Semester Exam--11A

Remember: To Essay (essai) means "to explore an idea" to put a pattern to thoughts.  Also, remember to employ active verbs to engage your reader and specific examples to support your ideas.

1.  The Scarlet Letter. (Approximately 45 minutes.)

     A.   Complete the following with a partner.  Also record your answers.  Briefly explain what theme you chose for your essay and what evidence you used to support that theme.  Also, discuss how you chose to represent the novel artistically.  Why did you do what you did?  What message were you attempting to convey?  Rate how effectively your artistic rendering conveys your theme (1-5, with 5 being high).  What would you do differently--with more time, resources, and/or ideas?  Given that The Scarlet Letter is a highly symbolic novel, how might symbolism be explored artistically to enhance the themes of the novel?  Considering that Creation and Synthesis are the highest forms of thinking in Bloom's Taxonomy, what challenges did you face in this project?  How might you better meet these challenges in the future?

     B.  Choose one of the major characters in The Scarlet Letter and discuss how he or she changes.  Is this change for the better or worse?  Make specific references to the novel to support your arguments. Discuss how this character's getting or not getting what he or she wants influences theme.

     C.  What if the setting of The Scarlet Letter were here, today?  How would the tone, conflicts, characters, and themes be the same? Different?

     D.  Compare/contrast themes and symbolic elements in the novel with those in the painting The Woman Taken in Adultery, http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/rembrandt-the-woman-taken-in-adultery which was completed in 1644 by Rembrandt and which is in the National Gallery in London.

2.  Sitting Around the Fire--Narrative and the Exploration of Inner and Outer Worlds.  Walt Whitmanesque Poetry.  (Approximately 20 minutes.)

Read this excerpt about storytellers from Sherman Alexie's short story, "What You Pawn I Will Redeem": http://books.google.com/books?id=xWQhkWrFZBoC&pg=PA170&lpg=PA170&dq=sherman+alexie+storytellers+liars&source=bl&ots=1c3j3HcJYU&sig=Nolwj2fye7QZ9oxOEf8uFl8vidM&hl=en&sa=X&ei=TDAeT9DMMpLZiALT3uC6Cw&sqi=2&ved=0CCUQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q&f=false

Take a look at the lines from Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass.  Link is here: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1322/1322-h/1322-h.htm  Or, you can use your Elements of Literature book--Pages 331-341. Think about how Whitman is characterized as "The Bard of Democracy," a poet for common men and women and their stories.  Get up and look at the sketches and "Whitmanesque" poems you wrote.  Think about how each "snapshot" represents a story.

Think about this quote by Rabbi Nachmann of Bratzlav, as found in Peter Matthiessen's The Snow Leopard: "As the hand held before the eye conceals the greatest mountain, so the little earthly life hides from the glance the enormous lights and mysteries of which the world is full, and he who can draw it away from before his eyes, as one draws away a hand, beholds the great shining of the inner worlds."

Prompt: Making specific references to Leaves of Grass, any of the other literature, and your own experiences, discuss the role that "story-telling" and "story-listening," particularly by common folks, plays in helping us examine the relationships that exist between our inner and outer worlds and the relationships that exist between different persons.  Discuss too how a "journey" can elicit a story, how travel, or pilgrimage, might promote discovery.

3.  Art of Seeing.  Writing and Writing Well.  (Approximately 40 minutes.)

Check out these two pages from Susan Zwinger's journals.  Also, look at her comments about journal writing.  http://www.susanzwinger.com/journals_map.html  and

http://www.susanzwinger.com/journals_plant.html

Read this about Walt Whitman: "He wrote symphonically, associating themes and melodies with great freedom and suggestiveness; he abandoned conventional and hackneyed poetic figures and drew his symbolism freshly from experience."

And this about Helen Keller: "The most persuasive story of Helen Keller's life is what she said it was: 'I observe, I feel, I think, I imagine.'  She was an artist.  She imagined."

And this from Kim Stafford's Having Everything Right: "Memory is made as a quilt is made.  From the whole cloth of time, frayed scraps of sensation are pulled apart and pieced together in a pattern that has a name: Grandmother's Garden, Drunkard's Path to Dublin, Double Wedding Ring."

And this, from Donald Hall's "Writing, and Writing Well": "Our minds are muscle-bound, not by intellect, but by formulas of thought, by cliches both of phrase and organization.  Our minds do not need to remain restricted. . . . Practice was the first thing for him, sheer practice in putting pen to paper, letting the words follow each other across the page; if the habit of writing remains alien to us, we will never learn to write with any naturalness. . . . Everyone who starts daily writing at first fears running out of material.  Really, we have enough memory packed away, by the age of eighteen, to keep us writing until we are seventy."

Now, use the book that you chose from the "classic" American literature or "contemporary" American literature shelves.  Read for at least five minutes (enough to get a sense of what you are reading).  Then, using the list of senses http://mrbonnellswiki.pbworks.com/w/page/17964526/Life%20in%20America--The%20Art%20of%20Seeing  analyze how the writer uses language to engage the senses in order to influence tone, develop character, enhance setting, move plot,  create symbolism, or grapple with a theme.  Deal with as many literary elements as you can.  How are "seeing" and imagination necessary to writing (you may refer to any of your readings or experiences here)?

4.  Self-selects.  You may use your journals to assist you here.  Answer one of the following essay prompts, which are former AP exam prompts.  (Approximately 30 minutes.)

2011B.In The Writing of Fiction (1925), novelist Edith Wharton states the following:

At every stage in the progress of his tale the novelist must rely on what may be called the illuminating incident to reveal and emphasize     the inner meaning of each situation. Illuminating incidents are the magic casements of fiction, its vistas on infinity.

Choose a novel or play that you have studied and write a well-organized essay in which you describe an "illuminating" episode or moment and explain how it functions as a "casement," a window that opens onto the meaning of the work as a whole. Avoid mere plot summary.

 

2010.

Palestinian American literary theorist and cultural critic Edward Said has written that “Exile is strangely compelling to think about but terrible to experience. It is the unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home: its essential sadness can never be surmounted.” Yet Said has also said that exile can become “a potent, even enriching” experience. Select a novel, play, or epic in which a character experiences such a rift and becomes cut off from “home,” whether that home is the character’s birthplace, family, homeland, or other special place. Then write an essay in which you analyze how the character’s experience with exile is both alienating and enriching, and how this experience illuminates the meaning of the work as a whole. Do not merely summarize the plot.

5.  Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau.  Topophilia is a sense of place, a love of place, an "affinity for a particular place," according to the geographer Yi Fu Tuan.  Use the Elements of Literature book as a resource to answer this question.  Pages 191-193, 194, 208-218.   Choose at least five significant quotations from the writings of either Emerson and/or Thoreau and explain how they illustrate Transcendentalism and/or Individualism.  Discuss how Nature or Place influence Transcendence and/or Individualism.  (Approximately 15 minutes)

6.  Authentic Writing Situation.  (Approximately 10 minutes)

Describe what you did for your Authentic Writing Situation.  Attach a sample to the final.  How did this situation illustrate the relationship between the author (creator) and the audience?  What were you hoping to achieve through this type of writing?  What were you hoping for the audience?  How might you engage in "authentic" writing situations in the future?