ACADEMIC COACHES CLINIC NOTES Sr. English Round

Transcription

1 ACADEMIC COACHES CLINIC NOTES Sr. English Round The Novel: My Ántonia Willa Cather (40%) My Ántonia, a highly accessible classic American novel, begins with a brief introductory chapter followed by five sections of diminishing length. To prepare for competition, students should read the novel at least twice: once to get acquainted with the characters, settings, and organization of the novel and at least once more to read closely to analyze characters and their relationships, imagery and symbolism, and tone. A third reading is advisable to develop a command of detail. While reading the novel, students should keep a vocabulary notebook in which to record and define unfamiliar words or words used in an unfamiliar way. Questions will be asked about... Characters traits Characters relationships Characters motivations Imagery, symbolism, and other devices Tone Vocabulary Short Stories (30%) The four short stories include Stephen Cranes The Blue Hotel Hamlin Garland s Under the Lion s Paw Mark Twain s The Californian s Tale Bret Harte s At the Mission of San Carmel Both Crane s and Garland s stories are widely anthologized, and all four are available on the Internet in full text. As with the novel, students should read these stories multiple times until they become highly familiar with them. Questions will not focus on obscure details but will require students to know the stories well enough to answer analytical questions. While some questions will feature quotations from the stories, not all will. As with the novel, students should keep a vocabulary notebook in which to record and define unfamiliar words or words used in an unfamiliar way.

2 Questions will be asked about... Characters traits Characters relationships Characters motivations Imagery, symbolism, and other devices Tone Vocabulary Poetry (30%) The four poems include... Carl Sandburg s Wilderness Walt Whitman s Pioneers! O Pioneers! Walt Whitman s Unnamed Lands Walt Whitman s As I Sat Alone by Blue Ontario s Shores All of these poems are available on the Internet in full text. Again, students should read the poems multiple times, despite the length of Pioneers! O Pioneers! and As I Sat Alone by Blue Ontario s Shores. As they read these poems, they should read first to get familiar with the language. To do so, they should read with a dictionary (or access to dictionary.com) nearby. Whitman, especially, loves to use words in unusual ways occasionally. Therefore, it is necessary to think about which meaning or meanings he may intend in certain instances. The same may be said of certain phrases or idioms Whitman or Sandburg might use. Of course, it is best to keep this information in the aforementioned vocabulary notebook. All four of these poems may be better understood by chunking them and then discussing with teammates and coach what the poet is saying in a chunk and how he is saying it. The latter will require an analysis of figurative language and rhetorical devices. Students should be familiar with all the terms on the handout on figurative language. Chunking may also help students to identify multiple themes, especially in the longer poems. Questions will be asked about... Theme Figurative language Point of view Tone Vocabulary

3 Overall Questions will also be asked concerning syntax and will be drawn from all three divisions of the English Study Guide. This is a carryover from last year s outline. A few questions in the competition will present a quotation from the novel, short stories, or poems and ask the students to identify the syntax exemplified in that quotation. These are... Anadiplosis: repeats the last word of one phrase, clause, or sentence at or very near the beginning of the next. it can be generated in series for the sake of beauty or to give a sense of logical progression: Pleasure might cause her read, reading might make her know,/ Knowledge might pity win, and pity grace obtain Philip Sidney Anaphora: repetition of the same word or words at the beginning of successive phrases, clauses, or sentences, commonly in conjunction with climax and with parallelism: To think on death it is a misery,/ To think on life it is a vanity;/ To think on the world verily it is,/ To think that here man hath no perfect bliss. --Peacham In books I find the dead as if they were alive; in books I foresee things to come; in books warlike affairs are set forth; from books come forth the laws of peace. --Richard de Bury The wish of the genuine painter must be more extensive: instead of endeavoring to amuse mankind with the minute neatness of his imitations, he must endeavor to improve them by the grandeur of his ideas; instead of seeking praise, by deceiving the superficial sense of the spectator, he must strive for fame by captivating the imagination. --Sir Joshua Reynolds Anastrophe: Inversion of the normal syntactic order of words; for example, "Matter too soft a lasting mark to bear" (Alexander Pope) Antithesis: establishes a clear, contrasting relationship between two ideas by joining them together or juxtaposing them, often in parallel structure. Human beings are inveterate systematizers and categorizers, so the mind has a natural love for antithesis, which creates a definite and systematic relationship between ideas: To err is human; to forgive, divine. --Pope That short and easy trip made a lasting and profound change in Harold's outlook. That's one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind. --Neil Armstrong Asyndeton: consists of omitting conjunctions between words, phrases, or clauses. In a list of items, asyndeton gives the effect of unpremeditated multiplicity, of an extemporaneous rather than a labored account: On his return he received medals, honors, treasures, titles, fame.

