Teaching 11 Regents, Shakespeare, AP Language & Composition

The first one, Ch. 22 p. 191, talks about Charles’s uncle’s summons of him to visit him at the family manor. The passage is filled with foreshadowing and, looking back on it, with a fair amount of irony. However, his word choices and descriptions of details really reveal much about Charles, as well as the author. Especially noteworthy are some of the vibrant adjectives the author uses.

The second one, Ch. 48 p. 360, begins the conversation Charles has with himself in the church. It reveals much of the self-doubt and other emotions that have been raging within Charles ever since he met Sarah. The most important part is the self-conflict going on inside Charles, and the author enhances the effect with the symbol he uses to describe his various persona.

The first one, Ch. 22 p. 191, talks about Charles’s uncle’s summons of him to visit him at the family manor. The passage is filled with foreshadowing and, looking back on it, with a fair amount of irony. However, his word choices and descriptions of details really reveal much about Charles, as well as the author. Especially noteworthy are some of the vibrant adjectives the author uses.

The second one, Ch. 48 p. 360, begins the conversation Charles has with himself in the church. It reveals much of the self-doubt and other emotions that have been raging within Charles ever since he met Sarah. The most important part is the self-conflict going on inside Charles, and the author enhances the effect with the symbol he uses to describe his various persona.

Charles in this passage begins to feel swarmed by his “waspish self-inquiries.”. He begins thinking about how his life could possibly be different if he were to be with Sarah instead of Ernestina, feeling that where Sarah would help him to expand himself, Ernestina would begin his contraction through their marriage. He believes himself to be “a brilliant man trapped”, who is becoming confined by the possibility of marriage, seeing it as a “fixed voyage to a known place.” He feels that it is only with the help of Sarah that he will regain his brilliance, feeling that she symbolizes “some emotion, some possibility…She made him aware of a deprivation.” Even though he himself believes such feelings to be foolish, saying “It is the stupidest thing, but that girl attracts me;” he cannot help but wonder at how different things would be if he were to go live with Sarah.

Fowles, in this passage, starts off by describing some of the views held by the Victorian scientists; yet, this is only used as an extended symbol to talk about the changing status of the society they now inhabited. He talks about the ideas of Darwin, yet uses them as metaphorical idea to talk about his parallel argument on how the strata of the society is slowly being undermined. The new ideas of the next few centuries already exist, yet it is the forebears of modern society who fail, or rather, are reluctant to even acknowledge them, and he talks about this while making small asides about them. Yet, he also brings up the classical argument on order being the highest human good, which is perhaps a theme he will cover in more depth as the novel progresses.

Wade Davis, a National Geographic “Explorer-in-Residence,” talks about his experiences while traveling the world. He discusses the loss of cultural diversity that is going on, the ethnicide of over thousands of languages that is not condoned, but rather celebrated. He talks about the power of storytelling as a tool to combat the destruction of the ethnosphere, using humor (he talks about psychedelic drugs and a feces blade) while putting a human face to the statistics that get thrown around way too often. Davis also talks about many of the misconceptions people have with these dying cultures, talking about the loss of wisdom as elders have no way to pass on their lore. This is rather heartbreaking, yet inspiring.

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/wade_davis_on_endangered_cultures.html