Text Rationale for In Cold Blood by Truman Capote Rationale: From The English Journal, A Cold Manipulation of Language : A useful text to illustrate that authors control language for an audience is In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, so I always start my course with that text. Activities that teach tone, diction, and syntax are used throughout my Capote unit to help the students understand and master concepts that might be poorly understood. I introduce the Aristotelian model of rhetoric (audience subject speaker) with this book, as Capote carries the students through his real (or invented) personal saga with Perry Smith and Dick Hickock. Students appreciate the complications that In Cold Blood presents, and they enjoy examining the language that Capote uses to change readers perceptions of the events as he takes them through an account of the true story (Noel). Through these lessons [using In Cold Blood], students recognize how to engage with a text and question an author by recognizing that writers have agendas other than making money or getting published. The primary objective for me is to teach my readers and writers the command of voice. I want students to understand how it can empower their writing; likewise, students must understand how uncontrolled voice can hinder what writers are trying to communicate. Capote was castigated for his attempts at making a martyr out of Smith when he was obviously a brutal killer of an innocent family that lived on the plains of Kansas. This result is a reminder of the power of rhetoric. Students must learn to question writers. The final job is for students to learn how to manipulate their rhetorical devices for their own purposes (Noel). Summary: From One Night on a Kansas Farm, The New York Times Book Review: On the Indian summer night of Nov. 14, 1959, two criminals visited this haunting geography. With a knife and a 12-gauge shotgun, they robbed and murdered a man and his wife and their son and daughter. The deed filled the scene. It echoed through the lives of all who lived nearby, rushing toward some appalling, mysterious point of psychic infinity. It made haggard men out of the guardians of order. Eventually through a fluke almost as gratuitous as the killing itself, they captured the murderers. On an April night last year, as rain beat on the roof, the two were hanged in a chilly warehouse in the corner of the yard of the Kansas State Penitentiary at Lansing. To the Midwestern newspaper reader, the crime and its aftermath while awful enough, were not especially astonishing. Spectacular violence seems appropriate to the empty stage of the plains, as though by such cosmic acts mankind must occasionally signal its presence. To Truman Capote, the killings in western Kansas seemed less commonplace. He went west, to Kansas City, to Garden City and Holcomb, Kan., the hamlet where the murders took place. With the obsessiveness of a man demonstrating a profound new hypothesis, he spent more than five years unraveling and following to its end every thread in the killing of Herbert W. Clutter and his family. In Cold Blood, the resulting chronicle, is a masterpiece--agonizing, terrible, possessed, proof that the times, so surfeited with disasters, are still capable of tragedy. The tragedy was existential. The murder was seemingly without motive. The killers, Perry Smith and Richard Hickock, almost parodied the literary anti-hero.
[Capote] gratifies our electronically induced appetite for massive quantities of detail, but at the same time, like an ironic magician, he shows that appearances are nothing. In Cold Blood also mocks many of the advances (on paper) of anti-realism. It presents the metaphysics of antirealism through a total evocation of reality. Not the least of the book's merits is that it manages a major moral judgment without the author's appearance once on stage. At a time when the external happening has become largely meaningless and our reaction to it brutalized, when we shout "Jump" to the man on the ledge. Mr. Capote has restored dignity to the event. His book is also a grieving testament of faith in what used to be called the soul (Knickerbocker). Merit: First book of its kind: true crime, literary nonfiction. Received the Edgar Award for Best Fact Crime Benefit to Students: From The English Journal, A Cold Manipulation of Language : Teaching Nonfiction and In Cold Blood: With nonfiction, especially imaginative nonfiction, such as Capote s In Cold Blood, the question of What is the author s purpose? can be challenging. Maybe there is a global or local message to convey as in Fast Food Nation. Perhaps the author wants to prompt an action or generate a movement such as Booker T. Washington s Up from Slavery. Or, as in Capote s case, perhaps the writer has so many agendas that the discussion of intentions is endless. Truman Capote wanted to break away from fiction to awaken the world to a new genre by melding imaginative writing with journalistic reporting, so he wrote a nonfiction book with a little flair. With his friend Harper Lee, he investigated the true account of the murder of Herbert Clutter s family in Holcomb, Kansas, in 1959. Capote befriended the family, friends, and killers of the Clutter family to tell this horrific story. He presents the events chronologically with his unnamed narrator revealing everything from a detached viewpoint; however, it becomes apparent in Part II that the killers, or Persons Unknown, are shown some sympathy by the author. Frequently he presents one murderer, Perry Smith, as a victim instead of a killer. The murder is quickly detailed in Part I and forgotten as the killers are described and followed on their trek across the country in a failed attempt to escape capture. The author gradually shows Smith s handicaps and then begins detailing his past; before readers realize what is happening, they find themselves feeling some sympathy for this cold killer. Capote s manipulation is gradual, but every reader recognizes it by the time he reaches Part II. I do not warn students that this shift in perspective is coming. In fact, I enjoy watching them discover it on their own, because it is the best example I know of an author s deliberate manipulation of an audience. When students realize that Capote is showing kindness toward Smith, they are surprised, just as everyone else was when the book was released after Smith s and Hickock s executions. Without any encouragement from me, students ask, Why did Capote do this? He just showed us the details of the murders in Part I. That curiosity is a springboard for a discussion into HOW? How did Capote manipulate the reader to feel kindness toward Smith? This natural progression of curiosity thanks to Capote provides me an opportunity to show students how language can be controlled for a specific purpose (Noel). Brief description of proposed classroom activities generated by text: This book will be one of two choices students may select for the Sense of Place unit in the second semester of
English III. Both texts (In Cold Blood and The Sun Also Rises) are excellent examples of the guiding questions for the unit: How is our identity shaped by where we re from and where we want to go? How do your expectations and behaviors change as we move from place to place? How do we find places where we feel we belong, and how do we cultivate and protect that feeling? In addition to their chosen seminal text, students will study the following classic short texts from American literature (using the textbook): The Devil and Tom Walker A Rose for Emily The Masque of the Red Death A Christmas Memory Hills Like White Elephants We will approach all works through the lens of rhetorical analysis rather than classic literary analysis. List of the TEKS the proposed text supports: (1) Reading/Vocabulary Development. Students understand new vocabulary and use it when reading and writing. Students are expected to: (A) determine the meaning of grade-level technical academic English words in multiple content areas (e.g., science, mathematics, social studies, the arts) derived from Latin, Greek, or other linguistic roots and affixes; (B) analyze textual context (within a sentence and in larger sections of text) to draw conclusions about the nuance in word meanings; (2) Reading/Comprehension of Literary Text/Theme and Genre. Students analyze, make inferences and draw conclusions about theme and genre in different cultural, historical, and contemporary contexts and provide evidence from the text to support their understanding. Students are expected to: (A) analyze the way in which the theme or meaning of a selection represents a view or comment on the human condition; (B) relate the characters and text structures of mythic, traditional, and classical literature to 20th and 21st century American novels, plays, or films; and (C) relate the main ideas found in a literary work to primary source documents from its historical and cultural setting.
