Early American Literature 3

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• Leerjaar 5

Early American Literature

Road Map

• Finish: Edgar Allan Poe - The Tell-Tale Heart
• Start: Edgar Allan Poe - The Raven

The Tell-Tale Heart - Edgar Allan Poe

1. Introduction: The narrator introduces himself, a nervous man with a very acute sense of hearing who has killed his housemate because he could not stand his vulture-like eye.

2. Rising action: for seven nights in a row, the narrator enters the old man’s bedroom at around midnight with the intention of killing him only he doesn’t because he is asleep.

The Tell-Tale Heart - Edgar Allan Poe

3. Cllmax: On the 8th night, the old man wakes up because the narrator’s ‘thumb slipped upon the tin fastening’ of his lantern. The narrator kills the old man and hides his body parts.

4. Falling action: The police come to investigate after a neighbour had informed them they had heard a shriek.

5. Denouement: The narrator cracks and ‘admits the dead’.

The Tell-Tale Heart

Assignments 

Romanticism

A literary and artistic movement that reacted against the restraint and universalism of the Enlightenment. The Romantics celebrated spontaneity, imagination, subjectivity, and the purity of nature.

 Romantics set themselves in opposition to the order and rationality of classical and neoclassical artistic precepts to embrace freedom and revolution in their art and politics.

Gothic literature

Started as: European Romantic pseudo-medieval fiction having a prevailing atmosphere of mystery and terror. Its heyday was the 1790s, but it underwent frequent revivals in subsequent centuries.

Traces of this can be seen in Poe's work.

The Raven

Literary aspects

Poetry: has its origins in music and oral performance.

Characterised by controlled patterns of rhythm and syntax, compression, and compactness. 

Rhythm: the modulation of weak and strong/stressed and unstressed elements (often syllables) in the flow of speech.

Literary aspects

Rhyme: repetition or correspondence of sounds of words, most common is end rhyme in which the final, terminal sounds rhyme (= end rhyme)

Rhyme scheme: the pattern of end rhymes in a poem, often denoted with small letters, e.g. aabb, abab

Alliteration: the repetition of usually the initial consonant sounds through a sequence of words. 

www.lexico.com

Homework

Finish assignments 1-4  belonging to 'The Raven'

The Raven Extensive Studyguide

https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/poetry/the-raven

Lesson goals - Edgar Allan Poe

At the end of the lessons you can

• give a brief description of the context of Edgar Allan Poe's life 
• outline the major events of his life
  
• describe the characteristics of a short story
• summarise the plot line of The Black Cat, The Tell-Tale Heart
• summarise the gist of the poem 'The Raven'
• describe at least two characteristics of the stories
• analyse their effect on the reader
• give your well-founded opinion of the work