MODULE 2: Overview and To Do List
Overview
This lesson explores how to read fiction and how to write about fiction.
Learning Outcomes
Upon completion students will be able to:
- Demonstrate an understanding of literature that addresses coming of age .
- Analyze, interpret, and evaluate a variety of prose short stories for the creative and meaningful uses of literary elements.
- Respond to literature with rational judgments supported by evidence.
To Do List
In order to successfully complete Lesson 2, please do the following:
Readings:
- Read
- Introduction, pgs 1-13 (in your textbook)
- “A&P” by John Updike (in your textbook)
- “Boys and Girls” by Alice Munro (in your textbook)
- “The Lesson” by Toni Cade Bambara (in your textbook)
- Review Presentation: Introduction to Fiction (Discover)
- Review Reading and Writing About Fiction Notes (Discover)
Activities:
- Complete discussion: “What Does It Means To Grow Up?”
- Complete assignment: “Thesis Statement Practice”
Assign readings.
Reading a story and writing about friction in literature
This site explains literary devicesLinks to an external site.
ASSIGNMENT/ HOMEWORK OVERVIEW
Thesis Statement Practice in literary analysis essay.
Assignment Overview
Thesis Statement Practice:
First, review these guides to thesis statements in literary analysis essays:
- From UTA: Libguide on thesis statementsLinks to an external site.
- LibreText: Thesis statement guideLinks to an external site.
Then, think about the stories we read in Module 2 (“A&P”, “Boys and Girls”, and “The Lesson”), and choose one story to focus on.
Now, consider these questions:
- How does the story define or depict what it means to grow up?
- According to the story, what character trait or life lesson is essential to have in order to be an adult?
Write a thesis statement over the chosen story. Be sure it:
- Is one or two sentences long.
- Meets the criteria for a thesis statement.
- Includes the name of the story’s author and title.
You should avoid:
- Copy / pasting from other submissions.
- Writing a summary of the story
- Conversational language (you, I, etc.)
STORIES BELOW
First story
JOHN UPDIKE (1932–2009) Story (A & P)
The man The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Lit-erature dubs “perhaps America’s most versatile, pro-lific, and distinguished man of letters of the second half of the twentieth century” spent the early years of his life in Reading and rural Shillington, Pennsylva-nia. John Updike went on to study English literature at Harvard, where he also contributed cartoons and articles to the famous Lampoon. Marrying a Radcliffe fine-arts student in 1953, Updike the next year graduated summa cum laude and sold both his first poem and his first story to the New Yorker, whose staff he joined in 1955. Though he would continue to contribute essays, poems, and fiction to that magazine for the rest of his life, in 1957 Updike moved with his young family from Manhattan to rural Massachusetts. In the two years following the move, he pub-lished both his first book, a collection of poems (1958), and his first novel (1959). Updike went on to publish some twenty-one novels, thirteen short-story collections, seven volumes of poetry (including Collected Poems, 1953–1993 [1993]), as well as seven collections of essays, a play, and a memoir. He is best known for the tetralogy tracing the life of high-school basketball star turned car salesman Harry C. Rabbit Angstrom. Begun with Rabbit, Run in 1960, the series of novels includes Rabbit Is Rich (1981) and Rabbit at Rest (1990), both of which won Pulitzer Prizes. I n walks these three girls in nothing but bathing suits. I’m in the third check-out slot, with my back to the door, so I don’t see them until they’re over by the bread. The one that caught my eye first was the one in the plaid green two-piece. She was a chunky kid, with a good tan and a sweet broad soft-looking can with those two crescents of white just under it, where the sun never seems to hit, at the top of the backs of her legs. I stood there with my hand on a box of HiHo crackers trying to remember if I rang it up or not. I ring it up again and the customer starts giving me hell. She’s one of these cash-register-watchers, a witch about fifty with rouge on her cheekbones and no eyebrows, and I know it made her day to trip me up. She’d been watching cash registers for fifty years and probably never seen a mistake before. By the time I got her feathers smoothed and her goodies into a bag—she gives me a little snort in passing, if she’d been born at the right time they would have burned her over in Salem2 —by the time I get her on her way the girls had circled around the bread and were coming back, without a pushcart, back my way along the counters, in the aisle between the checkouts and the Special bins. They didn’t even have shoes on. There was this chunky one, with the two-piece—it was bright.