(6) Reading/Comprehension of Literary Text/Literary Nonfiction. Students understand, make inferences and draw conclusions about the varied structural patterns and features of literary nonfiction and provide evidence from text to support their understanding. Students are expected to analyze how rhetorical techniques (e.g., repetition, parallel structure, understatement, overstatement) in literary essays, true life adventures, and historically important speeches influence the reader, evoke emotions, and create meaning. (7) Reading/Comprehension of Literary Text/Sensory Language. Students understand, make inferences and draw conclusions about how an author's sensory language creates imagery in literary text and provide evidence from text to support their understanding. Students are expected to analyze the meaning of classical, mythological, and biblical allusions in words, phrases, passages, and literary works. (8) Reading/Comprehension of Informational Text/Culture and History. Students analyze, make inferences and draw conclusions about the author's purpose in cultural, historical, and contemporary contexts and provide evidence from the text to support their understanding. Students are expected to analyze how the style, tone, and diction of a text advance the author's purpose and perspective or stance. (12) Reading/Media Literacy. Students use comprehension skills to analyze how words, images, graphics, and sounds work together in various forms to impact meaning. Students will continue to apply earlier standards with greater depth in increasingly more complex texts. Students are expected to: (A) evaluate how messages presented in media reflect social and cultural views in ways different from traditional texts; (B) evaluate the interactions of different techniques (e.g., layout, pictures, typeface in print media, images, text, sound in electronic journalism) used in multi-layered media; (C) evaluate the objectivity of coverage of the same event in various types of media; and (D) evaluate changes in formality and tone across various media for different audiences and purposes. (13) Writing/Writing Process. Students use elements of the writing process (planning, drafting, revising, editing, and publishing) to compose text. Students are expected to: (A) plan a first draft by selecting the correct genre for conveying the intended meaning to multiple audiences, determining appropriate topics through a range of strategies (e.g., discussion, background reading, personal interests, interviews), and developing a thesis or controlling idea; (B) structure ideas in a sustained and persuasive way (e.g., using outlines, note taking, graphic organizers, lists) and develop drafts in timed and open-ended situations that include transitions and rhetorical devices to convey meaning;
(C) revise drafts to clarify meaning and achieve specific rhetorical purposes,consistency of tone, and logical organization by rearranging the words, sentences, and paragraphs to employ tropes (e.g., metaphors, similes, analogies, hyperbole, understatement, rhetorical questions, irony), schemes (e.g., parallelism, antithesis, inverted word order, repetition, reversed structures), and by adding transitional words and phrases; (D) edit drafts for grammar, mechanics, and spelling; and (E) revise final draft in response to feedback from peers and teacher and publish written work for appropriate audiences. (15) Writing/Expository and Procedural Texts. Students write expository and procedural or work-related texts to communicate ideas and information to specific audiences for specific purposes. Students are expected to: (A) write an analytical essay of sufficient length that includes: (i) effective introductory and concluding paragraphs and a variety of sentence structures; (ii) rhetorical devices, and transitions between paragraphs; (iii) a clear thesis statement or controlling idea; (iv) a clear organizational schema for conveying ideas; (v) relevant and substantial evidence and well-chosen details; and (vi) information on multiple relevant perspectives and a consideration of the validity, reliability, and relevance of primary and secondary sources; Clarification of any potentially controversial segments and why the text remains a suitable choice, despite being potentially controversial: Violence The story of the very first true crime nonfiction novel is horrifying, no doubt about it. It reads like a long, detailed newspaper article, giving every detail of the murders. It also provides readers with a real glimpse into the minds and motivations of the two killers. It traces the events from the night before the murders right up to the execution of Hickock and Smith, which Capote himself attended in order to have an ending for his book. Will it unsettle and disturb some students? Yes, as it should. However, the benefits of teaching this text far outweighs the negative aspects. Similar Works: The Thin Man, Dashiell Hammett
The Talented Mr. Ripley, Patricia Highsmith Devil s Knot, Mara Leveritt