Thursday, March 5 perods 3 and 9 only:Ethan Frome for Period 7 only: for Ms. Camp - a short story unit
*******************************************************************************
The following is only for periods 3 and 9 for Parker
Learning Targets: I can interpret words and phrases as they are used in the text, including technical, connotative and figurative meanings, and analyze how the specific word choices shape the meaning.
I can determine two or more central ideas of a text and analyze their development over the course of the text, including how they interact and build on one another to provide a complex analysis; provide an objective summary of the text.
I can analyze a complex set of ideas or sequence of events and explain
in how specific individuals, ideas, or events interact and develop over the course of the text.
In class: vocabulary handout for Ethan Frome (copy below) quiz on Friday, March 13. Collecting Ethan Frome texts; turning in Spoon River.
: Coming up: please have read The Prologue to Ethan Frome by Monday, March 16. These are pages 3-22. Please complete the accompanying questions. (class handout / copy below).
Here is a link to the text, in case you do not have the book: Ethan Frome text audio for Ethan Frome
Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton:
Literary Naturalism
Collecting the novel Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton. You will need this in class everyday.
What is Naturalism?
Background information on Naturalism
Naturalism
Naturalism (1890 - 1915):
1. The term Naturalism describes a type of literature that attempts to apply scientific principles of objectivity and detachment to its study of human beings.
2. Naturalistic writers, since human beings are, in Emile Zola's phrase, "human beasts," characters can be studied through their relationships to their surroundings.
3. The Naturalist believed in studying human beings as though they were "products" that are to be studied impartially, without moralizing about their natures.
4. Naturalistic writers believed that the laws of behind the forces that govern human lives might be studied and understood through the objective study of human beings.
5. Naturalistic writers used a version of the scientific method to write their novels; they studied human beings governed by their instincts and passions as well as the ways in which the characters' lives were governed by forces of heredity and environment.
6. Naturalism is considered as a movement to be beyond Realism. Naturalism is based more on scientific studies.
7. Darwin's Theory of Evolution is a basis for the Naturalist writer. Natural selection and survival of the fittest help to depict the struggle against nature as a hopeless fight.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
5. Naturalistic writers used a version of the scientific method to write their novels; they studied human beings governed by their instincts and passions as well as the ways in which the characters' lives were governed by forces of heredity and environment.
6. Naturalism is considered as a movement to be beyond Realism. Naturalism is based more on scientific studies.
7. Darwin's Theory of Evolution is a basis for the Naturalist writer. Natural selection and survival of the fittest help to depict the struggle against nature as a hopeless fight.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Ethan Frome is introduced from an omniscient Narrator’s point of view. We never learn his name; rather he is an engineer sent to work on a job and temporarily detained in Starkfield, Massachusetts. Intrigued by Ethan Frome’s bleak, stiffened appearance, imagining how he must have looked before the "smash up" that has twisted his body on one side, the Narrator wants to learn details of the accident, but his landlady, Mrs. Hale, and the "village oracle," Herman Gow, the stagecoach driver, are reluctant to supply them.
Gow comments that "the smart ones get away" from Starkfield, yet Ethan has remained. Mrs. Hale allows that she "knew them both…it was awful" – information that serves to pique the Narrator’s curiosity but not enough to satisfy. Gow has volunteered the bare facts of Frome’s background, and, from these bits, the Narrator infers that the real Ethan Frome, whoever he may be, has been frozen by his "tragic" past as well as the "accumulated cold of many Starkfield winters" into the mute lonely cripple who has become a fixture in the town.
When Frome agrees to transport the Narrator to his job, their brief snatches of conversation make the Narrator feel that he is finally getting to know Ethan, the man. A fierce snowstorm forces Frome and his passenger to put up at Frome’s poor farm, and as the Narrator steps across the threshold to hear a "droning querulous voice," he says that he has found the clue to Ethan Frome and is able to put together a "vision of his story." He does not enter the narrative again until the Epilogue.
Name__________________________________ Prologue questions for
Ethan Frome Due Monday, March 13
1.
What does the name Starkfield suggest about the
setting?
________________________________________________________________________________________________
2.
How does Herman Gow corroborate this later? Find
his words on page 6.
________________________________________________________________________________________________
3.
Give two words that portray the stereotype of an
engineer.
____________________________
_________________________________________
4.
How is the narrator, whose name we never learn,
a typical? (Think about how he views Ethan).
_________________________________________________________________________________________________
5.
What could be the significance of the missing
“L” structure on the farm?
__________________________________________________________________________________________________
6.
What places to Herman Gow and Mrs. Ned Hale
Occupy in the story?
a.
Gow:_______________________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________________________
b.
Hale:______________________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________________________
1. sardonic: adj. Scornfully or cynically mocking; sarcastic.
2. colloquial: adj. 1. Characteristic of or appropriate to the spoken language or to writing that seeks
the effect of speech; informal. 2. Relating to conversation; conversational.
3. innocuous: adj. 1. Having no adverse effect; harmless. 2. Not likely to offend or provoke to strong
emotion; insipid.
4. reticent: adj. 1. Inclined to keep one's thoughts, feelings, and personal affairs to oneself;
Restrained or reserved in style. 3. Reluctant; unwilling.
5. poignant: adj. Keenly distressing to the mind or feelings: poignant anxiety; profoundly moving; touching: a poignant memory.
6. wraith: n. 1. An apparition of a living person that appears as a portent just before that person's
death. 2. The ghost of a dead person. 3. Something shadowy and insubstantial.
7. wistful: adj. 1. Full of wishful yearning. 2. Pensively sad; melancholy.
8. undulation: n. 1. A regular rising and falling or movement to alternating sides; movement in waves.
9. tenuous: adj. 1. Long and thin; slender: tenuous strands. 2. Having a thin consistency; dilute;
having little substance; flimsy: a tenuous argument.
10. throng: n. 1. A large group of people gathered or crowded closely together; a multitude.
throngs v.tr. 1. To crowd into; fill: commuters thronging the subway platform.2. To press in
to gather, press, or move in a throng.
11. vex: (verb) 1. To annoy, as with petty importunities; bother. 2. To cause perplexity in; puzzle.
12. laden: adj. 1. Weighed down with a load; heavy: "the warmish air, laden with the rains of those
thousands of miles of western sea" Hilaire Belloc. 2. Oppressed; burdened: laden with grief.
13. preclude: 1. To make impossible, as by action taken in advance; prevent. 2. To exclude or prevent (someone) from a given condition or activity: Modesty precludes me from accepting the honor.
14. succumb: (verb) 1. To submit to an overpowering force or yield to an overwhelming desire; give up or give in. 2. To die.
15. foist: (verb) 1. To pass off as genuine, valuable, or worthy: "I can usually tell whether a poet . . . is foisting off on us what he'd like to think is pure invention" J.D. Salinger.
2. To impose (something or someone unwanted) upon another by coercion or trickery:They had extra work foisted on them because they couldn't say no to the boss. 3. To insert fraudulently or deceitfully: foisted unfair provisions into the contract.
Comments
Post a Comment