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The section number is 23626281
The class key (password) is 2wheeler I have set the deadline for Tuesday 11:59 English Lit/Comp 121 (aka Brit Lit) Course Description
Welcome to Honors Sophomore English at Wheeler High School. I enjoy teaching this class, and I hope you will enjoy taking it. Our major textbooks is College Board’s SpringBoard 12, supplemented by Prentice Hall’s Literature: The British Tradition. I hope this brief overview of the class will give you some idea of what we do. Pacing Guide 1st 6 weeks — grammar & composition review -- Reflective writing -- Timed & formal writing 2nd 6 weeks — Research Paper — Renaissance Drama: Othello — Prose Unit 3rd 6 weeks — Senior Project presentation — Themes in British literature — Modern unit: Pygmalion The Senior Project This assignment seems to cause a lot of anxiety, but it should not. Grades on the Senior Project have significantly raised the class average every year. Senior Project documents will be available at wheelerhigh.com. Grading This course’s grades fall into 6 categories: Formative (30%), Senior Project (25%), Writing (15%), Reading (10%), Vocab & Conventions (5%), Listening/Speaking (5%), and Final Exam (10%). This arrangement is the same for all senior English teachers at Wheeler. If there is an SGM, we will deal with that according to county policy. Every assignment will receive a grade. A basic homework assignment is worth 5 points if (a) it was done outside of class and (b) it makes it to class in print on the day assigned. I don’t accept late homework. Quizzes will be worth 1 point per question; tests will be worth 2. Formal compositions are worth 100 points. Students may turn them in late at a penalty of 20% per day as per English Dept. policy. My grade profile is usually a third A’s, a third B’s, with a third all other grades. In matters of grade scale, attendance, and tardies, we will adhere to the policies outlined in the student handbook. Please feel free to contact me: Jimmy Carter [email protected] www.wheelerhigh.com (find my name under faculty and click on it) Our blog: www.drcsworldlit.weebly.com Who Needs Parables?
by Janet Suzman Janet Suzman is an acclaimed actress, director, and member of the Royal Shakespeare Company. She made her directorial debut with a controversial production of Othello in Johannesburg, South Africa in 1987, when the country was still racially segregated under the system of apartheid. It was the first major production of the play in South Africa to feature a black African actor playing opposite a white actress. The year I take us back to is 1987. April. Johannesburg – the town where I was born. A full three years before Nelson Mandela walked free. I have a friend who lives there; a friend of some twenty-five years standing. Name of John Kani, actor, executive director of The Market Theatre, artistic guerilla fighter, Tony Award winner. In totalitarian regimes, an actor becomes more than an actor, he becomes an activist. He is required, every day of his life, to make moral choices denied the softer existence of your common or garden “luvvie[1].” (Detestable epithet!) The effort is always towards finding a piece of work that reflects the quality of that life, since to do otherwise would be to abrogate all responsibility, in a profession supposedly devoted to “show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure.” I had first met John, in the late sixties … In 1976, he and I had done a production of Edward Albee’s The Death of Bessie Smith … It made us eager to go on finding plays we could collaborate on in the future. If there was a future; it was always touch and go. It proved difficult; either he was busy, or I was, and we were choosy about the plays. Still, here I was, a little over a decade later, sitting in my beloved Market Theatre, and watching my friend in a piece of agit-prop[2]. The atmosphere was bad in that year; unrest, as the government liked to call it, was hotting up. And certainly no one had any idea that secret, if tentative talks had already begun between the world’s most famous prisoner and the government. No, what we knew was that the country was a ghastly mess, and, in our neck o’ the woods, a cultural boycott was sapping its heart and head. I watched restlessly; I couldn’t keep my mind on the play. I kept thinking, “This is not good enough for you, my friend. You deserve better.” And then, from left field, an idea popped into my head that would not go away. I looked at John anew; I gazed at the theatre itself, which began to turn into the great Globe itself before my very eyes. The idea was so obvious I couldn’t imagine why it hadn’t occurred before. I said nothing to him at the end, and took the notion home with me to sleep on it. It was persistent; it stuck overnight, growing in stature like a fat fledgling, and was ready to take wing by morning. I found myself impelled to speak. Wandering across the sunny precinct of The Market the next morning, I took John’s arm, to absorb his shock I think, and put two questions to him: would he consider playing Othello, and would he consider me to direct it? He