Hello, wonderful Seniors! You can be proud of your poignant personal-interest essays, and your reflections on The New Yorker articles were very perceptive.
The illustration above will, I hope, remind you to bring your well-crafted introductory paragraph about a fairy tale of your choice to class next Wednesday. Pay special attention to the specifics we reviewed in class--particularly the carefully-worded thesis statement.
Also bring mental preparedness for your "written recitation" of the Alexander Pope poem and a quiz on the first 73 pages of How to Read Literature Like a Professor. To help preserve your sanity, I'll list below the salient points I want you to remember from Foster's intro and the first nine chapters:
---***Memory, symbol, pattern***----these concepts will be your constant companions all year, so please learn them well.
---Major elements of the quest, inc. the real reason vs. the ostensible reason
---Significance of food and drink/breaking bread together
---Significance of vampires and ghosts; essential elements of the genre
---Structure of the sonnet form, inc. lines, stanzas, shape, and the sentence as the basic unit of poetry
---What Foster means by asserting that there's "only one story."
---Shakespeare's place in literary allusions
---The Bible's place in literary allusions, along with major examples
---The literary canon and the importance of fairy tales, esp. Hansel and Gretel
---The real meaning of 'myth' and the widespread misconception about its meaning
Although she doesn't know it yet, I'm going to ask Emma Tingle to be our class emissary and information coordinator. I've chosen Emma for two reasons: 1) She, like most of you, is a responsible student, and 2) I know the Tingles' phone number by heart.
See you next week.
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