Second story
BOYS AND GIRLS BY ALICE(STORY)ALICE MUNRO (b. 1931) Boys and Girls
Described by novelist Jonathan Franzen as having “a strong claim to being the best fiction writer now working in North America” and by the committee that awarded her the 2013 Nobel Prize for Literature as a “master of the contemporary short story,” Alice Munro today enjoys an enviably high reputation. That was long in coming and unexpected for a girl raised during the Great Depression and World War II, on a farm in southwestern Ontario—that unglamorous terrain she has since so vividly memorialized in her fiction. She began publishing stories while attending the University of Western Ontario. But when her two-year scholarship ran out, she left the university, married James Munro, and moved first to Vancouver and then to Victoria, where the couple raised three daughters. Though her stories appeared sporadically during the 1950s, it was not until 1968 that then-thirty-eight-year-old Munro published her first book and won the first of multiple Governor General’s Awards, Canada’s highest literary prize. Divorced and remarried, Munro returned to Ontario and began regularly publishing collections including Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You (1974), The Progress of Love (1986), Open Secrets (1994), the Booker Prize–winning View.
Third story
THE LESSON” STORY.TONI CADE BAMBARA (1939–95) The Lesson Born in New York City, Toni Cade Bambara grew up in Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant, two of New York’s poorest neighborhoods. She began writing as a child and took her last name from a signature on a sketchbook she found in a trunk belong-ing to her great-grandmother. (The Bambara are a people of northwest Africa.) After graduating from Queens College, she wrote fiction in “the predawn in-betweens” while studying for her MA at the City College of New York and working at a variety of jobs: dancer, social worker, recreation director, psychiatric counselor, college English teacher, literary critic, and film producer. Bambara began to publish her stories in 1962. Her fiction includes two collections of stories, Gorilla, My Love (1972) and The Sea Birds Are Still Alive (1977), as well as two novels, The Salt Eaters (1980) and If Blessing Comes (1987). Bambara also edited two anthologies, The Black Woman (1970) and Stories for Black Folks (1971). B ack in the days when everyone was old and stupid or young and foolish and me and Sugar were the only ones just right, this lady moved on our block with nappy1 hair and proper speech and no makeup. And quite naturally we laughed at her, laughed the way we did at the junk man who went about his business like he was some big-time president and his sorry-ass horse his secre-tary. And we kinda hated her too, hated the way we did the winos who clut-tered up our parks and pissed on our handball walls and stank up our hallways and stairs so you couldn’t halfway play hide-and-seek without a goddamn gas mask. Miss Moore was her name. The only woman on the block with no first name. And she was black as hell, cept for her feet, which were fish-white and spooky. And she was always planning these boring-ass things for us to do, us being my cousin, mostly, who lived on the block cause we all moved North the same time and to the same apartment then spread out gradual to breathe. And our parents would yank our heads into some kinda shape and crisp up our clothes so we’d be presentable for travel with Miss Moore, who always looked like she was going to church, though she never did. Which is just one of the things the grown-ups talked about when they talked behind her back like a dog. But when she came calling with some sachet she’d sewed up or some gin-gerbread she’d made or some book, why then they’d all be too embarrassed to turn her down and we’d get handed over all spruced up. She’d been to college and said it was only right that she should take responsibility for the young ones’ education, and she not even related by marriage or blood. So they’d go for it. Specially Aunt Gretchen. She was the main gofer in the family. You got some ole dumb shit foolishness you want somebody to go for, you send for Aunt Gretchen. She been screwed into the go-along for so long, it’s a blood-deep 1. Untreated and unstraightened, naturally curly or coiled.
