Block, 4.29 & 30 - We Should Be in Earnest Today

• 3PO
• Finish TIBE (review assignment due next Tues)
• Monday: wear your college gear! It's "Sport–your–school–gear Day"

HW:

1. As you read each act (there are three), identify one quote (or snippets of dialogue) that you think satirize (comically criticize) Victorian values and/or institutions (total of three quotes).
   1. Context (Who are the characters?) What is/are the character(s) saying?
      1. EX. Jack: "Gwendolen, it is a terrible thing for a man to find out suddenly that all his life he has been speaking nothing but the truth. Can you forgive me?"
      2. Here, Jack is oddly asking forgiveness for having deceived Gwendolen with the truth about his Christian name, a dramatic irony.
   2. What do you think the playwright (Wilde) is possibly saying through the quote?
      1. (Remember that irony is a discrepancy between expectations and reality.) Although Jack ironically deceived Gwendolyn with the truth, it was a deception nonetheless, for he was deliberately deceiving her with what he perceived to be a lie. His inadvertent "truthfulness" was null and void, since it was his intent to deceive. Wilde uses this comical irony to illustrate the sad reality that relational deception (and often infidelity) was all too common between Victorian couples.  Wilde reveals the ubiquity of Victorian duplicity by making trivial what would otherwise be a dark deception.

Tuesday, 4.28 - More Walking on the Wilde Side

• 3PO
• GUM: Take the Senior Exit Survey (while I check U7 Nails and Lit Terms)
• Go to: succeed.naviance.com/mvcs 
• Username: Focus username (not e-mail)
• Password: Focus password

• Click on the “About Me” tab, and on the left you will see “2015 Senior Exit Survey.”
• Take it and submit it! 

• Finish An Ideal Husband and continue The Importance of Being Earnest
   

Monday, 4.27 - Finish Bunburying, Then, Back to Earnest

Cucumber sandwiches? They're worth fighting for

• 3PO
• GUM: Finish Bedford 25 exercises 1-4 (PDF) and discuss your answers with a neighbor while I check your Victorian Notes HW.
• Finish An Ideal Husband
• Back to The Importance of Being Earnest

HW:

1. (Tues) U7: Victorian Nails and Lit Terms updated
2. (next Mon) Journal: TIBE (three quotes, context, and explanation of satire) 

Block, 4.23 - Victorian Tea Party

• 3PO
• Party

HW:

1. (Mon) Victorian Era notes
1. One TS and two facts per section:
1. "Peace and Economic Growth" 
2. "The Idea of Progress"
3. "The Hungry Forties"
4. "The Movement for Reform"
5. "Decorum and Authority"
6. "Intellectual Progress"
7. "Questions and Doubts"
8. "From Trust to Skepticism and Denial"
9. "Revealing Reality" 

1. (Tues) Journal check - Victorian nails and lit terms (you do not need to write out all the examples)

Wednesday, 4.22 - Prepare for the Funky Cheese Par-tea

For the Student Talent Show today

• 3PO
  
• GUM: Continue with nails and lit terms (U7: Vic).
• TIBE:
1. Remember that you must select one quote from each of the three acts
2. Explain the meaning/context
3. Explain what Oscar Wilde is satirizing about Victorian society 

• Extra credit opp: bring something to contribute to the tea party on block day. Here follow some ideas:
• funky English/European style cheeses
• English tea, cream, honey, sugar, etc.
• paper cups for hot beverages, small paper plates, plastic ware
• cucumber sandwiches (English are also fond of egg salad)
• scones, crumpets
• clotted cream, strawberry preserves
• crusty bread (loaf of bread, NOT Wonder nasty Bread)

• Extra, extra credit to anyone who dresses like an English aristocrat




• Extra, extra, extra credit to anyone who also wears a cravat

 
HW:

1. (Block) Victorian Era notes
1. One TS and two facts per section:
1. "Peace and Economic Growth" 
2. "The Idea of Progress"
3. "The Hungry Forties"
4. "The Movement for Reform"
5. "Decorum and Authority"
6. "Intellectual Progress"
7. "Questions and Doubts"
8. "From Trust to Skepticism and Denial"
9. "Revealing Reality"

