This independent reading unit will focus students on the (often-difficult) issue of language and its ability to express and communicate meaning. Following an introduction and analysis of short passages, all students will read one essay in common, followed by three texts chosen from a list for a total of four texts.
For each text, students will be exploring the mechanics of the text's language. How is it using words to convince you? What is the argument the author is making? Finally, how does this assignment translate into an understanding of the AP exam? |
Overview
Below, you will see three short texts by a variety of authors. All of them deal in some way with the difficult task of language in communicating the truth of human experience or a speaker's meaning. As we read, ask yourself some of the following questions:
Text 1: Hamlet, Prince of Denmark
Text 2: Through the Looking-Glass (Alice in Wonderland)
Text 3: Opening sentence to James Joyce's Finnegans Wake
Context: Naaah, I'm sending you all in cold on this one. The spelling, capitalization, and punctuation are as Joyce intended.
|
As the opening exchange from Shakespeare's Hamlet suggests, pinning down meaning in language is often like nailing Jell-o to a wall: as Princess Leia was wont to say, it slips through your finnngaaaz. Words (words, words) have multiple meanings, and those meanings can often slide past each other, touching on one another only in passing.
We are aware, in this short conversation, how much of meaning is dependent upon two people's willingness to try to understand each other -- but unfortunately for Polonius, Hamlet understands him only too well and he understands Hamlet not at all. Asking a seemingly-simple question, "What do you read, my lord?" Hamlet answers with the most literal possible answer: he reads "words, words, words." When asked, "What is the matter?" Hamlet parries with "Between who?" a tactic that shifts the word's definition from material to dispute. As your chemistry teacher will tell you, however, matter matters -- and it does in English too. Though language has the ability to define the most evanescent of emotional states, complex ideas, and abstract musings, it also has the ability to disguise and obfuscate, to present "[s]landers" and lies, to muddle and mumble and mutter the matter. If, as Alice wonders, it is possible for "words [to] mean so many things," including the word "glory" signifying "a nice knock-down argument," then meaning is so fluid as to be -- ironically enough -- "impenetrab[le]," dependent only on the whimsical definitions assigned to them by the words' "master." (By the way, verbs really do have a temper, don't they?) Joyce's famous opening sentence from Finnegans Wake illustrates both why this...novel? poem? nightmare? is a marvel of composition -- and why very few people have ever read the whole thing -- all 646 pages of it. If you think Rapgenius provided the world a necessary close-reading service, try being one of the people who probably gave much of their lives and most of their sanity to glossing Joyce's novel -- which is as much about language's impenetrability, slipperiness, playfulness, and obfuscation as it is about death or Dublin (doublin?) The texts we will read in this unit will address multiple issues of language -- language as a tool of self-definition, as political weapon, as propaganda tool, as clarifier and obscurer, as a door to the mind that either opens or shuts fast. Then, by a commodius vicus of recirculation, we will find language weaving into and out of our in-class discussions of comedy, which depends enormously on language for its very existence. |
Mandatory Text that Everyone's Reading
Now Pick Your Favorite Three Works From the List Below and Read Them
|
Annotate
Write Three Argument Templates
Argument Template
Example
|