Day 46: AP Lit/Comp

CCRS

• 4. Determine the meaning of words and phrases as they are used in the text, including figurative and connotative meanings; analyze the impact of specific word choices on meaning and tone, including words with multiple meanings or language that is particularly fresh, engaging, or beautiful. (Include Shakespeare as well as other authors.) [RL.11-12.4]
• 9. By the end of Grade 12, read and comprehend literature, including stories, dramas, and poems, at the high end of the Grades 11-College and Career Readiness (CCR) text complexity band independently and proficiently. [RL.11-12.10]
  

Agenda

1. Attendance
2. Vocabulary List 2
3. Benito Cereno activity

Don Benito's] mind appeared unstrung, if not still more seriously affected. Shut up in these oaken walls, chained to one dull round of command, whose unconditionality cloyed him, like some hypochondriac abbot he moved slowly about... [With] nervous suffering [he] was almost worn to a skeleton…half-lunatic. 

Even the formal reports which, according to sea-usage, were, at stated times, made to him by some petty underling, either a white, mulatto or black, he hardly had patience enough to listen to, without betraying contemptuous aversion.

[In] him was lodged a dictatorship… [Authority] obliterates alike the manifestation of sway with every trace of sociality; transforming the man into a block, or rather into a loaded cannon, which, until there is call for thunder, has nothing to say.

But probably this appearance of slumbering dominion might have been but an attempted disguise to conscious imbecility.

Starting on page 42, Captain Delano alternates here between seeing Don Benito as shell shocked or unwell, as unwisely and lazily aristocratic, as dictator who provokes fear and seems to be a ticking time bomb, and as an idiot. These are incommensurate ways to read a single person, and it is worthwhile to consider both that Captain Delano is really a terrible reader of social cues and also preoccupied by his fascination on Don Benito to the point that he ignores Babo and all the other slaves.

Questions to consider in your journal:

• This rapid change in characterization happens over three short pages. How can we paraphrase these descriptions—what are all of the ways that Capt. Delano interprets Benito Cereno?
• Does the rapid change of characterization affect how you see Capt. Delano at all? Does it matter that he can’t make his mind up about Benito Cereno?
• How reliable are Delano's perceptions of reality? What tendencies in particular make him an unreliable interpreter of the behavior he sees manifested on board the San Dominick?
• What are other things that Captain Delano might be looking at while on board?

Homework

1. Read
2. Vocabulary Cards 2- Due Day 48