A Lesson Before Dying 1

A Lesson Before Dying 1

As a McKinley or Timken student who has registered for English II Advanced for the 2010-2011 school year, you are required to complete reading over the summer. The assigned book is A Lesson Before Dying by Ernest J. Gaines and the assignments are included in the work packet that is attached.

This work is aligned with the Grade 10 English Academic Standards and Indicators that will be addressed in class the first nine weeks of English II Advanced. These assignments will give you a jump start on thinking about the literary elements and terms with which you need to be familiar to complete this year’s advanced work, as well as that work which you will encounter as you move through the advanced English program.

This packet contains, not only the assignments that you are to complete as you read A Lesson Before Dying, but also additional resource materials that will help you better understand the text, the work of Ernest J. Gaines and the reasons that the Chicago Tribune published the following about this book: “This majestic novel is an instant classic, a book that will be read, discussed and taught beyond the rest of our lives.”

Resource materials included in the packet:

·  ELA Academic Standards Glossary

·  A synopsis of A Lesson Before Dying

·  A brief biography of Ernest J. Gaines

·  Editorial reviews of A Lesson Before Dying

All packet assignments to be completed by Friday, Sept. 3, 2010

·  Vocabulary Log Sheet

·  Literacy Elements Analysis

·  Poetic Interpretation of Novel

A Synopsis of A Lesson Before Dying

In a rural Cajun community in the 1940s Louisiana, a white shopkeeper had died during a robbery attempt. Jefferson, a young black man, is in jail awaiting execution for the murder he did not commit. A country schoolmaster, Grant Wiggins, understands that the verdict and the penalty were inevitable. Likewise, Wiggins finds that he is also deprived of liberty. Although university educated, his ways are barred. He can find no better job than teaching in the small plantation church school. When visiting the house of a white person, African-Americans must come in by the kitchen door. Custom and the law rigidly separate the races. HE longs to leave Louisiana with his girlfriend, Vivian, to leave the antebellum attitudes persisting 80 years after the Civil War. However, Jefferson’s grandmother, Miss Emma, pleads with Wiggins to teach her grandson pride so that he can die as a man. During the ensuing weeks, both Wiggins and Jefferson learn lessons—lessons about love, salvation, and their common humanity.

About the Author, Ernest J. Gaines

Ernest Gaines says, “We all know—at least intellectually—that we’re going [to die]. The difference is being told, “Okay, it’s tomorrow at 10 a.m." How do you react to that? How do you face it? That, it seems to me, is the ultimate test of life.”

“When I speak to black students about Hemingway, they often ask me what I expect them to learn from ‘that white man’. I tell them: ‘All Hemingway wrote about was race under pressure. And he was talking about you. Can you tell e a better example of grace under pressure than our people for the past three hundred years? Grace under pressure isn’t just about bullfighters and men at war. It’s about getting up every day to face a job or a white boss you don’t’ like but have to face to feed your children so they’ll grow up to be a better generation.”

Ernest J. Gaines was born in 1933 on the River Lake plantation in Pointe Coupee Parish, Louisiana, the setting for most of his fiction; he was the fifth general in his family to be born there. At the ages of nine he was picking cotton in the plantation fields; the back quarter’s school held classes only five or six months a year.

When he was fifteen, Gaines moved to California to join his parents, who had left Louisiana during World War II. There he attend San Francisco State University and later won a writing fellowship to Stanford University.

Gaines published his first short story in 1956. Since then he has written eight books of fiction, including Catherine Carmier, Of Love and Dust, Bloodline, the Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, A Long Day in November, In My Father’s House, and A Gathering of Old Men. A Lesson Before Dying won the 1993 National Book Critics Circle Award. He has also been awarded a MacArthur Foundation grant, for writings of ‘rare historical resonance.”

Gaines divides his time between San Francisco and Lafayette, Louisiana, where he is writer in residence at the University of Southwestern Louisiana. He is married to the lawyer Dianne Saulney.

Editorial Review

Amazon.com Review
Oprah Book Club® Selection, September 1997: In a small Cajun community in 1940s Louisiana, a young black man is about to go to the electric chair for murder. A white shopkeeper had died during a robbery gone bad; though the young man on trial had not been armed and had not pulled the trigger, in that time and place, there could be no doubt of the verdict or the penalty.

"I was not there, yet I was there. No, I did not go to the trial, I did not hear the verdict, because I knew all the time what it would be..." So begins Grant Wiggins, the narrator of Ernest J. Gaines's powerful exploration of race, injustice, and resistance, A Lesson Before Dying. If young Jefferson, the accused, is confined by the law to an iron-barred cell, Grant Wiggins is no less a prisoner of social convention. University educated, Grant has returned to the tiny plantation town of his youth, where the only job available to him is teaching in the small plantation church school. More than 75 years after the close of the Civil War, antebellum attitudes still prevail: African Americans go to the kitchen door when visiting whites and the two races are rigidly separated by custom and by law. Grant, trapped in a career he doesn't enjoy, eaten up by resentment at his station in life, and angered by the injustice he sees all around him, dreams of taking his girlfriend Vivian and leaving Louisiana forever. But when Jefferson is convicted and sentenced to die, his grandmother, Miss Emma, begs Grant for one last favor: to teach her grandson to die like a man.

As Grant struggles to impart a sense of pride to Jefferson before he must face his death, he learns an important lesson as well: heroism is not always expressed through action--sometimes the simple act of resisting the inevitable is enough. Populated by strong, unforgettable characters, Ernest J. Gaines's A Lesson Before Dying offers a lesson for a lifetime.

