Silent Jam Session

1. Silent Jam Session • Write down your question(s) in the middle of your paper. Do NOT worry about having a “perfect” essential question—just get down the core or essence of what you’re interested in exploring. • Pass to the right: in exactly 3 minutes, generate as many follow-up or “sub” questions as you can. What other questions does this question raise? • Now in exactly 3 minutes, generate as many responses/connections/ideas as you can. Look for complexity! (contradictions, exceptions, gray areas, etc.)

2. Some Notes on Close Reading • Analytical essays provide you with an opportunity to make sense of a text’s complexity, not just to make surface-level observations. • If it’s obvious, there’s no need to analyze • So where the heck do I “find” this complexity? 1. Looking closely at the details in the author’s language (observations) 2. Exploring the significance of these details by connecting them to the text’s big ideas, problems, concerns, etc. (analysis)

3. Levels of Complexity: The Jungle “He looked like a brown ghost at twilight—of everything in it. Of course Jurgis had made his home a miniature fertilizer mill a minute after entering. The stuff was half an inch deep in his skin—his whole system was full of it.” • Basic:Life is hard for immigrants; Jurgis has an awful job; This is Industrialism/Social Darwinism, etc. But how do you know? What WORDS are significant? SHOW the reader.

4. Levels of Complexity: The Jungle “He looked like a brown ghost at twilight—of everything in it. Of course Jurgis had made his home a miniature fertilizer mill a minute after entering. The stuff was half an inch deep in his skin—his whole system was full of it.” But how do you know? What WORDS are significant? Complex:“in his skin”  Jurgis is physically part of the corrupt system “his home a miniature fertilizer mill”  in a laissez faire, capitalist system, the family, and therefore society at large, suffer.

5. Levels of Complexity: The Jungle “He looked like a brown ghost at twilight—of everything in it. Of course Jurgis had made his home a miniature fertilizer mill a minute after entering. The stuff was half an inch deep in his skin—his whole system was full of it.” But how do you know? What WORDS are significant? Even More Complex:“his whole system was full of it”  the human system has become indistinguishable from the capitalist system. Industrialism sees humans as physical bodies, cogs in a machine, profit “like a brown ghost at twilight”  Jurgis is already dead, the system has stripped him of his humanity; he is determined to fail; again, he is indistinguishably from his surroundings.

6. Levels of Complexity: “The Open Boat” “A singular disadvantage of the sea lies in the fact that after successfully surmounting one wave you discover that there is another behind it just as important and just as nervously anxious to do something effective in the way of swamping boats. There was a terrible grace in the move of the waves, and they came in silence, save for the snarling of the crests” (Crane)

7. Weaving the Author’s Language into your Sentences • No quote bombs! • Like the “silence” of the waves, the deterministic forces that control our lives often go unnoticed and yet they exist as “fact”(Crane 5). • Crane’s describes the waves as “nervously anxious” and “snarling” (5) to show that…

8. Practice • Re-read pp. 72-73 in The Great Gatsby. • Identify one or two key passages • In the context of the novel and its big ideas, why is this passage significant? • Write a few sentences of analysis • Integrate Fitzgerald’s language into your own • Focus on complex, ambiguous language that requires some explanation

9. Quarter Paper • Look through your sources and identify passages that are dense and require explanation • Identify more passages than you need and then pick the best of the best • Take a risk  don’t analyze quotes that we spent time analyzing as a class • Thesis Draft  turnitin by 7:40 AM and hard copy in class tomorrow. • Book club