4 Chiasmus: might be called "reverse parallelism," since the second part of a grammatical construction is balanced or paralleled by the first part, only in reverse order. Instead of an A,B structure (e.g., "learned unwillingly") paralleled by another A,B structure ("forgotten gladly"), the A,B will be followed by B,A ("gladly forgotten"). So instead of writing, "What is learned unwillingly is forgotten gladly," you could write, "What is learned unwillingly is gladly forgotten." Similarly, the parallel sentence, "What is now great was at first little," could be written chiastically as, "What is now great was little at first." Here are some examples: He labors without complaining and without bragging rests. Polished in courts and hardened in the field, Renowned for conquest, and in council skilled. -- Joseph Addison For the Lord is a Great God... in whose hand are the depths of the earth; the peaks of the mountains are his also. --Psalm 95:4 Epistrophe: forms the counterpart to anaphora, because the repetition of the same word or words comes at the end of successive phrases, clauses, or sentences: Where affections bear rule, there reason is subdued, honesty is subdued, good will is subdued, and all things else that withstand evil, for ever are subdued. --Wilson And all the night he did nothing but weep Philoclea, sigh Philoclea, and cry out Philoclea. --Philip Sidney You will find washing beakers helpful in passing this course, using the gas chromatograph desirable for passing this course, and studying hours on end essential to passing this course. Polysyndeton: the use of a conjunction between each word, phrase, or clause, and is thus structurally the opposite of asyndeton. The rhetorical effect of polysyndeton, however, often shares with that of asyndeton a feeling of multiplicity, energetic enumeration, and building up. They read and studied and wrote and drilled. I laughed and played and talked and flunked. The definitions and examples come from except for anastrophe.

5 Figures of Speech Allusion: Apostrophe: Archetype: Connotation: Denotation: Hyperbole: Imagery: Visual: Auditory: Olfactory: Gustatory: Tactile: Organic: Kinesthetic: Irony, verbal: a reference to something literary, mythological, or historical that the author assumes the reader will recognize a figure of speech in which one directly addresses an absent or imaginary person, or some abstraction a detail, image, or character type that occurs frequently in literature and myth and is thought to appeal in a universal way to the unconscious and to evoke a response what a word suggests beyond its basic dictionary definition; a word s overtones of meaning the basic definition or dictionary meaning of a word intentional exaggeration to create an effect the use of figures of speech to create vivid images that appeal to one of the senses of imagery that appeals to the sense of sight of imagery that appeals to the sense of hearing of imagery that appeals to the sense of smell of imagery that appeals to the sense of taste of imagery that appeals to the sense of touch (e.g., hard/soft, wet/dry, hot/cold) of imagery that appeals to internal sensation (e.g., hunger, thirst, fatigue, nausea) of imagery that appeals to the sense of movement or tension in muscles or joints a figure of speech in which what is said is the opposite of what is meant Irony, situational: a situation in which there is an incongruity between appearance and reality, or between expectation and fulfillment, or between the actual situation and what would seem appropriate Irony, dramatic: Metaphor: an incongruity or discrepancy between what a character says or thinks and what the reader knows to be true (or between what a character perceives and what the author intends the reader to perceive) a direct comparison of two different things

6 Metonymy: Oxymoron: Paradox: Personification: Simile: Symbol: Synecdoche: Synesthesia: Understatement: substituting the name of one object for another object closely associated with it (The pen is mightier than the sword. ) an expression in which two words that contradict each other are joined an apparently contradictory statement that actually contains some truth endowing non-human objects or creatures with human qualities or characteristics a comparison of two things using like, as, or other specifically comparative words an object that is used to represent something else using one part of an object to represent the entire object (for example, referring to a car simply wheels ) describing one kind of sensation in terms of another ( A loud color, a sweet sound ) the deliberate representation of something lesser in magnitude that it actually is; a deliberate under-emphasis