SUMMER READING JOURNAL

2014-2015

A.P. English Literature and Composition

Welcome to “A.P. English Literature and Composition” and your first assignment…

Over the summer, you’ll be reading How to Read Literature Like A Professor by Thomas C.

Foster and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey. You’ll be viewing the film

Cool Hand Luke (1967) starring Paul Newman.

I also advice reading ahead and do the first Book Talk book. We’ll begin that book at the

end of August.

STEP ONE: How to Read Literature Like a Professor by Thomas C. Foster

Buy and read How to Read Literature Like a Professor. It will be an excellent foundation for

how to read texts in AP Literature. Be sure to annotate the text as you read, marking

key points or ideas.

As you read the whole book, please answer the following chapter questions (you’ll turn

your responses in to me):

Introduction: How'd He Do That? – “Discuss a time when your appreciation of a literary work

was enhanced by understanding symbol or pattern.”

Chapter 1 -- Every Trip Is a Quest (Except When It's Not) – “Apply the five aspects of the

“Quest” to something you have read (or viewed).”

Chapter 6 -- When in Doubt, It's from Shakespeare... – “Discuss a work that you are familiar

with that alludes to or reflects Shakespeare. Show how the author uses this connection

thematically.”

Chapter 10 -- It's More Than Just Rain or Snow – “Discuss the importance of weather in a

specific literary work, not in terms of plot.”

Interlude -- Does He Mean That – “Reflect deeply on the issue of an author’s intentions. What

do you think of what Foster says? Why?”

Chapter 11 --...More Than It's Gonna Hurt You: Concerning Violence – “Present examples of

the two kinds of violence found in literature. Show how the effects are different.”

Chapter 12 -- Is That a Symbol? – “Use the process described in the chapter and investigate the

use of symbolism in one major work that you’ve read.

Chapter 19 -- Geography Matters... – “Discuss at least three different aspects of a specific

literary work that Foster would classify under ‘geography.’”

Chapter 20 -- ...So Does Season – “Think of a story or novel that mentions a specific season.

Then discuss how the writer uses the season in a meaningful, traditional, or unusual way.”

Chapter 21 -- Marked for Greatness – “Figure out Harry Potter's scar. If you aren't familiar

with Harry Potter, select another character with a physical imperfection and analyze its

implications for characterization.”

Chapter 26 -- Is He Serious? And Other Ironies – “Select an ironic literary work and explain the

multi-dimensional nature of the irony in the work.”

These questions are designed to allow you to practice immediately the kind of textual

analysis you will perform in the course. Whenever I ask for a “work,” I am asking for an

example from a short story, a novel, a play, or a film. You may use the personal

pronoun “I” in your responses, but I would advise you to steer clear of it. Instead of

saying, “I believe that Captain Ahab is a cruel man,” simply say, “Captain Ahab is a

cruel man.” It’s actually very easy to drop the “I” with a little practice. Regarding

length, think at least one paragraph of 3-5 sentences for every question.

STEP TWO: READ ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO’S NEST BY KEN KESEY

Keep a double entry journal while you read the novel. Keep in mind our focus for

analysis: satire and the anti-hero. See attached sheet for more info on the double entry

journal. For a double entry journal, you put key quotes from the novel on the left and

your analysis of those quotes on the right. Here is where the metacognition part comes

in. You will write about the following in close, specific detail in your double entry

journal as it happens to you:

1. Times when you note changes in the text or how you are reading it. E.g., When…

a. You see something you didn’t see before.

b. You recognize an ‘idea pattern’ – i.e., the images start to overlap or reappear, some

gestures or phrases reoccur, or some details seem associated with one another.

c. You discover that you were misreading.

d. The writer introduces a new context or a new perspective.

2. Times when you are surprised or puzzled. E.g., When…

a. Something just doesn’t fit. Explain clearly why this is so.

b. Things do not make sense. Pose explicitly the question you have.

3. Details that seem important and make you look again. And again.

4. Author’s style and literary devices you notice – how do they enhance the sense of what the

author says?

