To wrap up the unit on identity, we will be reading The Catcher in the Rye, by J.D. Salinger. Published in 1951, this story features typical, poignant, and sometimes crude episodes from protagonist Holden Caufield’s searching journey to New York City. The story begins:

“If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth. In the first place, that stuff bores me, and in the second place, my parents would have about two hemorrhages apiece if I told anything pretty personal about them.”

We will be reading the novel together in class, though silent reading will occasionally be assigned. Students will be responsible for tracking themes and symbols throughout the book (by using a tracking sheet) and for completing study questions as we read.

Complete the following poll. You may select multiple answers.

Catcher resources:

Character Map

Click for an interactive map of Manhattan

Reading guide Ch 1-4

[goog doc="dc4kzt6f_55fzfc5hd6"]Catcher notes[/goog]

Catcher Pics

[Show as slideshow]

Allie's baseball mitt

American Museum of Natural History

Field of Rye

Carousel in Central Park

Central Park, N.Y.

Duck on a frozen pond

Red hunting cap

Old-time skates

Pencey Prep

Radio City Music Hall

Museum of Art

J.D. Salinger

Custom Cover

Catcher Videos

Related posts:

1. Arguement and Logical Fallacies Update: take the quiz [QUIZZIN 7] The following presentations contains...
2. Literary terms Literary elements are the parts, or components of a story....
3. Independent Novel Study As the name implies, independent study will involve you reading...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

[goog doc="dc4kzt6f_223g757pgg4"]Notes[/goog]

Huckleberry Finn, one of the central works of American literature and a worldwide best seller, traces the moral education of a young boy whose better impulses overcome both self-interest and the negative forces of his culture. Huck, a homeless boy whose only relative is his disreputable father, is taken in by a respectable widow who seeks to educate him. She forces him to go to school, but Huck dislikes being “so cramped up and sivilized [sic] as they call it.” His father abducts him, and Huck prefers the freedom of his father’s shack to the constraint of more genteel surroundings.

This is what we are reading.

Freed from civilizing influences and placed in the company of his father, a vicious racist who boasts of his own illiteracy, Huck seems like a poor candidate for moral growth. But when Pap Finn nearly kills the boy during an alcoholic delirium, Huck escapes and meets the runaway slave Jim, who provides him with the opportunity to make a significant moral choice. Huck has been shaped not only by his father’s view that one should act out of self interest, but also by his society’s belief that God’s law mandates slavery. As he protects Jim, Huck feels certain that he will go to hell. Nonetheless, he transcends his upbringing and learns to value essential human bonds of trust beyond his own interest. Throughout the novel the boy witnesses a variety of human corruption, pretension, and violence, but maintains his integrity through his ability to identify with others.

“All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn. American writing comes from that. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since.”

–Ernest Hemingway

Mark twain was born Samuel Langhorne Clemens in the town of Florida, Missouri, in 1835. When he was four years old, his family moved to Hannibal, a town on the Mississippi River much like the towns depicted in his two most famous novels, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884).

Author and humorist Mark TwainClemens spent his young life in a fairly affluent family that owned a number of household slaves. The death of Clemens’s father in 1847, however, left the family in hardship. Clemens left school, worked for a printer, and, in 1851, having finished his apprenticeship, began to set type for his brother Orion’s newspaper, the Hannibal Journal. But Hannibal proved too small to hold Clemens, who soon became a sort of itinerant printer and found work in a number of American cities, including New York and Philadelphia.

While still in his early twenties, Clemens gave up his printing career in order to work on riverboats on the Mississippi. Clemens eventually became a riverboat pilot, and his life on the river influenced him a great deal. Perhaps most important, the riverboat life provided him with the pen name Mark Twain, derived from the riverboat leadsmen’s signal-”By the mark, twain”-that the water was deep enough for safe passage. Life on the river also gave Twain material for several of his books, including the raft scenes of Huckleberry Finn and the material for his autobiographical Life on the Mississippi (1883).

Clemens continued to work on the river until 1861, when the Civil War exploded across America and shut down the Mississippi for travel and shipping. Although Clemens joined a Confederate cavalry division, he was no ardent Confederate, and when his division deserted en masse, he did too. He then made his way west with his brother Orion, working first as a silver miner in Nevada and then stumbling into his true calling, journalism. In 1863, Clemens began to sign articles with the name Mark Twain.

