Summer Reading Assignment: Pre-Joyce
Understandably, one might be thinking, "What is a poem by T.S. Eliot is doing on a website devoted to teaching the works of James Joyce?" Well, it is a wonderful pre-Joyce assignment to get students in the right mindset for tackling Joyce. I give this assignment to my incoming sophomores at the end of their freshmen school year. This becomes their summer reading assignment. Now, some professors could spend an entire semester on "The Waste Land" as it is one of the most celebrated and complex poems of the twentieth century. It is certainly a daunting text to provide fifteen-year-old students over their summer break.
As Joseph Campbell writes in his book, Mythic Worlds, Modern Words, "T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land came out the same year as Ulysses, but Eliot had read Ulysses before he wrote The Waste Land. There are constant echoes in The Waste Land of themes and images from Ulysses -- the drowned man, the voice of the thunder, and others" (48). Likewise, in 1921, Joyce had sent Eliot some drafts of his later chapters of Ulysses. A month later, Eliot responded to Joyce, "I have nothing but admiration...I wish, for my own sake, that I had not read it." And in the 1923 issue of The Dial, Eliot wrote a review of Ulysses.
To say the least, there are connections between Eliot's "The Waste Land" and Joyce's Ulysses. To that end, it is an ideal text to get the students' minds reeling. In the directions, I am clear that I am not looking for "the right" answers. I simply want to see if they have the mental tenacity to endure a challenging text and the creativity to develop some text-based responses to my questions. The students are expected to look up and familiarize themselves -- at least partly -- with the Fisher King myth, the story of Tristan and Isolde, and World War I.
These assignments are collected at the beginning of the school year, reviewed by me, graded (for participation, mostly), returned, and discussed in class over a couple of days. The students share their thoughts and responses, I probe further into their analyses, and we establish a nice baseline for exploring Joyce in the coming weeks.
Estimated Time Frame: 2-3 days
B.E.S.T. Standards: ELA.10.R.1.1, ELA.10.R.1.2, ELA.10.R.1.4, ELA.10.R.3.1, ELA.10.R.3.3, ELA.10.C.1.4, ELA.10.V.1.2, ELA.10.V.1.3
As Joseph Campbell writes in his book, Mythic Worlds, Modern Words, "T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land came out the same year as Ulysses, but Eliot had read Ulysses before he wrote The Waste Land. There are constant echoes in The Waste Land of themes and images from Ulysses -- the drowned man, the voice of the thunder, and others" (48). Likewise, in 1921, Joyce had sent Eliot some drafts of his later chapters of Ulysses. A month later, Eliot responded to Joyce, "I have nothing but admiration...I wish, for my own sake, that I had not read it." And in the 1923 issue of The Dial, Eliot wrote a review of Ulysses.
To say the least, there are connections between Eliot's "The Waste Land" and Joyce's Ulysses. To that end, it is an ideal text to get the students' minds reeling. In the directions, I am clear that I am not looking for "the right" answers. I simply want to see if they have the mental tenacity to endure a challenging text and the creativity to develop some text-based responses to my questions. The students are expected to look up and familiarize themselves -- at least partly -- with the Fisher King myth, the story of Tristan and Isolde, and World War I.
These assignments are collected at the beginning of the school year, reviewed by me, graded (for participation, mostly), returned, and discussed in class over a couple of days. The students share their thoughts and responses, I probe further into their analyses, and we establish a nice baseline for exploring Joyce in the coming weeks.
Estimated Time Frame: 2-3 days
B.E.S.T. Standards: ELA.10.R.1.1, ELA.10.R.1.2, ELA.10.R.1.4, ELA.10.R.3.1, ELA.10.R.3.3, ELA.10.C.1.4, ELA.10.V.1.2, ELA.10.V.1.3
| summer_reading_for_general_paper.docx |
