ELA REGENTS exam: Monday, January 27 pm session.....more information to come
We have only 9 days for review.
On Tuesday and Thursday there is a review / prep class in room 247 immediately after school. You receive 100 bonus points for attending.
Due today: "The Raging Reporter" response from Friday's class. We began this in class and finishing the assignment was your homework. This is a writing grade. Any that are not turned in my the close of today are considered late. To refresh your memory: you were to look at the categories of transportation, media and industrial from your graphic organizer and select items from one of these. You were then to write a two-paragraph essay of a minimum of 300 words that compared and contrasted the beneficial and destructive aspects of the items you placed under the category.
In class part 1: handout of literary terms. On Tuesday, January 21, you will have a matching test on 20 of these. As you will not know exactly which ones you will be tested upon, please review (you should already know all of these). As well, please make sure to bring the review list (copy below) to class each day to use as a reference.
In class: part 2: Ernest Hemingway's short story "In Another Country" (class handout / copy below)
You will notice that I have not "chunked" the text. Please read the short story through, underlining any words with which you are unfamiliar. This is independent work.
Parallels can be made between "In Another Country" and Umbehr's "The Raging Reporter" in that both the photo montage and the short story have a theme of fragmentation brought about by the embracing of technology. Hemingway's story, however, personalizes the situation.The narrator of this story, a wounded American soldier, is recuperating from his injury in Milan, Italy. He receives treatments delivered by machines each afternoon at the hospital. His doctor seems overly optimistic. "You are a fortunate young man," he tells the narrator, promising the soldier that his injured knee and leg will recover well enough for him to play football again.
The physician's prognosis for another patient, an Italian major receiving treatment for a shriveled hand, is also dubious. The officer was once a renowned fencer and is now angry and bitter. His invalid condition and the recent death of his young wife from pneumonia have sapped his will. He professes no faith in the machines treating his hand injury and does not believe in bravery.
Injury fosters camaraderie and the narrator socializes with four other young men undergoing treatment at the hospital. The narrator admits his injury was not the result of heroic action but merely an accident. The medals he received were undeserved. Life may be a series of random events but some people have it worse than others. The only certainty in the lives of these characters is the fact that "the war was always there."
In Another Country—Ernest
Hemingway
In the next machine was a major who had a little hand like a baby's.
He winked at me when the doctor examined his hand, which was between two
leather straps that bounced up and down and flapped the stiff fingers, and said:
"And will I too play football, captain-doctor?" He had been a very
great fencer, and before the war the greatest fencer in Italy.
The doctor went to his office in a back room and brought a
photograph which showed a hand that had been withered almost as small as the
major's, before it had taken a machine course, and after was a little larger.
The major held the photograph with his good hand and looked at it very
carefully. "A wound?" he asked.
"An industrial accident," the doctor said. "Very interesting, very interesting," the major said, and handed it back to the doctor. "You have confidence?" "No," said the major. There were three boys who came each day who were about the same age I was. They were all three from Milan, and one of them was to be a lawyer, and one was to be a painter, and one had intended to be a soldier, and after we were finished with the machines, sometimes we walked back together to the Café Cova, which was next door to the Scala. We walked the short way through the communist quarter because we were four together. The people hated us because we were officers, and from a wine-shop someone called out, "A basso gli ufficiali!" as we passed. Another boy who walked with us sometimes and made us five wore a black silk handkerchief across his face because he had no nose then and his face was to be rebuilt. He had gone out to the front from the military academy and been wounded within an hour after he had gone into the front line for the first time. They rebuilt his face, but he came from a very old family and they could never get the nose exactly right. He went to South America and worked in a bank. But this was a long time ago, and then we did not any of us know how it was going to be afterward. We only knew then that there was always the war, but that we were not going to it any more. We all had the same medals, except the boy with the black silk bandage across his face, and he had not been at the front long enough to get any medals. The tall boy with a very pale face who was to be a lawyer had been lieutenant of Arditi and had three medals of the sort we each had only one of. He had lived a very long time with death and was a little detached. We were all a little detached, and there was nothing that held us together except that we met every afternoon at the hospital. Although, as we walked to the Cova through the though part of town, walking in the dark, with light and singing coming out of the wine-shops, and sometimes having to walk into the street when the men and women would crowd together on the sidewalk so that we would have had to jostle them to et by, we felt held together by there being something that had happened that they, the people who disliked us, did not understand.