Throughout the late 1860s and 1870s, Twain’s articles, stories, memoirs, and novels, characterized by an irrepressible wit and a deft ear for language and dialect, garnered him immense celebrity. His novel The Innocents Abroad (1869) was an instant bestseller, and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) received even greater national acclaim and cemented Twain’s position as a giant in American literary circles. As the nation prospered economically in the post-Civil War period-an era that came to be known as the Gilded Age, an epithet that Twain coined-so too did Twain. His books were sold door-to-door, and he became wealthy enough to build a large house in Hartford, Connecticut, for himself and his wife, Olivia, whom he had married in 1870.

Twain began work on Huckleberry Finn, a sequel to Tom Sawyer, in an effort to capitalize on the popularity of the earlier novel. This new novel took on a more serious character, however, as Twain focused increasingly on the institution of slavery and the South. Twain soon set Huckleberry Finn aside, perhaps because its darker tone did not fit the optimistic sentiments of the Gilded Age. In the early 1880s, however, the hopefulness of the post-Civil War years began to fade. Reconstruction, the political program designed to reintegrate the defeated South into the Union as a slavery-free region, began to fail. The harsh measures the victorious North imposed only embittered the South. Concerned about maintaining power, many Southern politicians began an effort to control and oppress the black men and women whom the war had freed.

Meanwhile, Twain’s personal life began to collapse. His wife had long been sickly, and the couple lost their first son after just nineteen months. Twain also made a number of poor investments and financial decisions and, in 1891, found himself mired in debilitating debt. As his personal fortune dwindled, he continued to devote himself to writing. Drawing from his personal plight and the prevalent national troubles of the day, he finished a draft of Huckleberry Finn in 1883, and by 1884 had it ready for publication. The novel met with great public and critical acclaim.

Twain continued to write over the next ten years. He published two more popular novels, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889) and Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894), but went into a considerable decline afterward, never again publishing work that matched the high standard he had set with Huckleberry Finn. Personal tragedy also continued to hound Twain: his finances remained troublesome, and within the course of a few years, his wife and two of his daughters passed away. Twain’s writing from this period until the end of his life reflects a depression and a sort of righteous rage at the injustices of the world. Despite his personal troubles, however, Twain continued to enjoy immense esteem and fame and continued to be in demand as a public speaker until his death in 1910.

Huck Finn and Jim on the raft

Although regarded as a classic, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn has engendered controversy from the start. The Concord Public Library in Massachusetts banned it shortly after publication. In reporting approvingly of this action, the Boston Transcript noted that members of the library committee found the book “the veriest trash” and “rough, coarse, and inelegant.” The Springfield Republican found the novel “a gross trifling with every fine feeling” and “harmful.” These objections, grounded on the view that only idealized portrayals of young persons can be edifying, can be dismissed easily by contemporary readers; more serious, however, are charges that the book encourages racism.

“We said there warn’t no home like a raft, after all. Other places do seem so cramped up and smothery, but a raft don’t. You feel mighty free and easy and comfortable on a raft.” –Huck

In 1957 New York City junior and senior high schools dropped the novel from a list of approved books because it uses the term “nigger” and allegedly stereotypes Jim. More recently, a number of court cases have been fought to remove it from lists of required reading on grounds of racism. For example, in 1982 an administrative aide at, ironically, the Mark Twain Intermediate School in Fairfax County, Virginia, stated, “The book is poison … it works against the idea that all men are created equal. . . anybody who teaches this book is a racist.”

Listen to the program “The ‘n-word” on Minnesota Public radio by clicking here. Or download a copy of the article. Radio Transcript N-Word

Some elements in Jim’s character do suggest stereotyping – his superstition, his seeming passivity and gullibility – but he is generally superior to the book’s white characters. Pap Finn’s “whiteness” stands in contrast to Jim’s color as does his vice to Jim’s virtue. Pap’s color is linked to his racism. He is white “not like another man’s white, but white to make a body sick, a white to make a body’s flesh crawl – a tree toad white, a fish-belly white.” He gains his sense of worth by feeling superior to black men, whatever their attainments. Far from degrading Jim, Twain measures the worth of all of the other characters against him. The impact of the term “nigger” cannot be discounted, however. The sensibilities of readers may be offended by its use if they come to the book without adequate historical background: The characters’ attitudes and terminology must be measured against the times in which they live.

