Notes:

How to break apart Huck Finn:

Three Movements:

Movement 1 - Chapters 1-11: St. Petersburg (land)
The introduction to society and the escape from it.


Episodic Structure:
Episode 1: Tom's Gang (chapters 1-4)

Episode 2: Huck and Pap (chapters 5-7)

Episode 3: Jackson Islands (chapters 8-11)

Traditional Plot:

Inciting Event: Huck fakes his death (or could you argue that it's when Huck's Pap returns?)


Huck Finn Personas: Sarah Mary Williams, George Peters.

Huck's stories (his family is dead or sick and he is seeking help)

Motifs: Death, Snakes.

Literary Terms for Huckleberry Finn

Picarsque Novel: Usually a satirical novel which depicts in realistic detail the adventures of a roguish hero of low social class who survives by his or her wits in a corrupt society.

Bildungsroman: A novel whose principal subject is the moral, psychological and intellectual development of a youthful main character.

Episodic Plot: A structure that features distinct episodes or a series of stories linked together by the same character. Huck Finn can be broken up into 8 or 9 episodes.

Romanticism:
Work of literature that deal with imagination, that represent ideals of life, these works often include fantastic adventure stories, spiritual connections with nature, gothic stories of the fantastic. Authors include: Sir Walter Scott, Fenimore Cooper, Poe.

Realism:
Works of literature that depict life and people as they really appear. Hence Realistic.
Themes include corruption of society as a whole, racism.

Anithero:
A protagonist who doesn't fit the traditional description of a hero.

Persona:
An assumed identity or character.

Satire:
A work of literature that uses irony and hyperbole to attack and mock some aspect of society as a way to promote social change.

Thesis Statements and Order of Development

Due today: Thesis statement and order of development.

A couple websites that could help you: Writing Thesis Statements
or how to write a literary analysis

Themes

Go here

Nature vs. Human Law
Nature of Evil
Sin vs. Forgiveness or Punishment vs. Forgiveness
Individual vs. Society
Exile
Public Guilt vs. Private Guilt
Civilization vs. Wilderness or Town vs. Woods
Good vs. Evil

Practice Essay Question

2010. Palestinian American literary theorist and cultural critic Edward Said has written that “Exile is strangely compelling to think about but terrible to experience. It is the unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home: its essential sadness can never be surmounted.” Yet Said has also said that exile can become “a potent, even enriching” experience. Select a novel, play, or epic in which a character experiences such a rift and becomes cut off from “home,” whether that home is the character’s birthplace, family, homeland, or other special place. Then write an essay in which you analyze how the character’s experience with exile is both alienating and enriching, and how this experience illuminates the meaning of the work as a whole. Do not merely summarize the plot.

New Vocabulary Words

Opaque
Propensity
Esoteric
Vitiated
Magnate
Malleable
Dearth
Florid
Evanescent
Veneration