Coming up: vocabulary quiz on Tuesday, April 4
there is another copy of the handout from last Monday below.In class: continuing to read the prologue
work on your prologue questions. These will be collected at the beginning of class on Monday.
Remember diction is word choice.
Annotate the text as you read.
Remember to approach the text through the lens of naturalism.\
As a reminder: Characteristics of naturalism
- Objective
- Darwinistic--survival of the fittest
- Detached method of narration
- Language--formal; piling on of images ("wretched excess")
- Human beings unable to stand up against enormous weight of circumstances.
- Deterministic--natural and socioeconomic forces stronger than man.
- Heredity determines character
- Violence--force against force
- man against man
- man against nature
- man against himself
- Taboo topics
- Animal imagery
- Attention to setting to the point of saturation
- Characters--lower socioeconomic class
- Static characters
- Naturalists observe, then write. Often about the black, darker side of life.
- "Pessimistic materialistic determinism" (Pizer)
- Characters conditioned or controlled by environment, heredity, instinct or chance but they have a compensating humanistic value that affirms the significance of the individual (Pizer).
- Characters do not have free will (determinism)
Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton
Establishing mood and tone through diction
Learning Targets:
I can interpret words and phrases as they are used in
the text, including technical, connotative and figurative
meanings, and analyze how the specific word choices shape the meaning.
I can determine two or more central ideas of a text and analyze their development over the course of the text, including how they interact and build on one another to provide a complex analysis; provide an objective summary of the text.
I can analyze a complex set of ideas or sequence of events and explain how specific individuals, ideas, or events interact and develop over the course of the text.
I can determine an author’s point of view or purpose in a text in which the rhetoric is particularly effective, analyzing how style and content contribute to the power, persuasiveness, or beauty of the text.
Name__________________________________ Prologue questions
Due Monday, April 3 For full credit, your responses must be complete, well-written, grammatically correct sentences.
1. What does the name Starkfield suggest about the setting?
____________________________________________________________________
2. How does Herman Gow corroborate this later? Find his words on page 6.
____________________________________________________________________
3. Give two words that portray the stereotype of an engineer.
____________________________ _______________________
4. How is the narrator, whose name we never learn, atypical*? (Think about how he views Ethan). (*not representative of a type, group, or class)
_____________________________________________________________________
5. What could be the significance of the missing “L” structure on the farm?
_____________________________________________________________________
6. What places to Herman Gow and Mrs. Ned Hale Occupy in the story?
a. Gow:________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________
b. Hale:_________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________
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Ethan Frome Vocabulary Words First List…quiz on Tuesday, April 4…power point review on Monday, April 3
1. sardonic: adj. Scornfully or cynically mocking; sarcastic.
2. colloquial: adj. 1. Characteristic of or appropriate to the spoken language or to writing that seeks
the effect of speech; informal. 2. Relating to conversation; conversational.
3. innocuous: adj. 1. Having no adverse effect; harmless. 2. Not likely to offend or provoke to strong
emotion; insipid.
4. reticent: adj. 1. Inclined to keep one's thoughts, feelings, and personal affairs to oneself;
Restrained or reserved in style. 3. Reluctant; unwilling.
5. poignant: adj. Keenly distressing to the mind or feelings: poignant anxiety; profoundly moving; touching: a poignant memory.
6. wraith: n. 1. An apparition of a living person that appears as a portent just before that person's
death. 2. The ghost of a dead person. 3. Something shadowy and insubstantial.
7. wistful: adj. 1. Full of wishful yearning. 2. Pensively sad; melancholy.
8. undulation: n. 1. A regular rising and falling or movement to alternating sides; movement in waves.
9. tenuous: adj. 1. Long and thin; slender: tenuous strands. 2. Having a thin consistency; dilute;
having little substance; flimsy: a tenuous argument.
10. throng: n. 1. A large group of people gathered or crowded closely together; a multitude.
throngs v.tr. 1. To crowd into; fill: commuters thronging the subway platform.2. To press in
to gather, press, or move in a throng.
11. vex: (verb) 1. To annoy, as with petty importunities; bother. 2. To cause perplexity in; puzzle.
12. laden: adj. 1. Weighed down with a load; heavy: "the warmish air, laden with the rains of those
thousands of miles of western sea" Hilaire Belloc. 2. Oppressed; burdened: laden with grief.
13. preclude: 1. To make impossible, as by action taken in advance; prevent. 2. To exclude or prevent (someone) from a given condition or activity: Modesty precludes me from accepting the honor.
14. succumb: (verb) 1. To submit to an overpowering force or yield to an overwhelming desire; give up or give in. 2. To die.
15. foist: (verb) 1. To pass off as genuine, valuable, or worthy: "I can usually tell whether a poet . . . is foisting off on us what he'd like to think is pure invention" J.D. Salinger.
2. To impose (something or someone unwanted) upon another by coercion or trickery:They had extra work foisted on them because they couldn't say no to the boss. 3. To insert fraudulently or deceitfully: foisted unfair provisions into the contract.
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