5. Anything else that happens to you, mentally, as you slowly read and understand.

Draw out your thoughts fully. Be explicit about your thoughts – cite text and page

numbers of the quotes. You should have at least 20 entries, and your entries should

cover the entire novel to show your careful, in-depth reading of the text.

The journal will seem less like an intrusion if you use it in a way that fits naturally with

your reading. For some of you, this will mean keeping a pen in hand at all times and

jotting as you read. For others, this might mean reading a chapter or a chunk of pages,

and then reflecting and writing on what you read. Or it may be a combination of both

methods. Please remember that the analysis you do in the double-entry journal should

reflect AP level thinking… Step it up!

STEP THREE: WATCH COOL HAND LUKE

As you watch the movie, just take detailed notes during your viewing. Pause and

rewind key scenes as you watch. I will include a film glossary for terms to use when

analyzing a film (we’ll become more familiar with these throughout the school year). As

you’re watching, definitely look for connections between the movie and the novel. Also,

consider our focus for analysis: satire and the anti-hero

SOME ADVICE…

1) When you watch Cool Hand Luke, I would turn on the English subtitles, so it’s easier

for you to jot down key quotes, characters’ names, etc. They have a strong Southern

accent, and sometimes it’s hard to catch everything that’s being said.

2) I respect students who take the time to do proper thinking and writing. This kind of

effort is never shallow or brief. Dig deeply.

If you skim the books and the movie and do only mediocre writing, I will know and so,

of course, your grade will suffer.

3) Please do not copy and paste directly from SparkNotes, CliffsNotes, or any other

study guides… now and for the entire year. This is plagiarism. This is cheating. Any

student caught cheating in any way will be guilty of academic misconduct and will be

dealt with according to school policy. Also, all of your work should be totally original

because it calls for your interpretation only.

4) This work will be due on Friday, August 8th. We will immediately begin analyzing

both the film and the two books during the first week of school. We’ll test over the

novel during the first week too.

5) Try to avoid total procrastination. I would however save watching the movie till the

end of the summer, or you could also consider buying a copy of it online if you want to

watch it again at the end of the summer.

If you have questions or problems, please e-mail me at:

teachernikkismith@gmail.com. If you want to see an example of a double-entry

journal that reflects the quality of work I’m expecting, please email me, and I’ll send

you an example. I’ll try help you as soon as possible.

STEP FOUR: READ AHEAD FOR OUR BOOK TALK AT THE END OF AUGUST

Here is a list of Book Talk plays and novels you can choose from for the semester 1 Book

Talk, which will include a small group discussion with me and an essay, which is

basically an in-depth analysis of the novel, examining stylistic devices, tone, theme,

critical history, and part to whole analysis. You will complete at least one Book Talk

first semester. We will start writing the essay at the end of August, so I highly

recommend reading over the summer.

Tim O’Brien’s In the Lake of the Woods (1995)

This riveting novel of love and mystery from the author of The Things They Carried examines the lasting impact of the

twentieth century’s legacy of violence and warfare, both at home and abroad. When long-hidden secrets about the

atrocities he committed in Vietnam come to light, a candidate for the U.S. Senate retreats with his wife to a lakeside cabin

in northern Minnesota. Within days of their arrival, his wife mysteriously vanishes into the watery wilderness.

Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead (2005 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction)

Marilynne Robinson returns with an intimate tale of three generations from the Civil War to the twentieth century: a story

about fathers and sons and the spiritual battles that still rage at America's heart. Writing in the tradition of Emily

Dickinson and Walt Whitman, Marilynne Robinson's beautiful, spare, and spiritual prose allows "even the faithless reader

to feel the possibility of transcendent order" (Slate). The narrator, John Ames, is 76, a preacher who has lived almost all of

his life in Gilead, Iowa. He is writing a letter to his almost seven-year-old son, the blessing of his second marriage. It is a

summing-up, an apologia, a consideration of his life. Robinson takes the story away from being simply the reminiscences

of one man and moves it into the realm of a meditation on fathers and children, particularly sons, on faith, and on the

imperfectability of man.

Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985 nominated for Booker Prize)

A gripping vision of our society radically overturned by a theocratic revolution, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid's Tale

has become one of the most powerful and most widely read novels of our time.

Offred is a Handmaid in the Republic of Gilead, serving in the household of the enigmatic Commander and his bitter wife.

She may go out once a day to markets whose signs are now pictures because women are not allowed to read. She must

pray that the Commander makes her pregnant, for in a time of declining birthrates her value lies in her fertility, and

failure means exile to the dangerously polluted Colonies. Offred can remember a time when she lived with her husband

and daughter and had a job, before she lost even her own name. Now she navigates the intimate secrets of those who

control her every move, risking her life in breaking the rules. Like Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and George Orwell’s

Nineteen Eighty-Four, The Handmaid's Tale has endured not only as a literary landmark but as a warning of a possible

future that is still chillingly relevant.

Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2011)

Nine-year-old Oskar Schell has embarked on an urgent, secret mission that will take him through the five boroughs of

New York. His goal is to find the lock that matches a mysterious key that belonged to his father, who died in the World

Trade Center on the morning of September 11. This seemingly impossible task will bring Oskar into contact with

survivors of all sorts on an exhilarating, affecting, often hilarious, and ultimately healing journey.

Yann Martel’s Life of Pi (winner of Booker Prize 2002)

After the sinking of a cargo ship, a solitary lifeboat remains bobbing on the wild blue Pacific. The only survivors from the

wreck are a sixteen-year-old boy named Pi, a hyena, a wounded zebra, an orangutan—and a 450-pound royal bengal tiger.

The scene is set for one of the most extraordinary and beloved works of fiction in recent years.

Barbara Kingsolver’s Poisonwood Bible (1998 – nominated for Pulitzer Prize)

The Poisonwood Bible is a story told by the wife and four daughters of Nathan Price, a fierce, evangelical Baptist who takes

his family and mission to the Belgian Congo in 1959. They carry with them everything they believe they will need from

home, but soon find that all of it—from garden seeds to Scripture—is calamitously transformed on African soil. What

follows is a suspenseful epic of one family's tragic undoing and remarkable reconstruction over the course of three

decades in postcolonial Africa.

Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies Pulitzer Prize winner (2000)

Navigating between the Indian traditions they've inherited and the baffling new world, the characters in Jhumpa Lahiri's

elegant, touching stories seek love beyond the barriers of culture and generations. In "A Temporary Matter," published in

The New Yorker, a young Indian-American couple faces the heartbreak of a stillborn birth while their Boston

neighborhood copes with a nightly blackout. In the title story, an interpreter guides an American family through the India

of their ancestors and hears an astonishing confession. Lahiri writes with deft cultural insight reminiscent of Anita Desai

and a nuanced depth that recalls Mavis Gallant. She is an important and powerful new voice.

Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse- Five 1969

Slaughterhouse-Five, an American classic, is one of the world’s great antiwar books. Centering on the infamous

firebombing of Dresden, Billy Pilgrim’s odyssey through time reflects the mythic journey of our own fractured lives as we

search for meaning in what we fear most.

Gloria Naylor’s Linden Hills (1985)

In this thought-provoking and beautifully written novel, Gloria Naylor explores complex issues of social class within the

parameters of a black affluent community. While on the outside the residents of Linden Hills seem to revel in the

glamorous lifestyles and social status they work so hard to obtain, the reality is quite different. Naylor allows the reader a

glimpse behind the Porches and the Beverly Hills style mansions into the souls of several Linden Hills residents. With

each one of their stories we begin to understand the price paid for material success.

Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813)

In one of the most universally loved and admired English novels, a country squire of no great means must marry off his

five vivacious daughters. Jane Austen's art transformed this effervescent tale of rural romance into a witty, shrewdly

observed satire of English country life.

