Tuesday, October 9, 2007

Welcome to Day 2 of Homecoming Week--today you have the opportunity to dress like little kids. While I see this as fraught with dangerously negative potential, I hope you exercise good judgment and dress in a fun-filled but APPROPRIATE manner. 'Nuff said.

AP Literature: Continue to review for the Mactest via literary criticism; I've attached a primary source mini-text to the bottom of this blog entry for later review should you need it. Good times, indeed. The focus paper is due Friday by 3 p.m. and I am not backing down from that deadline. I know you have a lot to do; I know it's Homecoming Week. Here's the deal, peeps: I gave you this assignment last week, and we conferred over thesis statements on Friday. If I gave you an additional weekend to write this paper, it would not make one difference since you won't write it until the night before it's due regardless. Out of love, deference, and respect, I'm asking you to submit it in a timely manner--by Friday. Over and out.

Gifted English II: Back to the Media Center for Part II of our amazing exploration of the MC's resources, then back to the classroom for one more short passage in the literature book. Reminder that tomorrow is your THIRD and FINAL state-sponsored reading day for CMC; for the two of you who are already finished (booyah!) I have an amazing reading opportunity for you to supplement your understanding of the novel.

Primary Text Supplement for AP Lit:

AP Literature and Composition
Literary Criticism of the Macplay by A.C. Bradley
(from his series of 17 lectures on the play, presented in 1935)

4. SIMILARITIES BETWEEN MACBETH AND LADY MACBETH

. . .From this murky background stand out the two great terrible figures, which dwarf all the remaining characters of the drama. Both are sublime, and both inspire, far more than the other tragic heroes, the feeling of awe. They are never detached in imagination from the atmosphere, which surrounds them and adds to their grandeur and terror. It is, as it were, continued into their souls. For within them is all that we felt without the darkness of night, lit with the flame of tempest and the hues of blood, and haunted by wild and direful shapes, 'murdering ministers,' spirits of remorse, and maddening visions of peace lost and judgment to come. The way to be untrue to Shakespeare here, as always, is to relax the tension of imagination, to conventionalize, to conceive Macbeth, for example, as a half-hearted cowardly criminal, and Lady Macbeth as a whole-hearted fiend.
These two characters are fired by one and the same passion of ambition; and to a considerable
extent they are alike. The disposition of each is high, proud, and commanding. They are born to
rule if not to reign. They are peremptory or contemptuous to their inferiors. They are not children
of light, like Brutus and Hamlet; they are of the world. We observe in them no love of country, and no interest in the welfare of anyone outside their family. Their habitual thoughts and aims are, and, we imagine, long have been, all of station and power. And though in both there is something, and in one much, of what is higher honour, conscience, humanity they do not live consciously in the light of these things or speak their language. Not that they are egoists, like lago; or, if they are egoists, theirs is an egoisme a deux. They have no separate ambitions. They support and love one another. They suffer together. And if, as time goes on, they drift a little apart, they are not vulgar souls, to be alienated and recriminate when they experience the fruitlessness of their ambition. They remain to the end tragic, even grand.

Definition: egoisme a deux: 1. "Selfishness of two" or "double selfishness"; a satirical description of love, variously and dubiously attributed sometimes to the French medieval writer of romances, Antoine de la Sale (circa 1385-circa 1460), to the 18th century philosophe, Antoine de Lassalle, and to the Swiss-French belle-lettrist, Madame de Staël (1766-1817): "L'amour est un égoïsme à deux," which translates as: "Love is a selfishness of two."

2. A situation in which two people are in love with each other but lack brotherly love for others.