Tuesday, 4.21 - Time to Bunbury into Some Cucumber Sandwiches

• 3PO
• GUM: Today and tomorrow, write out new nails and lit terms posted in U7: Vic tab. I will check these next week.
• English Tea Party (block day) - discuss details in class
• Continue TIBE

 
HW:

1. (Block) Victorian Era notes
1. One TS and two facts per section:
1. "Peace and Economic Growth" 
2. "The Idea of Progress"
3. "The Hungry Forties"
4. "The Movement for Reform"
5. "Decorum and Authority"
6. "Intellectual Progress"
7. "Questions and Doubts"
8. "From Trust to Skepticism and Denial"
9. "Revealing Reality"

 

Monday, 4/20 - Peace often leads to stagnation; stagnation, to mischief.

• 3PO

• GUM: Begin intro to Victorian Era: take notes on each sections

• One topic sentence in your own words
• Two details for each section

• TIBE: A Trivial Comedy for Serious People - Some things to keep in mind:
• Wilde is using light satire to poke fun at Victorian duplicity (hypocrisy) 
• private vs public life - or sinful reality vs moral appearance
• The name "Ernest" sounds like "earnest," which means "serious in intention, purpose, or effort; sincerely zealous; showing depth and sincerity of feeling."

• Begin Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest (TIBE)
• As you read each act, identify one quote (or snippets of dialogue) that you think criticize Victorian values and/or institutions.  
• Context: (Who are the characters?) What is/are the character(s) saying?  
• What do you think the playwright (Wilde) is possibly saying through the quote? 

HW:

1. (Wed) Victorian Era notes
1. One TS and two facts per section:
1. "Peace and Economic Growth" 
2. "The Idea of Progress"
3. "The Hungry Forties"
4. "The Movement for Reform"
5. "Decorum and Authority"
6. "Intellectual Progress"
7. "Questions and Doubts"
8. "From Trust to Skepticism and Denial"
9. "Revealing Reality"

Unit 7: Victorian Era

• Intro to The Victorian Era
• Texts 
• See Brit Lit - Historical Eras/Contexts (in Notability) or get it again in Google Classroom if necessary.
• Nails
• What were some of the main people, events, and ideas of the Victorian Period?

• Oscar Wilde
• Texts 
• The Importance of Being Earnest
• An Ideal Husband (film)
• Nails



He's an English Man!

• What is a comedy of manners and how does Wilde's Importance of Being Earnest qualify as such?
• What does the word "earnestness" or "earnest" mean and how does Wilde use it as a pun (the name "Ernest") that critiques Victorian virtues?
• How does the subtitle "A Trivial Comedy for Serious People" contribute to Wilde's tone and thematic development?
• How does Wilde use epigram, hyperbole, understatement, and irony to satirize (critique) Victorian values and institutions?

• Lit Terms
• Comedy of Manners - A comic drama consisting of five or three acts in which the attitudes and customs of a society are critiqued and satirized according to high standards of intellect and morality.
• e.g. Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest

• Hyperbole - Calculated overstatement, exaggeration

• e.g. "I'm so hungry I could eat a ________"
• e.g. "He ate everything in the house."

• Understatement - Says less than is intended

• e.g. "Adolf Hitler was a naughty man."
• e.g. "I hate to seem inquisitive, but would you kindly inform me who I am?" (Oscar Wilde) 

• Paradox - Using contradiction in a manner that oddly makes sense on a deeper level.

• e.g. "Without laws, we can have no freedom."
• e.g. "The simplicity of your character makes you exquisitely incomprehensible to me." (Oscar Wilde)
• e.g. "I adore political parties. They are the only place left to us where people don't talks politics" (Wilde).

• Epigram - a short, witty, often paradoxical—sometimes satirical—statement designed to surprise the audience

• e.g. "Swans sing before they die--'twere no bad thing / Should certain people die before they sing!" (Coleridge)
• e.g. "What is an epigram? a dwarfish whole, / Its body brevity, and wit its soul" (Coleridge)
• e.g. "Forty years of romance make a woman look like a ruin and forty years of marriage make her look like a public building" (Oscar Wilde). 
• e.g. "Relations are simply a tedious pack of people who haven't got the remotest knowledge of how to live, nor the smallest instinct about when to die" (Wilde).
• e.g. "All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That's his" (Wilde).
• e.g. "I hope you have not been leading a double life, pretending to be wicked and being really good all the time. That would be hypocrisy" (Wilde).
• e.g. "God made women beautiful so that men would love them; and he made them stupid so that they could love men" (attributed to La Belle Otero).

