October 16, 2017 - October 20, 2017 Weekly Agenda for A.P. English Literature

Monday, October 16th: 

Dispatch - Quizlet:  tinyurl.com/LevelFUnit2

Grammar Handout: 
Combining Sentences
Discussion of Death of a Salesman
Pair up and look for possible themes in the plays. Remember a theme is a statement, not a word. One of Romeo and Juliet's possible themes could be that the lack of openness between parents and child can result in disaster and loss.  Love is not a theme of Romeo and Juliet.  Love is a topic or a subject of Romeo and Juliet, but not a theme.

Possible themes and evidence: 

Matteo – pages 1573

Willie is remembering talking to Ben when he said that he walked into the jungle of Africa and walked out with a diamond mines.

Is Ben a cipher who represents the American businessman?

Theme - Risk can pay off.

There is a dark side to the American Dream – that sometimes risk does not pay off.

Angela – Biff is willing to take risks but none of them have panned out. The closest thing he has found to be successful is the ranching but even that has not paid out.

Sydney – the fragility of masculinity.  Even when some men are wrong they will not admit that they are wrong. 

Write one or two possible themes for Death of a Salesman.  Then dive into the text to find examples or quotations which support the theme.

Theme:	Theme:	Theme:	Theme:
Example:  Evidence or quotation	Example:  Evidence or quotation	Example:  Evidence or quotation	Example:  Evidence or quotation
Evidence or quotation	Evidence or quotation	Evidence or Quotation	Evidence or quotation
Evidence or quotation	Evidence or quotation	Evidence or quotation	Evidence or quotation
Evidence or quotation	Evidence or quotation	Evidence or quotation	Evidence or quotation

Characters: Willie	Linda	Biff	Happy
Evidence and quotation	Evidence and quotation	Evidence and quotation	Evidence and quotation
Evidence and quotation	Evidence and quotation	Evidence and quotation	Evidence and quotation
Evidence and quotation	Evidence and quotation	Evidence and quotation	Evidence and quotation
Evidence and quotation	Evidence and quotation	Evidence and quotation	Evidence and quotation

Read Death of a Salesman  
Read to page 1550
For the weekend, please read Act One
Please do reading log:
The reading log should include:
The act and scene
Brief summary with analysis
Themes
Characters
Irony
Foreshadowing
Figurative Language

Divide Act 1 of Death of a Salesman  into three units:

The first unit is from pages 1546 – to the top of 1562

The second unit is from pages 1562 to 1574

The third unit is from pages 1574 to the end of Act 1.

Example:  
Death of a Salesman
The setting: Post War New York and Boston
Brief summary:
Act One, Scene One:
The opening of Death of a Salesman is late at night as Willie Loman, a sixty-year old salesman, returns home after a long trip on the road selling some undetermined product up and down New England. Although Willie is a salesman, Miller chooses not to tell the audience what exactly it is that he sells. The play is nonlinear in which the past and present blur in Willie Loman's mind.  The decades of driving on the road have taken a toil on him and his confusing of past with present seems to hint at encroaching dementia. Willie Loman confesses to his faithful, patient wife Linda that while driving home he lost track of where he was and nearly ran off the road. His two grown sons who are home visiting and sleeping in their shared childhood bedroom, overhear the conversation and share their concerns about their father's diminishing vigor. In their whispered conversation, the two sons also reveal their fears and frustrations about the emptiness of their own lives.

Devices:
The play echoes the confusion of Willie's mind by crossing back and forth between the present and the past, merging the past when his two boys were living at home as high school students and now when they are adults and visiting their parents.

Themes:

One of the recurring themes is those who privilege appearance over substance will be destroyed by their delusion.  

The present of the first scene blurs into the hazy idyllic past when Loman's beloved sons were in high school. They are presented as “winners” - Biff is a football hero “ with a “…a crowd of girls behind him every time the classes change.” Their father describes both of his sons as “Adonises” and the “man who makes an appearance in the business world…gets ahead.” However,  Biff is failing math and may not graduate, and Linda tells Willie that he is rough with the girls and their mothers are afraid of him. Bernard, their nebbishy high school friend says Biff stole some basketballs and needs to return them. 

 The  boys are now men, living empty unfulfilled lives. Biff, once so promising as a high school star, is working on another man’s ranch in Texas, and Happy has a meaningless job, a lonely apartment in New York, and a long string of girlfriends with no emotional connection to any of them. The delusion of being winners is predicated on lies, violence, and theft. 

Themes: 

Those who are unable to change or adapt are condemned to irrelevance.

