Due Tuesday 1/29 or Wednesday, 1/30

Please read the background information and Act I of Tartuffe for Tuesday/Wednesday. (1059-1071) Please look for instances of humor and irony.

Here's a link to an online version, but the one in your book is much better!

For Thursday/Friday:

Please have the play finished.

And, here's a link in French, for you Francophiles out there.

Final Essay

Here are some strategies for writing a Shakespearean passage analysis essay.

Marking the text due Thursday/Friday and Finals Information

Please complete a marking the text activity (due 1/10 or 1/11) for the passage below.


Hamlet, Act IV, Scene IV



How all occasions do inform against me,
And spur my dull revenge! What is a man,
If his chief good and market of his time
Be but to sleep and feed? a beast, no more.
Sure, he that made us with such large discourse,
Looking before and after, gave us not
That capability and god-like reason
To fust in us unused. Now, whether it be
Bestial oblivion, or some craven scruple
Of thinking too precisely on the event,
A thought which, quarter’d, hath but one part wisdom
And ever three parts coward, I do not know
Why yet I live to say ‘This thing’s to do;'
Sith I have cause and will and strength and means
To do’t. Examples gross as earth exhort me:
Witness this army of such mass and charge
Led by a delicate and tender prince,
Whose spirit with divine ambition puff’d
Makes mouths at the invisible event,
Exposing what is mortal and unsure
To all that fortune, death and danger dare,
Even for an egg-shell. Rightly to be great
Is not to stir without great argument,
But greatly to find quarrel in a straw
When honour’s at the stake. How stand I then,
That have a father kill’d, a mother stain’d,
Excitements of my reason and my blood,
And let all sleep? while, to my shame, I see
The imminent death of twenty thousand men,
That, for a fantasy and trick of fame,
Go to their graves like beds, fight for a plot
Whereon the numbers cannot try the cause,
Which is not tomb enough and continent
To hide the slain? O, from this time forth,
My thoughts be bloody, or be nothing worth!



Final Exam Information

Your final will consist of a fill-in-the-blank objective test and an essay on a Shakespearean passage. More specifics are below.


Objective Component--fill in the blank (90 Questions)


 Poetry Terms
 Poetry Time Periods (basic characteristics of; no identifying quotations)
 Names of Poets of major poems studied in this course (Think papers and discussions)
 Drama Terms
o aside, soliloquy, monologue, dramatic irony

 Greek Drama Terms, development of, and general knowledge
o Thespis, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Dionysus, unities of drama rheseis, stichomythia, hubris, hamartia, perepeteia, epiphany, catharsis
 Shakespearean Drama Terms and general knowledge
o monologue, soliloquy, aside, foil, irony, blank verse, prose.
 Literary Criticism
o New Criticism
o Psychoanalytic Criticism
 Freud’s theories of development
 Short Story Titles
o Quotation Identification: Identify the title
 Short Story Authors
 Short Story and Drama Characters
o Quotation Identification: Identify the speaker
 Short Story Terms
o Point of View, (1st, 3rd lim, 3rd omnisc.) Direct/Indirect Characterization, Internal/External Conflict, foreshadowing
 Existentialism
o Basic Principles and important Writers of…
 Sentence Structures
o periodic, cumulative, etc. (not the fancy ones like anaphora, etc)



Semester 1 Reading List

Poetry(lots)

Living Like Weasels

Yellow Wallpaper
Young Goodman Brown
Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber
Recitatif
Metamorphosis
Good Country People
Araby
Very Old Man with Enormous Wings

Oedipus
Hamlet

Homework over break!

Please finish reading the remainder of Hamlet. I strongly encourage you to watch a film/play version so that you can decide whether you agree or disagree with some of their interpretive decisions.

Due Tues/Wed

If you remembered to do your Act I marking the text that was posted Monday AND have read all of Act I, there is no additional homework for 9/18 or 9/19. If you have not finished reading Act I, please make sure you have finished reading it for next class. Act II will be due on Thurs/Fri, so you may want to get a head start on reading that.


However, if you did not do your marking the text, please do the passage below as a way of practicing those skills (and earning those points.)

Act I, scene ii, approx line 135

HAMLET
O, that this too too solid flesh would melt
Thaw and resolve itself into a dew!
Or that the Everlasting had not fix'd
His canon 'gainst self-slaughter! O God! God!
How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable,
Seem to me all the uses of this world!
Fie on't! ah fie! 'tis an unweeded garden,
That grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature
Possess it merely. That it should come to this!
But two months dead: nay, not so much, not two:
So excellent a king; that was, to this,
Hyperion to a satyr; so loving to my mother
That he might not beteem the winds of heaven
Visit her face too roughly. Heaven and earth!
Must I remember? why, she would hang on him,
As if increase of appetite had grown
By what it fed on: and yet, within a month--
Let me not think on't--Frailty, thy name is woman!--
A little month, or ere those shoes were old
With which she follow'd my poor father's body,
Like Niobe, all tears:--why she, even she--
O, God! a beast, that wants discourse of reason,
Would have mourn'd longer--married with my uncle,
My father's brother, but no more like my father
Than I to Hercules: within a month:
Ere yet the salt of most unrighteous tears
Had left the flushing in her galled eyes,
She married. O, most wicked speed, to post
With such dexterity to incestuous sheets!
It is not nor it cannot come to good:
But break, my heart; for I must hold my tongue.

Due Monday and Tues/Wed

Please read Act I of Hamlet for Monday and Tues/Wed. Please complete a "marking the text" activity for Claudius' speech in Act I scene ii printed below. We will most likely make it to the Claudius speech on Monday, so I'd recommend the following allocation of your time over the weekend:


-Read Act I up through the Claudius speech over the weekend.
-Print and complete the marking the text for the Claudius speech over the weekend.
-Finish reading the rest of Act I over the weekend (if you have time) or for class on Tuesday/Wednesday if you don't have enough time.

If we don't make it to Claudius' speech on Monday, at least it will already be done for the next class!

Marking the text instructions:

Please perform an analysis (mark the text with devices and "how" insights") for the following speech. As you are reading them, keep in mind the purpose of the speeches and what they reveal about the speakers and their attitudes towards their subject matter.

I recommend copying and pasting my text into a document of your choice and formatting it in such a way that you have margins sufficient for your marking the text techniques.


Act I, scene ii, approx line 94

KING CLAUDIUS
'Tis sweet and co
mmendable in your nature, Hamlet,
To give these mourning duties to your father:
But, you must know, your father lost a father;
That father lost, lost his, and the survivor bound
In filial obligation for some term
To do obsequious sorrow: but to persever
In obstinate condolement is a course
Of impious stubbornness; 'tis unmanly grief;
It shows a will most incorrect to heaven,
A heart unfortified, a mind impatient,
An understanding simple and unschool'd:
For what we know must be and is as common
As any the most vulgar thing to sense,
Why should we in our peevish opposition
Take it to heart? Fie! 'tis a fault to heaven,
A fault against the dead, a fault to nature,
To reason most absurd: whose common theme
Is death of fathers, and who still hath cried,
From the first corse till he that died to-day,
'This must be so.' We pray you, throw to earth
This unprevailing woe, and think of us
As of a father: for let the world take note,
You are the most immediate to our throne;
And with no less nobility of love
Than that which dearest father bears his son,
Do I impart toward you. For your intent
In going back to school in Wittenberg,
It is most retrograde to our desire:
And we beseech you, bend you to remain
Here, in the cheer and comfort of our eye,
Our chiefest courtier, cousin, and our son.

Monday's Greek Drama Notes

Notes from our discussion of Greek drama today are available here.