Code Name Verity by Elizabeth Wein

Transcription

1 Summer Reading Assignment: English IV If you have any questions over the summer, please contact Mrs. Cunningham at Code Name Verity by Elizabeth Wein The book above is your summer reading assignment. PURCHASE a copy of this book to read over the summer and to use when you come back to school. Your assignment must be submitted to turnitin.com by 8 a.m. on Monday, August 29 th. You must ALSO bring a hard copy on the first day of class. DO NOT USE INTERNET SOURCES, SPARKNOTES, OR ANY OTHER OUTSIDE SOURCES WHILE READING THE BOOK OR WHILE WORKING ON THIS ASSIGNMENT. Any student who is found to use outside sources will be given a zero. We want to see YOUR ideas only! EXPECT TO HAVE A TEST ON YOUR FIRST DAY OF CLASS. Once you have completed your assignment, you will upload that single document on Turnitin.com. Students with last names beginning with A L should sign up using the following information: Class Title: Seniors A L Class ID: Enrollment password: summer Students with last name beginning with M Z should sign up using the following information: Class Title: Seniors M Z Class ID: Enrollment password: summer The Assignment: For your upcoming senior research paper, you will be crafting your OWN argument/thesis, which you will eventually support through the use of scholarly secondary sources. For your summer assignment, you will read your assigned book carefully, and write a response, as if you were going to write your Senior Research Paper about this book. Think of this as practice for the very first step of your SRP, which is to figure out what issue you ll write about and how you will approach your book. This summer reading response can be 1 or 2 paragraphs; either way, it needs to be about 1 to 1½ pages long. Read through the description of the common approaches to literature (below), choose one that you find particularly relevant to this book, and then use your response to explain what idea and which approach you d use if you had to write a lengthy paper on this book. This paragraph will not follow the format for a typical literary paragraph, in the sense that it won t really have a thesis. (Your first sentence might be something like: If I were writing my senior research paper on Code Name Verity, I would focus on the issue of and use a

2 approach. ) In the body of your response, include 2 or 3 quotes that demonstrate why this issue is interesting to you and why this approach would work. Some questions that might help you with ideas: Start with your ideas about the book. Are there issues that are particularly interesting to you, just based on your reading? Use the information below about common approaches to literature to figure out what kind of an approach would help you explore those issues, OR use the common approaches to help you come up with some ideas. Which topic or approach is most interesting to you? If you choose that topic and approach, what question would you want to answer through your paper? Why are you interested in this topic and this question? What details from the book are relevant to this topic and approach? What do you see see as the advantages of this topic and approach? Do you have any questions or concerns about the topic or approach? You do not have to answer every single question; they are more meant to help you get started than to be a list you have to work through. When we grade this assignment, we are going to consider the amount of time, thought, and effort you put into it, whether it includes 2 3 quotes, and how insightfully you re responding to the book. While you are writing, keep in mind the literary conventions you have become so familiar with over the last 3 years! In other words, follow the rules on our green grammar sheet with the exception of the fact that you can use first person. Common Approaches to Literature The following is a brief guide to some of the most commonly used approaches to literature. It s meant to give you some additional ideas for how you might approach your senior research project in other words, to give you more ideas about the kinds of questions you might ask about your book. A formalist approach is one in which we look at the formal aspects of the primary text. Formalists do not consider biographical information about the author, historical context, or other issues from outside of the text. Instead, they look at issues like how imagery, language, setting, and so on are used in the text. This approach is particularly helpful if you love literature for its own sake, if you re interested in how texts work, or if you want to do your own creative writing. However, it can sometimes be a challenge to explain why it s important to look at the text in this way. If you use this approach for your SRP, you would probably mostly use literary criticism for your secondary sources in other words, sources in which the writers analyze the text itself. Examples with Their Eyes Were Watching God would include focusing on Zora Neale Hurston s use of dialect in the text, or on Hurston s use of nature imagery, or on how Janie develops as a character.