just laughed. I waited. He gulped. I waited. He went silent. I waited. Then he took a deep breath and he agreed. Now we both laughed. I explained why I thought we should embark on this. There are many forms that protest theatre can take, but one that makes use of a past masterpiece to examine a present tragedy was not the usual Market fare in those years. Indigenous writing was quite properly their remit, and John a constant champion and participant. But the story of a black man and a white girl who fall irretrievably in love, and who then commit the unforgivable sin – to a prejudiced society – of sealing that love with marriage vows, was surely germane to South Africa. That the marriage is then systematically destroyed, on, when you think about it, no more than an evil caprice, made Othello not only germane, but essential to our purpose. Whether it would be politically feasible with a boycott in place was something we would have to explore. He couldn’t but agree; we had found the meat we’d been searching for all these years. [1] luvvie: an actor or actress, especially one who is particularly effusive or affected [2] agit-prop: political propaganda International Star
by Eric Arnesen By the early 1940s, Paul Robeson was an international star. Millions of people had heard his powerful voice in concert halls or on the radio, had seen him acting on numerous theater stages, or had watched his appearances in movies such as The Emperor Jones (1933), Show Boat (1936), and The Proud Valley (1939). As a performing artist, Robeson both entertained and moved his diverse audiences. He also broke new ground as a black actor by challenging racial barriers and stereotypes in the arts. Robeson especially wanted to play Shakespeare’s Othello. He got his first opportunity in 1930 in a theater performance in London. Rarely had a black man portrayed the dark-skinned Othello. In earlier versions of the play, white actors in black-face makeup had played the role. Before the play Othello opened, Robeson received hostile letters from whites who decried the act of a black man, Othello, kissing Desdemona, played by a white actress. Nevertheless, Robeson found his opening-night performance lauded by London critics. His portrayal of Othello was “richly poetical, one of the great moments in the history of Shakespearean drama,” as one reviewer put it. Although the London production had its flaws, Robeson succeeded in breaking an important racial barrier in the theater. He later recalled, “I was deeply gratified to know that my people felt, as Dr. Benjamin Mays [a leading black American educator] put it, that I had ‘rendered the Negro race and the world a great service in Othello by demonstrating that Negroes are capable of great and enduring interpretations in the realm of theatre.’” But it would be another 13 years before Robeson played Othello on Broadway in the United States. Challenging and breaking down racial barriers was important for Robeson in the 1920s and 1930s. At the same time, his political vision was expanding and becoming more complex. As an international star, Robeson traveled regularly. His performance schedule took him from New York and London to Germany, the Soviet Union, and Egypt. By the 1930s, he saw himself as an internationalist, one who was supportive of, and often worked closely with, trade unionists, anti-imperialists, and communists. “It was in London, in the years that I lived among the people of the British Isles and traveled back and forth to many other lands,” Robeson wrote in his autobiography, Here I Stand, “that my outlook on world affairs was formed.” He chose to remain in England for a number of years, as “London was infinitely better than Chicago has been for Negroes from Mississippi.” In London and in other cities around the British Isles, he “‘discovered’ Africa.” He did so by meeting African students and sailors. “That discovery,” he remarked “influenced my life ever since—and I came to consider that I was an African.” Robeson became an avid student of African cultures, languages, and history. He came to appreciate and take pride in the achievements of “the culture of Africa.” Robeson identified his artistic skills, style, and vision with the continent from which his slave predecessors had been stolen. “My ancestors in Africa reckoned sound of major importance,” he explained. They “were all great talkers, great orators, and where writing was unknown, folk tales and an oral tradition kept the ears rather than the eyes sharpened. I am the same way. I always hear, I seldom see. I hear my way through the world.” Robeson identified not only with African culture but with Africans’ political hopes and aspirations as well. Over the years, he was a strong supporter of African independence movements and the struggles of Africans to overthrow the European colonial powers that ruled their continent. SpringBoard Unit 5 Adjusted Embedded Assessment
Your assignment is to present a video, novel, or play in a graphic novel format of at least 2 pages in length from a particular point of view. You will collectively prepare an analysis of the source text and your graphic interpretation of it. |