Related posts:

1. Catcher in the Rye Intro To wrap up the unit on identity, we will be...
2. Independent Novel Study As the name implies, independent study will involve you reading...
3. A Raisin in the Sun Intro A Raisin in the Sun was first produced in 1959...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

“The Fall of the House of Usher,” Edgar Allan Poe
Roderick Usher is not only alone, but the last of his line. The Fall of the House of Usher

“The Raven,” Edgar Allan Poe
The narrator is has been left alone by loss. See the Raven post for more info.

“Mariam,” Truman Capote
Time is not kind to Mariam.  Read how this little old lady deals with isolation. Mariam

[QUIZZIN 9]

Related posts:

1. The Raven “The Raven” resources. Here is a copy  of “The Raven”...
2. Unit One Review US Lit II Unit 1 Topic Review This first unit...
3. Identity Who are you? Do you Know? This unit is designed...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Read the passage and try to get a feeling for what is going on.

He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.

Then follow these steps to understanding:

Translating Notes

[Show as slideshow]

Click the slide to view the notes. The key is to replace information you don’t understand with information that you do.

The king has forbidden his governors to pass important laws, or if they do pass laws, they are temporarily stopped from taking effect till the king gives the ok; and when the laws are temporarily stopped, he has completely ignored the laws so they could never take effect.

Related posts:

1. Declaration of Independence Perhaps the most influential document in American history, The...
2. Letter from Birmingham Jail Written in sitting in jail in 1963 following a protest...
3. Quoting sources for your arguement An important skill for all upper level papers is the...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

[QUIZZIN 7]
The following presentations contains the notes for argument (logos, ethos, and pathos) and logical fallacies and the homework that goes with it. Remember, this is the foundation for most types of communication will help you to not only be a good student, but a good voter, citizen, consumer, employee, etc.
[goog doc="dc4kzt6f_109gtph32dm"]Logical Fallacies Notes[/goog]

These worksheets were completed in class and rely on the notes.

Name that Fallacy
How do they persuade

Related posts:

1. Quoting sources for your arguement An important skill for all upper level papers is the...
2. Catcher in the Rye Intro To wrap up the unit on identity, we will be...
3. Literary terms Literary elements are the parts, or components of a story....

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

You can download the assignment description that was handed out in class. Remember, it must be signed by you and a parent and returned.
Indpendent Novel Assignment (1 hit)

Requirements:

1. Selection of a novel or book written by an American author. You will need to select a book with some literary merit (no romance-type novels) or social/historical value (can be fiction or nonfiction). I will provide a list of suggested books and I will make my personal collection available (though you will probably need to use a library or bookstore as I have a limited number of books). I must approve your book.
2. Journal assignments. You will complete three journal assignments while reading your book. These will deal with plot, character, theme and personal reactions and reflections. These are self paced, though there are deadlines for each assignment, which you can use to pace your reading. You must keep track of deadlines and get the assignment from me beforehand. See the reverse side for deadlines. These are separate from your class journal.
3. A final project. There are several final projects to choose from. These will range from traditional writing assignments to more creative endeavors.

A description of each assignment is listed in this file. All will involve some sort of written explanation to go with it.
Independent Novel Final Projects (16 hits)

Make sure you read the grading rubric for your choice before completing the assignments. It will list the specific requirements.
Independent Novel Project Rubrics (13 hits)

These are the deadlines for the assignments. You may also click the .Events and Dates page to see a calendar with the dates
Independent Novel Deadlines (7 hits)

It will be important to keep up with the reading. Class time will not be nearly enough to complete your novel (class time may not be scheduled, so keep you book handy). This independent study will require just that, independent study. Developing independent reading habits is essential for college and life long learning and enrichment. This will be a challenge for some of you but all of you are capable of doing this-and you might find that you enjoy it. The final project will be a test grade (tests are worth 40% of your grade) so failure to complete it will severely hurt your grade. This should boost your first semester grade, not hurt it.

Related posts:

1. Catcher in the Rye Intro To wrap up the unit on identity, we will be...
2. Welcome to 2009-10 Time for another year Welcome back. This is the class...
3. College Application Essay Why do you have to write College App Essays? Colleges...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

While I use writing here, APPF can apply to any form of communication.  A movie, a song, a speach, sermon or myth (and much more).

For example, this Website has specific goals.

Here is the handout/homework from class: RAPPF (4 hits)

Related posts:

1. Unit One Review US Lit II Unit 1 Topic Review This first unit...
2. Age of Reason group work General directions: Create a PowerPoint presentation for your group’s prompt....
3. Declaration of Independence Perhaps the most influential document in American history, The...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.