Ms. Bridges' AP English

  Monday, February 13 th : 2 nd Period: Passed back “The Pupil” essay Went over it: 1.      Did you use an interesting attention grabbing opening paragraph? 2.      Did you just rewrite the prompt? 3.      Did you use quotations? 4.      Did you use too many quotations or were the quotations you used too long? 5.      Did you show how and why the quotations prove your point? 6.      Or did you just list the figurative language that you found? 7.      Did you use interesting, powerful verbs, nouns, and adjectives to color your essay? Discussion on using quotations, using metaphors, verbs, adjectives that echo the theme or subject of the excerpt. Passed out the released student essays on “The Pupil”.   Students read “W” essay. Tomorrow, go over it with class and pass out “T” and “H” and discuss. ...

Essay for Frankenstein: Analyzing Shelley’s use of characterization, setting and theme, give specific examples from the novel, FRANKENSTEIN, which demonstrate aspects of the Romantic and Gothic genre. The essay should be typed, double spaced in 12 font, and three to four pages in length. The essay must give specific examples from the text to support your claims. This essay will be due on Tuesday, February 21, 2017

Biography of Mary Shelley Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, who is better known as Mary Shelley, was the daughter of two of the most progressive thinkers of the 18th Century, philosopher William Godwin and feminist thinker Mary Wollstonecraft. Mary Shelley was born on August 30, 1797, in London, England five months after her parents' wedding. Shortly after her birth (some say two weeks, others say four weeks) her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft (who wrote “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman”) developed complications from the delivery and died - unfortunately, not an uncommon tragedy for that time. William Godwin married a few years later, but Mary, in Cinderella fashion, had a difficult relationship with her stepmother. However, the home her father provided for her was filled with a constant stream of some of the greatest thinkers and writers of the day. Poets and thinkers such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge were frequent guests and they, along with her father’s extensive library, hel...

The "Age of Reason" was in the 18th Century (the 1700's) and was marked by a small elite group of thinkers who extolled the intellect over emotion, and scientific inquiry over superstition. The Romantic Era (1780 - 1830) was one that represented a turning away from the entrenched, classicist, hierarchical structure of British Society. For those of you who read the American Jonathan Edward's hellfire and brimstone sermon entitled "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" you may remember that God was portrayed as an angry, vengeful father-figure who - regardless of what you did or didn't do - was perpetually angry at you. Edwards thundered from his pulpit that you could only seek salvation by assiduously attending to your thoughts and to your soul, and since you were only a sorry human being, that still might not be enough. If you read Arthur Millers' THE CRUCIBLE, you may remember that the church fathers in the English colonies in Massachusetts kept...

 Themes to Explore in  Mary Shelley's FRANKENSTEIN Taking into account the philosophy of the time, think about the role of the creator, Victor Frankenstein, with the role of a divine creator (God, if you) and how one might see the disastrous effects that occur when man attempts to usurp God’s perceived role as creator. You don't have to agree or disagree with the premise - just be aware of how a 19th Century reader may interpret Victor Frankenstein's wanderings onto the hallowed grounds of creation. Analyze the warning Mary Shelley implicitly gives regarding out of control scientific discovery and the havoc it may wreak in nature. Analyze the significance of the subtitle of Frankenstein and the symbol- ism of the Prometheus myth as it pertains to Victor and his creation of the monster. Consider Gothic literature and analyze how Shelley’s novel is a classic example of Gothic literature. Taking a feminist perspective, analyze the roles of nature an...

The subtitle of FRANKENSTEIN is Prometheus Unbound. If you remember the myth, Prometheus stole fire from the gods to give to humanity. As punishment for his hubris, the gods chained Prometheus to a cliff where every day a vulture (in some versions it's an eagle) devours his liver which grows back over night. Day after day the vulture - or eagle - returns to claw and tear at Prometheus' liver. But because of his daring to challenge the gods' claim on fire, we humans have benefited from the fire's light, its warmth and its protection. Of course, the fire symbolizes knowledge and intelligence. Why do you think Mary Shelley gave her book this subtitle? Prometheus also created human creatures which he then animated with a divine spark, another act of sacrilege for which he was punished by the gods. There are also similarities to the story of Frankenstein and to the story of creation in Genesis. According to the Old Testament, Man lived in ignorance until he cha...

A little additional information about Shelley's Frankenstein. Victor, as a young student in university, is concerned with the line, "...not to speak of a final cause, causes in their secondary and tertiary (third) grades were utterly unknown to him...." Now you may have skipped over that part or maybe briefly wondered - if at all - what that was about; however, you will probably come across that concept of the "four causes" in your future readings, so perhaps we should go over it now. We touched on this a bit last semester when we read some excerpts on Aristotle . Aristotle, as a philosopher, was concerned with the nature of reality and being, and with the classification and categorization of all things, including humans. Plato, who was Aristotle's teacher, believed that in a realm outside of time and space, the perfect ideal forms of everything (dogs, cats, chairs, trees, people, etc) reside, and that the pale, decaying copies of these ideal forms can be...

Another question you might have in your reading of FRANKENSTEIN is who the heck are Agrippa , Albertus Magnus , and Paracelsus and why should we care? These were men who straddled the divide between rigorous scientific thought and superstition - men whose worlds of inquiry would attract a young restless and ambitious  mind like Frankenstein's, but would be discounted by men of serious scientific inquiry.  Agrippa was a fourteenth century German astrologer whose scientific inquiries devolved into occult musings on the Kabbalah (a school or tradition in Judaism which sought to divine mystical truths in the Old Testament  through ciphers and numerical codes) and the magical properties of plants, minerals and crystals, and of course, astrology. After the Age of Reason (the 1700's), people of a more scientific mind frowned on the occult and mystical bent of his thinking. Albertus Magnus was a 13th Century German priest/scholar who sought to bridge the gap between religi...