Assignment Details

Fences--Wed., Jan. 25th

English Classes

3B AP Literature

Date Due

Jan. 25, 2017

Additional Info
Below are two prompts that are appropriate for Fences. By Wednesday, you need to have addressed one of them. You don't need to write the essay, but by the time we see the movie on Wednesday, you should have used one of the prompts to develop a bullet-pointed list of your own observations and ideas AND a bullet-pointed list of evidence that supports your ideas and observations. Be thinking about which prompt you want to use as we read. You'll have an opportunity to jot down some notes today. In class on Friday/Tuesday you'll present your ideas in front of the class.


1990. Choose a novel or play that depicts a conflict between a parent (or a parental figure) and a son or daughter. Write an essay in which you analyze the sources of the conflict and explain how the conflict contributes to the meaning of the work. Avoid plot summary.

2003. According to critic Northrop Frye, "Tragic heroes are so much the highest points in their human landscape that they seem the inevitable conductors of the power about them, great trees more likely to be struck by lightning than a clump of grass. Conductors may of course be instruments as well as victims of the divisive lightning." Select a novel or play in which a tragic figure functions
as an instrument of the suffering of others. Then write an essay in which you explain how the suffering brought upon others by that figure contributes to the tragic vision of the work as a whole.