Dorothy Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina (nom for National Book Award 1992)

Critics have likened Allison to William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, and Harper Lee, naming her the first writer of her generation to dramatize the lives and language of poor whites in the South. Since its appearance, the novel has inspired an award-winning film and has been banned from libraries and classrooms, championed by fans, and defended by critics.Greenville County, South Carolina, is a wild, lush place that is home to the Boatwright family-a tight-knit clan of rough-hewn, hard- drinking men who shoot up each other's trucks, and indomitable women who get married young and age too quickly. At the heart of this story is Ruth Anne Boatwright, known simply as Bone, a bastard child who observes the world around her with a mercilessly keen perspective. When her stepfather Daddy Glen, "cold as death, mean as a snake," becomes increasingly more vicious toward her, Bone finds herself caught in a family triangle that tests the loyalty of her mother, Anney-and leads to a final, harrowing encounter from which there can be no turning back.

Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (1926 Nobel Prize winner)

The quintessential novel of the Lost Generation, The Sun Also Rises is one of Ernest Hemingway's masterpieces and a classic example of his spare but powerful writing style. A poignant look at the disillusionment and angst of the post-World War I generation, the novel introduces two of Hemingway's most unforgettable characters: Jake Barnes and Lady Brett Ashley. The story follows the flamboyant Brett and the hapless Jake as they journey from the wild nightlife of 1920s Paris to the brutal bullfighting rings of Spain with a motley group of expatriates. It is an age of moral bankruptcy, spiritual dissolution, unrealized love, and vanishing illusions. First published in 1926, The Sun Also Rises helped to establish Hemingway as one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century.

J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace or Waiting for the Barbarians (Booker Prize Winner twice in 90s, 2003 Nobel Prize for Literature)

Disgrace: An uninspired teacher and twice divorced, David Lurie is a 52-year-old poetry scholar. Spooked by the flicker of

twilight in his life trajectory, he seduces Melanie Isaacs, a lithe student from his poetry elective. And then he is found out.

This not uncommon outrage earns him a dismissal and censure from the university committee he refuses to cooperate

with in hopes of saving his job. He immediately shoves off for Salem in the Eastern Cape where his daughter, Lucy,

manages a dog kennel and works her smallholding, harvesting a modest crop. Here David hopes to cleanse himself with

time-honored toil. But his new life in the country offers scarce refuge. Instead, he is flummoxed to discover an unfamiliar

Lucy-principled, land-devoted, with a heroic resignation to the social and political developments of modern South Africa.

But a violent attack on the estate irrevocably alters how the book's central figure perceives many things: his daughter and

her bewildering (to him) courage, the rights of South Africa's grossly aggrieved majority, the souls of the damaged dogs he

helps put down at the local Animal Welfare League and even the character of Lord Byron's mistress and the heroine of his

operatic "chamber-play."

Waiting for the Barbarians: A modern classic, this early novel by Nobel Laureate J. M. Coetzee centers on the crisis of

conscience and morality of the Magistrate-a loyal servant of the Empire working in a tiny frontier town, doing his best to

ignore an inevitable war with the "barbarians." This text is an allegory and an excellent postcolonial text.

Sandra Cisneros’s Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories (1992)

In this collection of Mexican American stories, Cisneros addresses the reader in a voice that is alternately buoyant, strong,

funny, and sad. The brief vignettes of the opening piece, "My Lucy Friend Who Smells Like Corn," are tiles in a mosaic.

Taken together, these vignettes give a vivid, colorful picture of life on the Texas/Mexico border. Family ties are strong:

aunts, uncles, cousins, grandparents are all present. The stories are often about the romantic dreams of young girls

longing to escape stifling small-town life who discover that things are not much different on the other side of the border.

Cisneros has an acute eye for the telling detail that reveals the secrets and the dreams of her characters.

Alan Paton’s Cry, the Beloved Country (1948)

This novel was written before the apartheid system was implemented in South Africa, and it follows a black priest from a

rural town as he journeys to Johannesburg to find his son and lost sister. A violent murder that involves his son changes

the entire course of his life and provides a deep understanding of race relations in South Africa.

Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (Pulitzer Prize Winner 2001)

This book is a triumph of originality, imagination, and storytelling, an exuberant, irresistible novel that begins in New

York City in 1939. A young escape artist and budding magician named Joe Kavalier arrives on the doorstep of his cousin,

Sammy Clay. While the long shadow of Hitler falls across Europe, America is happily in thrall to the Golden Age of comic

books, and in a distant corner of Brooklyn, Sammy is looking for a way to cash in on the craze. He finds the ideal partner in

the aloof, artistically gifted Joe, and together they embark on an adventure that takes them deep into the heart of

Manhattan, and the heart of old-fashioned American ambition. From the shared fears, dreams, and desires of two teenage

boys, they spin comic book tales of the heroic, fascist-fighting Escapist and the beautiful, mysterious Luna Moth,

otherworldly mistress of the night. Climbing from the streets of Brooklyn to the top of the Empire State Building, Joe and

Sammy carve out lives, and careers, as vivid as cyan and magenta ink. Spanning continents and eras, this superb book by

one of America’s finest writers remains one of the defining novels of our modern American age.

Kate Chopin’s The Awakening (1899)

Set in New Orleans and the Southern Louisiana coast at the end of the nineteenth century, the plot centers around Edna

Pontellier and her struggle to reconcile her increasingly unorthodox views on femininity and motherhood with the

prevailing social attitudes of the turn-of-the-century South. It is one of the earliest American novels that focuses on

women's issues without condescension. It is also widely seen as a landmark work of early feminism.

Edith Wharton’s House of Mirth

Lily Bart has no fortune, but she possesses everything else she needs to make an excellent marriage: beauty, intelligence, a

love of luxury, and an elegant skill in negotiating the hidden traps and false friends of New York's high society. But time

and again Lily cannot bring herself to make the final decisive move: to abandon her sense of self and a chance of love for

the final soulless leap into a mercenary union. Her time is running out, and degradation awaits. Edith Wharton's masterful

novel is a tragedy of money, morality, and missed opportunity.

Fae Myenne Ng’s Bone (1993)

In this profoundly moving novel, Fae Myenne Ng takes readers into the hidden heart of San Francisco's Chinatown, to a

world of family secrets, hidden shames, and the lost bones of a "paper father." It is a world in which two generations of

the Leong family live in an uneasy tension as they try to fathom the source of the middle daughter Ona's sorrow. Fae

Myenne Ng's portraits of the everyday heroism of the Leongs--who inflict deep hurt on each other in their struggles to

survive, yet sustain one another with loyalty and love--have made Bone one of the most critically acclaimed novels of

recent years and immediately a classic of contemporary American life.

Albert Camus’s The Stranger (Nobel Prize 1957)

Through this story of an ordinary man who unwittingly gets drawn into a senseless murder on a sundrenched Algerian

beach, Camus explored what he termed the "nakedness of man faced with the absurd." Albert Camus presents the world

as meaningless, therefore, its meaning is rendered by oneself; it is the individual person who gives meaning to a

circumstance. Classic existential text.

Jeffrey Eugenides ‘s Middlesex (Pulitzer Prize 2003)

"I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day of January 1960; and then again, as a teenage

boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of l974. . . My birth certificate lists my name as Calliope Helen

Stephanides. My most recent driver’s license...records my first name simply as Cal." So begins the breathtaking story of

Calliope Stephanides and three generations of the Greek-American Stephanides family who travel from a tiny village

overlooking Mount Olympus in Asia Minor to Prohibition-era Detroit, witnessing its glory days as the Motor City, and the

race riots of l967, before they move out to the tree-lined streets of suburban Grosse Pointe, Michigan. To understand why

Calliope is not like other girls, she has to uncover a guilty family secret and the astonishing genetic history that turns

Callie into Cal, one of the most audacious and wondrous narrators in contemporary fiction.

