week+of+oct+13+and+15+(for+the+lit+class)

October 13

Sharing and responding to one another's literary analysis study guide
 * What sticks?
 * What do you wonder and want to know more about?
 * Identifying and refining our unit learning/procedural goals AND our unit conceptual goals
 * Linking our goals to the unit's theme and overarching question that guides the unit

Walking through Jim's example of "reading like a writer".

The overarching question for my course was something like "How do writers think?" In order to pursue this question, I first had my students think about what it means to analyze a text, and in doing so, I repeated and repeated this cycle below.

Analysis Cycle:
 * 1) What does the writer want you to notice?
 * 2) According to the writer, what's the way things ought to be? (often not stated in the piece)
 * 3) In order to agree with the writer, what would someone have to believe?
 * 4) What might have been included that would counter or fill a gap that the writer does not address or include?

In answering the first question above, "What does the writer want you to notice?" students would notice all sorts of details, at all sorts of levels or layers. That is, sometimes they noticed small details, like a particular word that was repeated or a really clear image. Other times they noticed a big detail like what they thought the writer wanted the reader to walk away from the text thinking or doing. So, we created a literary analysis ladder like the one below. Whatever the students noticed, they began there on the ladder and then they would move up and down the ladder, trying to find the kinds of choices writers made in order to help them answer the second question on the literary analysis cycle.

The Literary Analysis Ladder
 * Exigence = What drove the writer to create this piece? What caused her/him to need to write this?
 * Audience = Who is the primary audience? Who are secondary audiences?
 * Purpose = What is the purpose of this piece? In other words, what function does it serve? What action does the writer want to see after someone has read this piece?
 * Appeals = The rhetorical appeals to logic/reasoning (logos), to emotions (pathos), to the speaker/writer's character (ethos)
 * Figures = Figures of speech (e.g., metaphor, personification, juxtaposition, hyperbole, etc)
 * Images = What pictures does the writer want in the readers' minds?
 * Sentences = What are the typical and atypical sentence features the writer employs (e.g., sentence length, sentence structure)?
 * Diction = What choice of words does the writer use? (e.g., verbs, nouns, elevated language, subtext, etc.)

If I was creating a literary analysis study guide, like I'm asking you to do in this class, then I would probably choose some of the figures of speech that are listed on the literary analysis ladder above. That is, I would choose about four or five figures because I know those kind be kind of tricky for students to sometimes understand and because it's near the middle of ladder. The important thing I'd push in the study guide is how metaphor, for instance, is used by the writer to make a case for some idea in her or his text. For instance, in reading Woman Hollering Creek I might pull an example of a metaphor, like the balloons Cisneros refers to often and she often has the balloons bumping up the ceiling or floating away. I'd ask my students how that image is a metaphor for what a character is seeing in her life and what it might suggest about "change." That is, I'd ask my students to notice the metaphor as a way for them to figure out how Cisneros might answer the question, "How does change happen and matter?"

For next time: Read Probst's "The Reader and the Text" and Downey's "The Transformative Power of Drama" (via email attachment - let me know if you had trouble with it)


 * October 15**

Checking in with literary analysis study guide

Woman Hollering Creek discussion
 * Questioning Circles for individual story - leading discussions in small groups
 * What do you notice about the questions?
 * What do you notice about the discussions?
 * How might these questions be related to a larger theme? (Look at Jim's example on his questioning circle to his unit's theme of change and its overarching question: how does change happen and matter?)

Probst and Downey on Drama