Jane Eyre Chapters 17 through 27

Extend. Explore. Examine. Respond. Revisit. Revise. Analyze. Synthesize. Write.

Jane Eyre Chapters 1 through 16

Extend the class discussion.

Extending the Literary Analysis Web Discussions

By class time on Monday, September 12, write responses (each 300+ words in length) to the discussion of the two works that we studied this summer that you did not create a web for. (For example, if you wrote about Wide Sargasso Sea write one response that extends the discussion of Invisible Man and write another response that extends the discussion of Invisible Cities.)

Respond! Explore! Extend! Debate! Be resourceful. Try to move back and forth between general, overarching insights and specific textual analysis. Be resourceful! (What resources do you have? Your notes from class discussion about the webs. Your passage responses. The notes Mr. Telles posted after each summer session. Comments posted about the summer sessions. The novels themselves. Click on the following links for the significant excerpts from the novels available on Google Books: Invisible Cities, Invisible Man, Wide Sargasso Sea.)

Note:
In Mr. Cook's class we didn't get to talk about Invisible Cities so here are excerpts from the Invisible Cities webs.

"[Reading Invisible Cities] we start to question our understanding of what is real and what is unreal, and if there is a difference between them, or [if they're] just what we know already and what we [have] yet to know...Kublai didn't know if the cities existed, and neither did Marco, the only thing Marco knew was that the city he described to Kublai was a possible city that he could find. The author us[es] cities as a microcosm for alternate realities." 

Here are some supporting quotations:

"Futures not achieved are only branches of the past: dead branches."

"It is a city made only of expectations, exclusions, incongruities, contradictions. If such a city is the most improbable, by reducing the number of abnormal elements, we increase the probability that the city really exists. So I have only to subtract exceptions from my model, and in whatever direction I proceed, I will arrive at one of the cities which, always as an exception exists. But I cannot force my operation beyond a certain limit: I would achieve cities too probable to be real."

"[Kublai says] 'why do you speak to me of the stone? It is only the arch that matters to me.' [Polo answers] 'without stones there is no arch.'"

"[T]hose who strive in camps and ports exist only because we two think of them, here, enclosed among these bamboo hedges, motionless in time."

& an excerpt from another Invisible Cities web:

"The main themes that are mentioned are the value that each city holds, the support they have, the city's invisibility, the invisible cities made within Polo's mind that are then transformed into words for the Khan's ears. Throughout the whole book, Polo weaves words into his stories creating invisible cities inside the Khan's mind, allowing him to think of these cities as part of his empire, which he believes will perish at the end of his reign."

& here are a few more quotations: 

"'Memory's images, once they are fixed in words, are erased,' Polo said. 'Perhaps I am afraid of losing Venice all at once, if I speak of it. Or perhaps, speaking of other cities, I have already lost it, little by little.'"

"And Polo answers, 'Travelling, you realize that differences are lost: each city takes to resemble all cities, places exchange their form, order distances, a shapeless dust cloud invades the continents. Your atlas preserves the differences in tact: that assortment of qualities which like are like the letters in a name.'"

"'This is the aim of my explorations: examining the traces of happiness still to be glimpsed, I gauge its short supply. If you want to know how much darkness there is around you, you must sharpen you eyes, peering at the faint lights in the distance.'"

"'I have also thought of a model city from which I deduce all the others,' Marco answered. 'It is a city made only of exceptions, exclusions, incongruities, contradictions.'"