Overarching Question: “How do authors use the resources of language to impact an audience?”
Essential Question: “How is our understanding of culture and society constructed through and by language?”
Culminating Learning Activity: Research Project and Presentation. Research one of the literary time periods within American History. Discuss the American Dream of that time period. (Use non-fiction, fiction, art, architecture, and music
Topical Questions: What are the contrasts between dreams and realities? How should the conflict between passions and responsibility be solved? How does power or lack of power influence people? How is our world reinvented through creative expression? To what extent does art imitate life/life imitate art? How does fiction mirror society? Skills: Analysis of literature Socratic Seminaring Bloom’s Taxonomy Literary criticism Essay Writing – Compare and contrast, other rhetorical modes
Major Works: The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald Winter Dreams by F. Scott Fitzgerald When the Negro was in Vogue by Langston Hughes How it Feels to be Colored Like Me by Zora Neale Hurston Poetry:
Chicago by Carl Sandburg Lucinda Matlock by Edgar Lee Masters Richard Cory by Edwin Arlington Robinson Miniver Cheevy by Edwin Arlington Robinson We Wear the Mask by Paul Lawrence Dunbar I, too by Langston Hughes The Weary Blues by Langston Hughes My City by James Weldon Johnson Any Human to Another by Countee Cullen Life for my Child is Simple by Gwendolyn Brooks
Literary Criticism and Related Readings: The Great Gatsby Literary Companion by Greenhaven Press – Chapter One “The Text of The