• Victorian Poets 
• Texts (Poets)
• Tennyson, Housman, Hopkins
• Nails
• What are some of the common ideas and tones expressed by Victorian poets . . . and why?
• Lit Terms 
• Tone - definition

Block, 4.16 & 17 - I must be cruel only to be kind (Hamlet and Mr. Reno)

• 3PO
• GUM: none. Clear your desks and prepare for your exam and essay. 
• Exam and essay: you have all period.

HW:

1. (Mon) CWP rewrites due - remember that you must highlight each correction and staple both copies to each other so I can see the edits I suggested.

Wednesday, 4.15 - Tax . . . er, I mean, Test Day

• 3PO
• GUM: review for your test for several minutes
• Romantics Test
• When you're finished, please finish up whatever P&P you have not yet read (you already should have); brush up on characters, places, plot.

HW:

1. (Block) Test 
1. Know all characters, their motivations, and their relationships with one another; I will have a section of quotes from characters that you will need to match with the correct speaker.
2. Social expectations and laws that affect the drama
3. Of course you must know the delicious plot ; )
4. The settings, particularly the named abodes (houses), and those who own or rent them.
5. You will be given several passage–based questions
2. ICE (In Class Essay) - P&P
1. Make sure you have your journal with you
2. You may also bring a hard copy of the book if you'd like.

Victorian Poets

Victorian Poets

From Trust to Skepticism and Denial 

Trust in a transcendental power was characteristic of the early Victorian writers. They were the immediate heirs of the Romantic idea of a finite natural world surrounded by and interfused with an infinite, ideal transcendental reality. The highest purpose of a poet, of any writer, was to make readers aware of the connection between earth and heaven, body and soul, material and ideal. 

Fundamentally, as Thomas Carlyle wrote in his essay “The Hero as Poet,” reality is spiritual, a divine idea. “All Appearances, from the starry sky to the grass of the field, but especially the Appearance of Man and his work, is but vesture, the embodiment that renders it [the divine idea] possible.” The poet penetrates to the divine idea and makes it palpable in language and story to those of lesser power and vision. “That is always his message; he is to reveal that to us—that sacred mystery which he more than others lives ever present with.” 
 
With some exceptions—Gerard Manley Hopkins is one and Christina Rossetti another—writers younger than Alfred Tennyson and Ruskin found it increasingly difficult to believe in an infinite power and order that made sense of material and human existence. Some simply thought it unnecessary. Algernon Charles Swinburne and Rudyard Kipling, in their different ways, celebrated a relation between humans and the natural world that could be joyous and even redemptive. Other writers at mid-century, sometimes reacting to explanations of the world that excluded the spiritual, were saddened by what seemed to them to be the withdrawal of the divine from the world. The dominant note of much mid-Victorian writing was struck by Matthew Arnold in his poem “Dover Beach”: “The Sea of Faith,” Arnold wrote, had ebbed. There was no certainty; or if there was, what was certain was that existence was not governed by a benevolent intelligence that cared for its creatures. 
 
By the end of the century, this skepticism and denial had become pervasive in the works of Hardy, Housman, and others. Early- and mid-Victorian novelists such as Dickens and George Eliot had dramatized a human ideal achieved through sympathy and unselfishness. They made sad or frightening examples of people like the Murdstones in David Copperfield and Godfrey Cass in Silas Marner—all hard surface and no soul. Their heroes and heroines learned to find happiness in nurturing marriages and in small communities of family and friends. But there were few such marriages and communities in the fiction and poetry of Hardy and Housman. These late-Victorian writers told stories of lovers and friends bereft and betrayed by unfaithfulness, war, and the other troubles that humans add to the natural troubles of mortal life. 


Revealing Reality, Creating Coherence 

Victorian writers had purposes as various as the ideas of reality they believed in. Some writers wanted to scare or shame readers into effective moral and political actions that they optimistically believed were possible. Some wanted to show readers what it is like to live in a pleasurable moment of intense feeling like that caught in a lyric or in the interesting perspectives of a character in a dramatic monologue or novel. Victorian literature entertained, informed, warned, and reassured. 

