College Prep book club

College Prep Book Club #1

For the next several weeks, you will use your time in English class to meet with your book club.  This club will consist of three to five students who are all reading and discussing the same novella or play. 

Each club must keep a work journal of its daily activities.  This journal will be kept in the classroom for easy access.   For each day you meet, you must keep track of the following:

·         Group members who are present

·         What you accomplished during the meeting

·         Your goals for the next meeting 

·         Additionally, it is recommended that you rotate the role of recording secretary.

Your first act as a group should be to determine each day’s reading assignment.  You may devote some class time to reading, but it must not exceed twenty minutes per period.  Please make sure all group members have the reading schedule; you all should finish the book before your group’s final meeting on February 13^th.

·         Each day, you will discuss your reading.  Take special note of how the author draws attention to what is significant.  You may discuss plot, character development, literary elements, themes, and anything else that pertains to your reading.

·         Please keep a daily journal of your reading, observations, ideas, conversations, and questions.  This will be handed in at the conclusion of this project. 

·         You will find several assignment topics below.  You will complete two of the assignments below. Each one should be at least 300 words long.

1.    Choose a symbol from your novel (an object, a place, an idea) and analyze it.  Do not choose a symbol referenced on Sparknotes or any other online cheating site. 

2.    Choose a short passage—no more than a page long—from your novel and perform a close reading of it.  Make sure you quote from the passage and comment on what you quoted.  Analyze your selection’s connections to the novel’s themes. 

3.    Write an essay in which you discuss how the title relates to the book as a whole—or to a section of the book.

4.    Write about the significance of a minor character.

5.    Trace the use of a particular word in a section of your book.  In what contexts does it appear?  How does it relate to a theme of the book?  The easiest way to find individual words is to search an etext of your, if one is available.

6.    Choose six quotations from your book and analyze each one. 

7.    Choose your own topic.

Here are some important dates:

o   February  3^rd: Assignment #1 due

o   February 10^th: Assignment #2 due

o   February 13^th will be the last day you meet in your clubs.  On that day, please hand in your personal journal and your club’s reading journal.                   

    There are etexts available for some of the books on the list:
The old Man and the Sea
The Invisible Man
Twelfth Night



 

More Poems with Common Themes

Find two more poems that share themes with the poems you chose yesterday.
Analyze each poem.  What literary techniques do you find?  How do the literary elements and techniques contribute to the meaning of each poem as a whole?  What about the theme?
Look back at the four poems.  Which do you like the most?  Why?

Finding Poems that Relate to Other Texts

Consider the texts we’ve read recently (The Stranger, No Exit, and “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place”) What themes do they have in common?

Find a poem that share’s a theme with one of the other texts we have read.  Compare how the two texts deal with the theme.

Once you have done that for one poem, find another poem that shares a theme with one or more of the texts we’ve read.  Compare them.

A Clean Well-Lighted Place

Here are the questions about the story:

Ernest Hemingway said, “I always try to write on the principle of the iceberg. There is seven-eighths of it underwater for every part that shows. Anything you know you can eliminate and it only strengthens your iceberg. It is the part that doesn’t show.”  What is beneath the surface in this story?

 What is not in the story but essential to understanding it?

 “Why is it important to have a “clean, well-lighted place?” to spend time?  What is the relationship of each character to the “place?”

This story is also grouped with novels and plays such as No Exit, The Stranger, and Waiting for Godot.  Why?  What ideas do they have in common?

Here are the questions about the essay on the story:

What is the writer’s thesis?

What literary devices does he discuss?  How do they affect his understanding of the Hemingway story?

What is unclear about the passage?  Write three questions about it.

No Exit Video

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We are watching this in class.

No Exit

If you have not been in class, please make sure you have read No Exit.

Please answer the following questions in your notebook:

1. Are the characters truly trapped?  What evidence from the text shows this?
2. What is each character's flaw?
3. Who is the most evil?
4. Think back to Waiting for Godot and The Stranger.  What do all three of these works have in common? Are the themes related? How does each seem to see the world? What does each say about the nature of existence?