Update Feb. 10

During class on Thursday and today we watched and discussed a recorded lecture on Twain and slavery. The video introduces the concept of bad faith, the phenomenon when people act as though something were true which they actually know to be false. It is a form of self-deception. We learned that self-deception is usually a communal act of denying what everyone knows to be true. We also learned that it is the very act of concealment that calls attention to the truth, thus ironically serving as a revelation of guilt. Thus Twain, or Clemens, claims that as a boy he was unaware that slavery was wrong since everyone acted as though it were right; nonetheless, this is clearly an act of denial or bad faith. We discussed how The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is itself an act of bad faith, for it tells the story of innocence lost when it seems that innocence was not the original state. The novel is an attempt to cover up national guilt by claiming ignorance/innocence prior to a moral awakening.

Homework:
Read through page 189 of Huckleberry Finn.

AP
We are working on writing rhetorical analyses. We have been learning to identify rhetorical strategies and their effects on audiences. Today we focused particularly on syntactical patterns including periodic and loose sentences.

Last week we learned about writing effective transition sentences that serve as "bridges" between paragraphs. We also reviewed paragraph structure for analysis writing:
1) claim
2) context for quotation
3) quotation
4) analysis of quotation

Of course, multiple quotations might be used in a single paragraph in support of the same claim. Such a paragraph might be structured as 123234 or 1234234.

Homework:
Review the list of rhetorical strategies. Look up any terms you do not yet know. Add any terms you feel are missing.