Robert Penn Warren’s All The King’s Men (Pulitzer Prize winner 1947)

This landmark book is a loosely fictionalized account of Governor Huey Long of Louisiana, one of the nation's most

astounding politicians. All the King's Men tells the story of Willie Stark, a southern-fried politician who builds support by

appealing to the common man and playing dirty politics with the best of the back-room deal-makers. Though Stark

quickly sheds his idealism, his right-hand man, Jack Burden -- who narrates the story -- retains it and proves to be a thorn

in the new governor's side. Stark becomes a successful leader, but at a very high price. All the King's Men is as relevant

today as it was fifty years ago.

Amy Tan’s Kitchen God’s Wife (1991)

Winnie and Helen have kept each other's worst secrets for more than fifty years. Now, because she believes she is dying,

Helen wants to expose everything. And Winnie angrily determines that she must be the one to tell her daughter, Pearl,

about the past—including the terible truth even Helen does not know. And so begins Winnie's story of her life on a small

island outside Shanghai in the 1920s, and other places in China during World War II, and traces the happy and desperate

events that led to Winnie's coming to America in 1949.

Khaled Hosseini’s Kite Runner (2003)

The unforgettable, heartbreaking story of the unlikely friendship between a wealthy boy and the son of his father's

servant, The Kite Runner is a beautifully crafted novel set in a country that is in the process of being destroyed. It is about

the power of reading, the price of betrayal, and the possibility of redemption, and it is also about the power of fathers over

sons-their love, their sacrifices, their lies.

James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953)

"Mountain," Baldwin said, "is the book I had to write if I was ever going to write anything else." Go Tell It On The Mountain,

first published in 1953, is Baldwin's first major work, a novel that has established itself as an American classic. With

lyrical precision, psychological directness, resonating symbolic power, and a rage that is at once unrelenting and

compassionate, Baldwin chronicles a fourteen-year-old boy's discovery of the terms of his identity as the stepson of the

minister of a storefront Pentecostal church in Harlem one Saturday in March of 1935.

Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre

An orphan girl's progress from the custody of cruel relatives to an oppressive boarding school culminates in a troubled career as a governess. Jane's first assignment at Thornfield, where the proud and cynical master harbors a scandalous secret, draws readers ever deeper into a compelling exploration of the mysteries of the human heart.

Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow In Time's Arrow the doctor Tod T. Friendly dies and then feels markedly better, breaks up with his lovers as a prelude to seducing them, and mangles his patients before he sends them home. And all the while Tod's life races backward toward the one appalling moment in modern history when such reversals make sense. Jean Paul Sartre’s No Exit

No Exit (Huis Clos), is a one-act, four-character play written by Jean-Paul Sartre, French philosopher, writer, literary critic, social and political activist and leader (with Albert Camus) of the existential movement based in Paris. No Exit, first produced one month before D-Day in 1944, was the second of Sartre's many plays. Translated literally, Huis Clos, means "closed doors." This play represents a tight conflict of characters who need one another and, at the same time, desperately want to get away from one another, yet cannot leave. There is no other modern play that offers such a profound metaphor for the human condition. In No Exit, three characters are doomed to spend eternity together in a Second Empire drawing room; Sartre's metaphorical hell. This room is devoid of mirrors, windows and books. There is no means of extinguishing the lights and the characters have even lost their eyelids. They have nothing left but one another and the hell (or heaven) they choose to create. August Wilson’s Fences

Arguably August Wilson's most renowned work, Fences explores the life and relationships of the Maxson family. This moving drama was written in 1983 and earned Wilson his first Pulitzer Prize. The protagonist, Troy Maxon is a restless trash-collector and former baseball athlete. Though deeply flawed, he represents the struggle for justice and fair treatment during the 1950s. Troy also represents human nature's reluctance to recognize and accept social change. In the playwright's setting description, symbols connected to his character can be found: the house, the incomplete fence, the porch, and the makeshift baseball tied to a tree branch.