We ourselves all understood the Cova, where it was rich and
warm and not too brightly lighted, and noisy and smoky at certain hours, and
there were always girls at the tables and the illustrated papers on a rack on
the wall. The girls at the Cova were very patriotic, and I found that the
most patriotic people in Italy were the café girls - and I believe they are
still patriotic.
The boys at first were very polite about my medals and asked me what
I had done to get them. I showed them the papers, which were written in very
beautiful language and full of fratellanza and abnegazione, but which really
said, with the adjectives removed, that I had been given the medals because I
was an American. After that their manner changed a little toward me, although
I was their friend against outsiders. I was a friend, but I was never really
one of them after they had read the citations, because it had been different
with them and they had done very different things to get their medals. I had
been wounded, it was true; but we all knew that being wounded, after all, was
really an accident. I was never ashamed of the ribbons, though, and
sometimes, after the cocktail hour, I would imagine myself having done all
the things they had done to get their medals; but walking home at night
through the empty streets with the cold wind and all the shops closed, trying
to keep near the street lights, I knew that Ì would never have done such
things, and I was very much afraid to die, and often lay in bed at night by
myself, afraid to die and wondering how I would be when back to the front
again.
The three with the medals were like hunting-hawks; and I
was not a hawk, although I might seem a hawk to those who had never hunted;
they, the three, knew better and so we drifted apart. But I stayed good
friends with the boy who had been wounded his first day at the front, because
he would never know now how he would have turned out; so he could never be
accepted either, and I liked him because I thought perhaps he would not have
turned out to be a hawk either.
The major, who had been a great fencer, did not believe in bravery, and spent much time while we sat in the machines correcting my grammar. He had complimented me on how I spoke Italian, and we talked together very easily. One day I had said that Italian seemed such an easy language to me that I could not take a great interest in it; everything was so easy to say. "Ah, yes," the major said. "Why, then, do you not take up the use of grammar?" So we took up the use of grammar, and soon Italian was such a difficult language that I was afraid to talk to him until I had the grammar straight in my mind.
The major came very
regularly to the hospital. I do not think he ever missed a day, although I am
sure he did not believe in the machines. There was a time when none of us
believed in the machines, and one day the major said it was all nonsense. The
machines were new then and it was we who were to prove them. It was an
idiotic idea, he said, "a theory like another". I had not learned
my grammar, and he said I was a stupid impossible disgrace, and he was a fool
to have bothered with me. He was a small man and he sat straight up in his
chair with his right hand thrust into the machine and looked straight ahead
at the wall while the straps thumbed up and down with his fingers in them.
"What will you do when the war is over, if it is
over?" he asked me. "Speak grammatically!"
"I will go to the States." "Are you married?" "No, but I hope to be." "The more a fool you are," he said. He seemed very angry. "A man must not marry." "Why, Signor Maggiore?" "Don't call me Signor Maggiore." "Why must not a man marry?" "He cannot marry. He cannot marry," he said angrily. "If he is to lose everything, he should not place himself in a position to lose that. He should not place himself in a position to lose. He should find things he cannot lose." He spoke very angrily and bitterly, and looked straight ahead while he talked. "But why should he necessarily lose it?" "He'll lose it," the major said. He was looking at the wall. Then he looked down at the machine and jerked his little hand out from between the straps and slapped it hard against his thigh. "He'll lose it," he almost shouted. "Don't argue with me!" Then he called to the attendant who ran the machines. "Come and turn this damned thing off."
He went back into the other room for the light treatment and the
massage. Then I heard him ask the doctor if he might use his telephone and he
shut the door. When he came back into the room, I was sitting in another
machine. He was wearing his cape and had his cap on, and he came directly
toward my machine and put his arm on my shoulder.
"I am sorry," he said, and patted me on the shoulder with his good hand. "I would not be rude. My wife has just died. You must forgive me." "Oh-" I said, feeling sick for him. "I am so sorry." He stood there biting his lower lip. "It is very difficult," he said. "I cannot resign myself." He looked straight past me and out through the window. Then he began to cry. "I am utterly unable to resign myself," he said and choked. And then crying, his head up looking at nothing, carrying himself straight and soldierly, with tears on both cheeks and biting his lips, he walked past the machines and out the door.