Willie enters late at night complaining about the claustrophobic closeness of the recently built apartment buildings, the superiority of the old classic cars, and even the change of cheese Linda gives him for his late night snack. At work Willie, at sixty, is feeling the ticking of the clock and a growing sense of irrelevance. He confesses to Linda that “people don’t seem to take to me”…”they seem to laugh at me”…”they just pass me by”… Someone called him a walrus and “…I cracked him right across the face.” “I get the feeling I’ll never sell anything again, and that I won’t make a living for you, or a business, a business for the boys.”  This ties in not only with the gnawing fear of passing into oblivion by time but also clinging to the delusion of the past - that they were all winners. Willie was a great salesman - and perhaps at one time many years ago, he was -  and his boys were football stars and “Adonises”.  But the times have changed and time has passed by Willie, his values, and his beliefs, and his sons are living frustrating desperate lives. 

Other possible themes: 

Believing in “the American Dream” or winning at all cost without a guiding moral principle can bring about lies, deception, suffering. Willie yells at the brainy but nebbishy Bernard to give Biff the answers to the math test. Bernard says he does but he can’t give Biff the answers to the New York Regents exam - “They’ll arrest me!” There is a chorus played by Bernard and Linda listing all of Biff’s sins - “He better give back that football, Willy, that’s not nice!” “He’s too rough with the girls! All the mothers are afraid of him!” “He’s driving the car without a license!” “Mr. Birnbaum says he’s stuck-up!” Willie becomes agitated, threatens to beat Biff, and then defends his son by saying, “There’s nothing wrong with him! You want him to be a worm like Bernard? He’s got spirit, personality….”  We see the devastation Willie's excusing and condoning of Biff's dishonesty will have on his son by the bitter futility of his adult life. 

Toxic masculinity (closely aligned with the American Dream): 

The need to cling to old values: winning at all cost, even if one must resort to lies and cheating; being successful as a womanizer; resorting to violence to resolve conflict ("He called me a walrus... I cracked him across the face")  - all having a deleterious effect on society and those in the man’s personal sphere,  his wife, family, and associates. The juxtapositon of Willie giving silk stockings to his mistress - a luxury item - and the subsequent scene of Linda darning her old silk stockings demonstrate the dishonesty of toxic masculinity. 

Character: 

Linda is on the surface a typical 1950s housewife - patient, kind, loving, giving. She is the foundation to Willie’s life. He tells her, “You’re my support, Linda”; she is the one who provides a safe secure home for him and their children; however, she is the holder of enormous silent strength. 

Willie

Biff

Happy

Irony: 

The names of the two sons, Biff and Happy, are stereotypical names representing the banality and mindlessness of the American middle-class. 

The fact that Willie’s second son is named Happy, despite being deeply unhappy and unfulfilled, is ironic. 

Monday, October 16th: 
Brief discussion of The Most Dangerous Game and The Short Happy of  Francis Macomber. 

Pair up, go through the first ten pages of Death of a Salesman, and do "Literary Scavenger Hunt".
Look for examples of possible themes; character behavior/personality; irony; figurative language; foreshadowing, etc.

Discussion of Death of Salesman 

Tuesday, October 17th: 

Vocabulary Quizlet 
Death of a Salesman 
Pair up, assign themes, characters, irony, figurative language, foreshadowing, etc. to teams. They then present to the class their findings.

Wednesday, October 18th:

Oscar – Willy

Elizabeth – Linda

Kais – Biff/Roland

Matteo  - Happy

Brandy – narrator

Bernard – Luis

Start on page 1551

“He’s going to get his license taken away.”

Vocabulary:

Misogyny: hatred of women

Casual misogyny

Themes:

Happy has money, a cool apartment, lots of women and is unhappy

Biff loves working on a ranch, with his shirt off in the outdoors but he doesn’t make much money and society looks down on what he loves to do.

Biff – “I don’t know what I’m supposed to want.”

Happy – defines masculinity through physical prowess. Page #1554, “I can outbox him, outrun….”

Women as commodity

Happy won’t take a bribe to throw business someone’s way, but he has no  compunction about dating and then “ruining” the girlfriends and/or fiancées of the executives at his corporation.

Both Biff and Willie have a cavalier attitude towards Biff’s theft.

People who are good looking (Willie, “you are both built like Adonises….”) can get away with things because they are well-liked. 

The memory of his boys’ childhoods are an idealized version of the American family – happy and in glowing good health. The reality of the present day is in stark contrast to that fictional past.

To insinuate: to imply, not to directly state; to “worm” oneself into an area; to deviously move into an area or topic or situation or relationship particularly for one’s own personal benefit.

Thursday, October 19th: 
Combining Sentences Handouts