this epithet. But it should be taken into account that this idea is quite broad and doesn’t reflect the real essence of the term. However, there is also another definition that gathers this essence: American Literature is the one that represents the Americanism, the singularity of the USA philosophy and culture. This way, instead of focusing on who the author is, it is focused on the content of the writing. In that which concerns Fiction, the following documents are the ones considered as narrative: Speeches Letters Short Stories Essays Political Documents Sermons Novels Diaries 1 FIRST LITERARY EXPRESSIONS The first documents in which the idea of Americanism is very present are the Sermons. They respond to the strict Protestantism settled in the New Continent after the arrival of the Pilgrim Fathers and Puritans in the Mayflower (1620) and the Arabella (1630). They established a theocratic community whose main and only point of reference was the Bible. That is why the idea of the ‘city upon a hill’ is still very present in American mentality. As we all know...
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...A TEACHER’S GUIDE TO THE SIGNET CLASSIC EDITION OF WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE’S MACBETH LINDA NEAL UNDERWOOD S E R I E S E D I T O R S : W. GEIGER ELLIS, ED.D., ARTHEA J. S. REED, PH.D., UNIVERSITY OF GEORGIA, EMERITUS and UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA, RETIRED A Teacher’s Guide to the Signet Classic Edition of William Shakespeare’s Macbeth 2 INTRODUCTION William Shakespeare developed many stories into excellent dramatizations for the Elizabethan stage. Shakespeare knew how to entertain and involve an audience with fast-paced plots, creative imagery, and multi-faceted characters. Macbeth is an action-packed, psychological thriller that has not lost its impact in nearly four hundred years. The politically ambitious character of Macbeth is as timely today as he was to Shakespeare's audience. Mary McCarthy says in her essay about Macbeth, "It is a troubling thought that Macbeth, of all Shakespeare's characters, should seem the most 'modern,' the only one you could transpose into contemporary battle dress or a sport shirt and slacks." (Signet Classic Macbeth) Audiences today quickly become interested in the plot of a blindly ambitious general with a strong-willed wife who must try to cope with the guilt engendered by their murder of an innocent king in order to further their power. The elements of superstition, ghosts, and witchcraft, though more readily a part of everyday life for the Renaissance audience, remain intriguing to modern teenagers. The action-packed...
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...G U I D E T E A C H E R’S A TEACHER’S GUIDE TO TWELVE YEARS A SLAVE BY SOLOMON NORTHUP bY Jeanne M. McGlInn anD JaMes e. McGlInn 2 A Teacher’s Guide to Twelve Years a Slave by Solomon Northup Table of Contents SYNOPSIS......................................................................................................................................3 ABOUT THE AUTHOR...............................................................................................................3 INTRODUCTION TO THE STUDY GUIDE............................................................................3 MEETING COMMON CORE STANDARDS.............................................................3 THE SLAVE NARRATIVE GENRE...............................................................................3 HISTORICAL OVERVIEW..........................................................................................................4 DURING READING.....................................................................................................................6 SYNTHESIZING DISCUSSION QUESTIONS.......................................................................9 ENRICHMENT ACTIVITIES.......................................................................................................9 ACTIVITIES FOR USING THE FILM ADAPTATION........................................................ 11 ADDITIONAL RESOURCES.....................................................................................
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...iaJasper Jones Reading Guide S.A. Jones v2 April 2010 http://www.sajones.com.au Synopsis .................................................................................................................................................. 3 About the Author .................................................................................................................................... 3 Edition Used ............................................................................................................................................ 3 Morality and Ethics ................................................................................................................................. 3 Moral Duality ...................................................................................................................................... 3 Scapegoats .......................................................................................................................................... 5 Morality versus Ethics ......................................................................................................................... 5 Responsibility and Culpability ............................................................................................................. 6 Atonement .......................................................................................................................................... 9 Law and Legality .............................
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