From Publishers Weekly
Gaines's first novel in a decade may be his crowning achievement. In this restrained but eloquent narrative, the author of The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman again addresses some of the major issues of race and identity in our time. The story of two African American men struggling to attain manhood in a prejudiced society, the tale is set in Bayonne, La. (the fictional community Gaines has used previously) in the late 1940s. It concerns Jefferson, a mentally slow, barely literate young man, who, though an innocent bystander to a shootout between a white store owner and two black robbers, is convicted of murder, and the sophisticated, educated man who comes to his aid. When Jefferson's own attorney claims that executing him would be tantamount to killing a hog, his incensed godmother, Miss Emma, turns to teacher Grant Wiggins, pleading with him to gain access to the jailed youth and help him to face his death by electrocution with dignity. As complex a character as Faulkner's Quentin Compson, Grant feels mingled love, loyalty and hatred for the poor plantation community where he was born and raised. He longs to leave the South and is reluctant to assume the level of leadership and involvement that helping Jefferson would require. Eventually, however, the two men, vastly different in potential yet equally degraded by racism, achieve a relationship that transforms them both. Suspense rises as it becomes clear that the integrity of the entire local black community depends on Jefferson's courage. Though the conclusion is inevitable, Gaines invests the story with emotional power and universal resonance.

English Language Arts Academic Content Standards

Reading Applications/Literary Text

Glossary

Term / Definition
Chronological / An organizational structure of text in which events are placed in the order in which they occur.
Conflict / The struggle between opposing forces that brings about the action within a story or drama; can be internal (within a character) or external (between a character and an outside force.)
Colloquialism / An expression or use of language that is appropriate in informal situations but not in formal ones or an expression that may be considered old-fashioned or folksy, such as “Aw, shucks.”
Dialect / A form of language as it is spoken in a particular geographic area or by a particular social or ethnic group.
Dialogue / A conversation between two or more characters in a work that is used by writers to give insight into the characters themselves.
Dynamic
Character / A character who undergoes a change during the course of the story.
First Person
Narration / Narration in which the point o view is that of the main character.
Flashback / The technique of stopping the chronological action in a story and shifting to an earlier period to introduce additional information.
Flat
Character / A character with only one outstanding trait or feature.
Foreshadowing / The technique of giving clues to upcoming events in a narrative.
Imagery / Words of phrases that create vivid sensory experiences for the reader.
Irony / The recognition of the difference between reality and appearance; includes situational irony in which there is a contrast between what is intended or expected and what actually occurs; verbal irony in which there is a contrast between what is said and what is actually meant; and dramatic irony in which words or actions are understood by the audience but not by the characters.
Term / Definition
Language / The systematic use of sounds, signs and symbols as a method of communication; in writing, the choice of words used to convey meaning.
Limited Point of
View / The vantage point in which a character tells the story in the third person, often confining himself or herself to what is experienced, thought, or felt by a single or limited number of characters.
Literacy Element / A component of a piece of literature such as plot of setting in a story.
Metaphor / A figure of speech in which an implied comparison is made between two unlike things ( ex: He’s a tiger.)
Monologue / An extended speech in a drama or a narrative that is presented by one character.
Mood / The feeling or atmosphere that a writer creates for a reader, or a reflection of an author’s attitude toward a reflection of an author’s attitude toward a subject of theme.
Nuance(s) / A delicate shade of difference.
Omniscient Point of View / The vantage point in which a narrator is removed from the story and knows everything that needs to be known.
Parallel plot / When a literary work has two separate and equally important story lines.
Persona / A voice or character representing a speaker or narrator of a literary work.
Plot / The careful sequencing of events in a story generally built around a conflict. Stages of plot include exposition (background), rising action, climax, falling action and denouement (resolution).
Term / Definition
Point of View / The perspective or attitude of a narrator of a literary work.
Round Character / A character who is complex and multi-dimensional.
Satire / A literary technique in which ideas, customs, behaviors or institutions are ridiculed for the purpose of improving society.
Sensory Details / Details perceived by sight, hearing, smell or any mode by which one perceives stimuli.
Setting / The time and place of the action of a literary work.
Simile / A comparison of two things that are unalike, usually using the words “like” or “as”. (“O my love is like a red, red rose.”)
Soliloquy / A speech, usually given alone on stage, in which a character speaks aloud his or her thoughts.
Static Character / A character who does not change throughout the story.
Subplot / The secondary action of a story that reinforces or contrasts with the main plot.
Symbol / A concrete thing used to suggest something larger and more abstract.
Syntax / The way in which sentences are formed; the grammatical rules that govern their information; the pattern or structure of word order in sentences, clauses, and phrases.
Theme / A topic of discussion or writing; a major idea of proposition broad enough to cover the entire scope of a literary work or work of art. A theme may be stated or implied.
Third Person
Narration / Narration in which the point of view is that of someone outside of the story who refers to all characters by name or as “he”, “she”, and “they”.
Tone / The reflection of an author’s attitude toward his or her subject.

Assignment Packet for English II Advanced

Student: ______School: ______

Teacher: ______Mods: ______

Complete the following Vocabulary Log as you read A Lesson Before Dying: As you read, look for words, terms or phrases with which you may not be familiar or which you believe help bring the writing to life because of their vividness or variety. Number each of your entries. Your log should contain a minimum of 20 entries.

Word, Term, or Phrase / Citation of Usage and Page # / Interpretation/Definition

Assignment Packet for English II Advanced

Student: ______School: ______