The doctor told me that the major's wife, who was very young and
whom he had not married until he was definitely invalided out of the war, had
died of pneumonia. She had been sick only a few days. No one expected her to
die. The major did not come to the hospital for three days. Then he came at
the usual hour, wearing a black band on the sleeve of his uniform. When he
came back, there were large framed photographs around the wall, of all sorts
of wounds before and after they had been cured by the machines. In front of
the machine the major used were three photographs of hands like his that were
completely restored. I do not know where the doctor got them. I always
understood we were the first to use the machines. The photographs did not
make much difference to the major because he only looked out of the window.
In the fall the war was always there, but we did not go to it any
more. It was cold in the fall in Milan and the dark came very early. Then the
electric lights came on, and it was pleasant along the streets looking in the
windows. There was much game hanging outside the shops, and the snow powdered
in the fur of the foxes and the wind blew their tails. The deer hung stiff
and heavy and empty, and small birds blew in the wind and the wind turned
their feathers. It was a cold fall and the wind came down from the mountains.
We were all at the hospital every afternoon, and there were
different ways of walking across the town through the dusk to the hospital.
Two of the ways were alongside canals, but they were long. Always, though,
you crossed a bridge across a canal to enter the hospital. There was a choice
of three bridges. On one of them a woman sold roasted chestnuts. It was warm,
standing in front of her charcoal fire, and the chestnuts were warm afterward
in your pocket. The hospital was very old and very beautiful, and you entered
a gate and walked across a courtyard and out a gate on the other side. There
were usually funerals starting from the courtyard. Beyond the old hospital
were the new brick pavilions, and there we met every afternoon and were all
very polite and interested in what was the matter, and sat in the machines
that were to make so much difference. The doctor came up to the machine where
I was sitting and said: "What did you like best to do before the war?
Did you practice a sport?"
I said: "Yes, football."
"Good," he said. "You will be able to play football
again better than ever."
My knee did not bend and the leg dropped straight from the knee to
the ankle without a calf, and the machine was to bend the knee and make it
move as riding a tricycle. But it did not bend yet, and instead the machine
lurched when it came to the bending part. The doctor said:" That will
all pass. You are a fortunate young man. You will play football again like a
champion."
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Literary terms review list
allusion A reference to a statement, person, place or thing that is known from literature, history,
religion, myth, etc.
catharsis
When a character experiences an emotional cleansing
characterization The process by which
the writer reveals the personality of a character. This can be done by describing the character's
thoughts,
feelings, speech and actions, revealing the reactions of other characters.
dynamic character
changes in an
important way as a result of the conflict.
static character remains the
same
protagonist The
main character (hero) who opposes one or more forces in
a story.
antagonist The character or force that comes into
conflict with the protagonist.
conflict
A struggle or clash between opposing characters, forces or emotions.
external conflict occurs when a
character struggles against some outside force. For example, man against nature, man against man
internal conflict occurs when a
character struggles with emotions, needs or desires within himself. (man against himself)
flashback When
the author interrupts the action of the story in order to recreate
a scene from an earlier time.
foreshadowing The use of clues
to hint at what is going to happen later in the plot.
imagery Language
that appeals to the senses.
irony
A contrast between expectation and reality - between what is said and what is
really meant, between what is expected and what really happens, or between what appears to be true and what really is true.
dramatic irony when the
audience knows something a character does not know
metaphor A
figure of speech that makes a comparison between two seemingly unlike things.
mood / tone The
overall atmosphere or feeling of a story.
personification A kind of
metaphor in which a nonhuman thing or quality is talked about as if it were human.
plot The
series of events that make up a story.
exposition introduces
the characters, setting, and background
Information
narrative hook the conflict that
drives the plot forward
rising action the events
that occur as the result of the narrative hook
climax the
turning point
falling action the events
that occur as the result of the climax
resolution is the
final outcome
point of view The position
from which the events in a story are
presented/observed.
first person restricted
to his or her partial knowledge or
experience will not give access to other character's hidden thoughts.
third person limited confines our knowledge of
events to whatever is observed by a single
character or small group of characters.
third person omniscient shows an unrestricted
knowledge of a story's events from outside or "above" them.
setting
The time and place in which the action occurs in a story.
simile A figure of speech that makes a
comparison between two seemingly unlike things by using a connective word such as like or as.
symbolism A
person, place, thing or event that stands both for itself and for something beyond itself. (Universal dove=peace, heart=love)
theme
The central idea or insight or a work of literature.
tone
The attitude a writer takes toward the
reader, a subject, or a character. (ironic, serious, humorous,
tender, angry, etc.)
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