Even the playfulness of Lewis Carroll and Oscar Wilde shows the two most important and consistent purposes or effects of Victorian literature. The first was to make readers hope, or wonder if, reality was really like that—really as whole and satisfying as in Tennyson’s In Memoriam, as briskly coherent as in a poem by Browning or an essay by Macaulay. The second principal purpose or effect was to demonstrate that, however bleak and chaotic reality seemed to be, the writer and reader could make a pleasing order in it. Even when a story or poem said that the world was ugly or made no sense, the story or the poem could seem beautiful and make sense to its audience. In every successful act of writing and reading literature, one more satisfyingly coherent thing in the world is created or discovered. 
 
Finally, it is important to remember that these purposes and effects happened first to readers who were living Victorian lives. Victorian literature did not exist above or outside the comfortable and often confident lives of its readers. Many of the people who read Dickens settled down with his books after dining in rooms as garishly decorated as the Veneerings’. Most of the young men and women who thrilled to Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s sensualism and to Housman’s tender gloom probably moved on to make proper and modestly happy marriages and to find worthy occupations. People who were making a lot of money listened to Carlyle and Ruskin telling them that they were foolish and damned. People who were disturbed by how much money was being made listened to Macaulay reminding them that a century or so before they might not have been able to afford, or even to read, his book. 
Victorian literature needs to be read not just as a comment on the complexity of its culture, but also as an important part of that culture. Its writers sent their words to work in the world to alter, to reinforce, to challenge, to enlarge, or to temper the ideas and feelings with which their contemporaries managed their lives. 

__________________________________________________

Let's read the following Victorian poems, considering how each poet fits into the above historical overview. Consider also checking out a bit of each poet's biography by tripping over the hyperlinked name.

• Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809–1892)
• "The Eagle: A Fragment" and "Flower in a Crannied Wall" 

• A. E. Housman (1859–1936)
• "Loveliest of trees, the cherry now" 
• "Is My Team Ploughing"

• Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889)
• "Spring" 
• "The Starlight Night"

  
Extra poems for those who are interested:

• Tennyson
• "Break, Break, Break"
• "Crossing the Bar"

• Matthew Arnold
• "Dover Beach"

 

Tuesday, 4.14 - Test Week

• 3PO
• GUM: Review your PDF Exercises 24.1-4 (the first four pages) and your Subject-Verb Agreement (SVA) PDF. Both will be part of the Romanticism Test tomorrow.
• Finish discussing 2nd generation romantic poets
• Review for tomorrow's test

HW:

1. (Wed) Test - Romantics (We will review Tues.)
1. Historical overview
2. Romantic Obsessions
3. First and Second Generation Romantic poets
4. Bedford 21 (SVA) and 24 (Pronoun Case)
2. (Block) Test and ICE (In Class Essay) - P&P
3. (next Mon) CWP rewrites due - remember that you must highlight each correction and staple both copies to each other so I can see the edits I suggested

Monday, 4.13 - The Final Laps

• 3PO
• GUM: Today we begin using the pronouns who/whom and whoever/whomever. Remember that who-whoever are subjective (so if you can use the pronoun "he," then use "who" or "whoever"); whom-whomever are objective (so if you can use the pronoun "him," then use "whom" or "whomever").
• Using the Bedford 25 online link on the blog, do PDF Ex. 25-1 and 2 (while I check your Romantics and P&P journals).
• Discuss Romantics journal

HW:

1. (Wed) Test - Romantics (We will review Tues.)
2. (Block) Test and ICE (In Class Essay) - P&P
3. (next Mon) CWP rewrites due - remember that you must highlight each correction and staple both copies to each other so I can see the edits I suggested

Block, 4.1 & 2 - Are you with Chaucer or Eliot this Holy Week?

• 3PO
• GUM: Do pages 3 and 4 of your Pronoun PDF (Ex. 24-3 & 4).
• Finish Journal: 2nd Gen. Rom. Poets (U6 tab). If you don't finish it today, it will be due the day you return from vacation, in addition to the P&P assignment ; )

HW: 

1. (Return from Spring Break) Finish P&P (three quotes from any three separate chapters). 
1. However, this time, link the quote to another quote or particular section of the book, explaining how they are connected (i.e. theme, character, or another lit. element like irony/satire); furthermore, consider what Austen is saying.