"Performing ALP" ~ Book I, Chapter 8 -- the Anna Livia Plurabelle chapter -- is widely considered the most beautiful and popular of all of Finnegans Wake. It is a dialogue between two washerwomen on either side of the River Liffey, cleaning the dirty linens of the protagonist, HCE, while talking about his alleged crime. The conversation then turns to his wife, ALP, who is the personification of the very river the women are at. The first paragraph of this chapter has been turned into a script to allow students to perform it and better get acquainted with the text while they look up annotations, puns, and portmanteaus. It is a fun activity, especially with theatre students. Try re-enacting the river or some divide between them. Here is a link to two students performing this first paragraph: HERE.
Standards: ELA.10.R.1.1, ELA.10.R.1.2, ELA.10.R.3.1, ELA.10.R.3.3, ELA.10.C.2.1, ELA.10.C.5.1, ELA.10.C.5.2, ELA.10.V.1.1. ELA.10.V.1.2, ELA.V.1.3 |
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"Finnegans Beat" ~ This is a great assignment to get the students intrigued by the rhythm and rhyme in some of the novel. It allows students to explore Finnegans Wake from a hip-hop perspective. Let the students make a music video or perform in class. Have fun with it! One of the performances can be seen on YouTube HERE.
Standards: ELA.10.R.1.1, ELA.10.R.1.2, ELA.10.R.3.1, ELA.10.R.3.3, ELA.10.C.2.1, ELA.10.C.5.1, ELA.10.C.5.2, ELA.10.V.1.1. ELA.10.V.1.2, ELA.V.1.3 |
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"Macbeth's Wake" ~ This assignment is fun if the students, as is common in the 10th grade, have recently finished William Shakespeare's Macbeth. It allows the students to explore two excerpts from Finnegans Wake in which Joyce makes puns out of lines in Shakespeare's play.
Standards: ELA.10.R.1.1, ELA.10.R.1.4, ELA.10.R.3.1, ELA.10.R.3.2, ELA.10.R.3.4, ELA.10.C.1.4, ELA.10.C.1.5, ELA.10.C.3.1, ELA.10.V.1.1, ELA.10.V.1.2, ELA.10.V.1.3 |
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"Word Puzzle" ~ This is a fun word game to play with a Finnegans Wake pun at the end to get students thinking about phrases and the hundreds of uses of everyday common words. It was created by Simon Winchester and Same Potts at The New York Times on May 28, 2011.
Standards: ELA.10.C.1.4, ELA.10.C.1.5, ELA.10.V.1.2, ELA.10.V.1.3 |
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"[DIS]ORDER" ~ This fun word game gives a little excerpt from Finnegans Wake in order to inspire students to write with words creatively. It also includes a great poem, "Refugees", by Brian Bilston.
Standards: ELA.10.C.1.4, ELA.10.C.1.5, ELA.10.V.1.1, ELA.10.V.1.2, ELA.10.V.1.3, ELA.10.C.3.1 |
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"Lameguage to Fameguage" ~ This exercise shows some of Joyce's creative ways of using word play to layer multiple meanings into a single word so that when it is deconstructed, a single word can have the meaning of an entire sentence. Then the students get to take a stab at it! It is inspired by some of the research done by Joseph Campbell and Henry Morton Robinson in A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake.
Standards: ELA.10.C.1.4, ELA.10.C.1.5, ELA.10.V.1.2, ELA.10.V.1.3 |
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