Sherman Alexie’s The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven

The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, published in 1993 by Atlantic Monthly Press, was Sherman Alexie's breakthrough book. Composed of twenty-two interconnected stories with recurring characters, the work is often described by critics as a short-story collection, though some argue that it has novel-like features similar to Louise Erdrich's Love Medicine. The book's central characters, Victor Joseph and Thomas Builds-the-Fire, are two young Native-American men living on the Spokane Indian Reservation, and the stories describe their relationships, desires, and histories with family members and others who live on the reservation. He deftly depicts the struggles of Native Americans to survive in a world that remains hostile to their very survival, and he does so in an honest and artful manner.

It’s a great time to read ahead so you will not be pressured later during the school year.

THANKS AND GOOD LUCK.

I LOOK FORWARD TO SEEING YOU IN

AUGUST…

Considering Cool Hand Luke and Randle McMurphy: The Anti-Hero and Satire

Guiding Questions to Help Focus Your Reading/Viewing: How are both Lucas

Jackson and Randle McMurphy anti-heroes? What is the satirical target of both

novels?

Satire: A literary work in which human vice or folly is attacked through irony, derision, or wit; the branch of literature constituting such works; irony, sarcasm, or caustic wit used to attack or expose folly, vice, or stupidity. Although satire is meant to be funny, its purpose is not so much humor for its own sake as an attack on something strongly disapproved by the satirist.

20th Century Satires: 1984 by George Orwell, Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, Catch-22 by Joseph Heller, Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut

anti-hero:

The principal protagonist of a film, novel, or short story who lacks the attributes

or characteristics of a typical hero, but with whom the audience identifies. The

character is often confused or conflicted with ambiguous morals, or character

defects and eccentricities, and lacks courage, honesty, or grace. The anti-hero can

be tough yet sympathetic, or display vulnerable and weak traits. Specifically, the

anti-hero often functions outside the mainstream and challenges it.

Defining the Anti-Hero

The definition of an anti-hero can be subjective. He is usually the protagonist or a key character. Generally, an anti-hero will have the following qualities:

it is clear that he has human frailties; he has flaws he is more accessible to readers because he is more "gritty" he is often disillusioned with society, or increasingly becomes so he often seeks for redemption or revenge for his own satisfaction, and

sometimes for the greater good of society unlike the classical tragic hero, he doesn't always think about what the

right, moral thing to do - he often thinks about what's right for him he is often misunderstood by others in his society he could perhaps be called a noble criminal or a vigilante qualities normally belonging to villains - such as amorality, greed and

violent tendencies - are tempered with more human, identifiable and even noble traits

their noble motives are pursued by breaking the law; a.k.a. "the ends justify the means"

increased moral complexity and rejection of traditional values

Examples of the Anti-Hero

Character: Dexter Morgan Novel(s): Darkly Dreaming Dexter series by Jeff Lindsay Dexter is one of my favourite antiheroes. He's a forensic blood splatter analyst for the Miami Police Department, but by night he's a serial killer who murders criminals or other immoral people. These novels have been turned into a TV series. When he was 3, he watched his mother's murder and since then has been numb to violence. He is driven to kill by an inner voice whom he calls "The Dark Passenger".

Character: Jay Gatsby Novel(s): The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald Jay Gatsby is a young man who grew up in poverty. He became famously wealthy through illegal means: organized crime, distributing prohibited alcohol and trading in stolen securities. His re-invention of himself eventually shows that he is a innocent, idealistic young man. His ideals of wealth and of his love, Daisy, are bound to disappoint because they could never live up to his dreams.

"V" is an anarchist - a freedom fighter and a vigilante who breaks the rules, believing that the "ends justify the means". He lives in a dystopian future that takes place in Britain. He can be considered both the protagonist and antagonist - readers decide whether or not he is a hero fighting for a cause, or if he is simply insane

Character: V Comic Book: V for Vendetta by Alan Moore and David Lloyd

Character: Batman Comic Book: Batman by Bob Kane and Bill Finger Batman fights the war on crime using his intellect and technology. His real identity is actually Bruce Wayne, a wealthy philanthropist. These two opposing personalities serve as juxtapositions to each other. He fights crime on his own terms, rather than going about it through the formal legal system.