3 Comparative approaches are those in which a writer compares two texts. For example, if there is a movie made out of your book, you could compare the book and the adaptation. You also could compare your book to a different text, such as another text with a similar topic. This approach is particularly helpful if you love literature for its own sake. One of the challenges with this approach is to figure out why it s important to compare these two texts. Who cares that they re similar or different? If you re looking at an adaption, why does it matter whether it s true to the original or how it s different? If you use this approach for your SRP, you would probably mostly use literary criticism for your secondary sources, about both texts. You also could look at some studies of adaptations or comparisons as models for your own, to get a sense of the kinds of arguments you could make. If you are going to compare your book to another text, CHECK WITH YOUR TEACHER FIRST! An example with Their Eyes Were Watching God would be comparing the book with the movie version. For example, the movie left out the part with Mrs. Turner. Does that matter? It also left out the part when Tea Cake is flirting with Nunkie again, does it matter? Does it matter that it made Janie seem more controversial (in how boldly she flirts with Tea Cake, for example)? A biographical approach is one in which you link the author s life to the text. In other words, you might consider how a text reflects the author s life, but is also different from the author s life. This approach is particularly helpful if your text has at least some parallels to the author s life. However, if you use this approach, you have to be very careful to not simply be saying, Look, this is an autobiographical text! That can lead you to oversimplify the relation between the book and the author s life, and it can lead you to equate the book with the author s life. To avoid those pitfalls, you would need to consider both the similarities and the differences between the text and the author s life, and you would need to make an argument about why they matter. If you use this approach for your SRP, you would need to use secondary sources about your author. You also might want to look at a biographical study of an author and a text as use it as a model for your SRP. Examples with Their Eyes Were Watching God would be to consider how the novel reflects Hurston s experiences growing up in an all black town very much like the one in the book, or to consider the fact that she was in three significant relationships with men, or to consider the fact that she worked as a folklorist.

4 Feminist approaches look particularly at how women are treated in literature. More broadly, they can be related to gender studies, in which case they look not only at women, but also at gender roles and how they play out for both women and men. This approach is particularly helpful if you re interested in how women are treated, how gender roles shape what we do or how we re perceived, ideas about how masculine and feminine are understood, and similar questions. If you use this approach for your SRP, you could use literary criticism, as well as secondary sources in the fields of women s studies, feminist studies, gender studies, and so on. An example with Their Eyes Were Watching God would be to focus on how Janie s husbands understood their roles in their marriages as well as their expectations for Janie and how she was supposed to act, because she was a woman. Psychological approaches often apply the work of particular psychologists to a text, particularly Sigmund Freud. For our purposes, it might be more helpful to think of psychological approaches as ones in which we look at characters in the ways that psychologists might look at their patients. For example, are they depressed? How have their childhood experiences shaped them as they mature? Why do they do things the way they do? This approach is particularly helpful if you are motivated by trying to understand people. In a way, the characters in your book become examples that help us understand how people develop, what their mental state is and why, and so on. If you use this approach for your SRP, you would probably some literary criticism, but also secondary texts that have to do with psychological issues. Examples with Their Eyes Were Watching God could be to analyze how Nanny s characteristics as a grandparent shaped Janie s ideas about her own life, or to study the people and events that help Janie develop and mature through the text. An historical approach is one that applies information about the historical context to the text in question. This approach is particularly helpful if you want to know more about what s going on in the background of the text. The challenge is to make a strong argument for why it s important to know the historical information. For example, what impact does it have on how we understand the text? If you use this approach for your SRP, you would probably mostly use some literary criticism, but also texts that give you background information about the events discussed. An example with Their Eyes Were Watching God would be to learn more about the big floods in Florida in the 1920s, which inspired Hurston s descriptions of the storm during which Tea Cake got bit by the dog.

5 Marxist criticism applies the insights of Karl Marx to literature. For our purposes, we can simplify this into an interest in how money or class plays out in the text. For example, do people who have money have more power or options than those who don t? How does money or class influence what people can or can t do? This approach is particularly helpful if you have a text with characters who have money and power, as well as those who don t, or at least if the characters in the text are concerned with issues of money and power. You also could think of this approach as having to do with issues of status. In other words, is one character understood as good enough for the others, or do the characters see big differences among themselves? If you use this approach for your SRP, you would probably mostly use literary criticism, as well as perhaps some secondary sources that deal with class, money, or status differences. An example with Their Eyes Were Watching God would be to focus on how Janie acts or is perceived while she is Joe s wife, as compared to while she is Tea Cake s wife. Another example would be to focus on how important money and status is for Nanny (although she calls it protection ). Other possibilities include taking an interest of yours and figuring out how to apply it to your SRP book. For example, say you re really interested in becoming a lawyer. Are there criminal justice issues you could apply to your book? What about issues that social workers might address? Or journalists? The idea here is to think about the issues that are really interesting to you and figure out a way to make this paper work with them. Since you re going to be working on this until February, make it something that will be really useful to you! An example with Their Eyes Were Watching God, if I wanted to go into medicine, might be to look into what was understood about rabies at the time. Were there treatments that Tea Cake could have had that would have saved his life? When would he have needed to have them? Is Janie safe from rabies, or is she in trouble, since Tea Cake bit her?