NAME: ______ a Lesson Before Dying

NAME: ______ A Lesson Before Dying

Frederick Douglass High School

Summer Reading Project

A Lesson Before Dying

by Ernest J. Gaines

As a rising 9th grade IB student, you are required to complete this summer reading assignment for 9th Grade English.

The assigned novel is A Lesson Before Dying by Ernest J. Gaines. The activities for this assignment are included in this packet.

ASSIGNMENT: Total 200 points

PART 1: READ THE BOOK—A LESSON BEFORE DYING by Ernest J.Gaines (1993)

PART 2: COMPLETE PACKET ASSIGNMENTS.

PART 3: THIS ASSIGNMENT IS DUE THE FIRST REGULAR DAY OF SCHOOL ON TUESDAY, AUGUST 23, 2016.

Be prepared the first day/week to discuss the book and to take an assessment on the book. Be sure to review your notes and this assignment before the first day of school so that you can be prepared. It is suggested that you make a copy of this assignment to keep AND save a copy to a flash drive as well as your home computer.

Following directions is a MUST. Points will be deducted if instructions are not followed.

IMPORTANT: IF ANY PART OF THIS ASSIGNMENT IS PLAGIARIZED,

THE ENTIRE PACKET RECEIVES A ZERO! This is in line with our Academic Honesty Policy.

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

•Vocabulary Log Sheet

•Literary Elements Analysis

•Poetic Interpretation of Novel

Assessments:

1.Vocabulary: = 25 points

2.Themes and Literary Analysis: = 25 points

3.Literary Elements Analysis: Conflict = 25 points

4.Poetic Interpretation: = 25 points

5.When you return to school on August 23, 2016 you will take a DID-YOU-READ-IT? test over A Lesson Before Dying. Do NOT expect to do well on the test if you have not read the novel. You will be permitted to use your annotations on your test. = 100 points.

REMEMBER:

ALL PACKET ASSIGNMENTS ARE TO BE COMPLETED BY TUESDAY, AUGUST 23, 2016.

English Language Arts Academic Content Standards

Reading Applications/Literary TextGlossary

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.

A Synopsis of A Lesson Before Dying

In a rural Cajun community in the 1940s Louisiana, a white shopkeeper 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.”

Gaines's father left the family early, and his mother moved to New Orleans to find work. This left the boy in the care of his disabled aunt, whose strength returns in Tante Lou and several of Gaines's other female characters. Barely into his teens, Gaines began to write and stage steadily more ambitious plays at the local church.

In 1948 Gaines rejoined his mother in Vallejo, California, where she had found work in California's great post-World War II economic boom. He discovered the downtown Carnegie Library and plundered it for books with two necessary qualities: "Number one, they had to be about the South, and two, they had to be fiction."

The 1950s ushered Gaines from high school to junior college, to an Army tour in Guam, to college back in California, and finally into the writer Wallace Stegner's prestigious creative writing program at Stanford, where classmates included Wendell Berry and Ken Kesey. He soon won the Joseph Henry Jackson Award for a novel in progress.

That novel developed into 1964's Catherine Carmier, followed three years later by Of Love and Dust, which coincided with a fellowship for Gaines from the National Endowment for the Arts. He broke through to a wider public with The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (1971), which was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in fiction.

More well-received novels followed, including A Gathering of Old Men in 1983, shortly after the start of his years teaching writing at the University of Louisiana in Lafayette. There he conceived the idea for his sixth novel, A Lesson Before Dying,—though a decade would pass before it saw print.

A Lesson Before Dying (1993) surpassed even the rapturous reception accorded Miss Jane Pittman. The Pulitzer jury shortlisted Gaines again. He walked off with the prestigious National Book Critics Circle Award. A MacArthur Fellowship finally gave him some financial security, and he married Dianne Saulney, a Miami attorney who grew up in—where else?—Louisiana.

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.

A Lesson Before Dying

By Ernest J. Gaines

Setting: This award-winning novel is set in a small Louisiana Cajun community in the late 1940s.

Background: The reader is summoned to confront the entire bitter history of black people in the South. This book is about the ways in which people declare the value of their lives in a time and place in which those lives seemingly count for nothing. It is about the ways in which the imprisoned may find freedom even in the moment of their death. Gaines addresses the basic predicament of what it is to be a human being, a creature striving for dignity in a universe that often denies it.

In his own words: "I write for the African-America youth in the country, especially the South, so that they can know who they are and where they came from and take pride in it . . . (And for) the white youth in this country, and especially the South, because unless he knows his neighbor of three hundred years, he only knows half his history."

Theme: While racism and prejudice is clearly at the novel’s forefront, other issues include love and redemption, the pursuit of personal happiness, community values, the nature of religious belief, justice and the death penalty, family relationships, and social responsibility.

Assessment #1: 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. THEY DO NOT HAVE TO BE WORDS YOU DO NOT KNOW! Number each of your entries. Your log should contain a minimum of 20 entries. If you need more pages, you may create your own or copy more from this packet.

Assessment #1: Complete the following Vocabulary Log as you read A Lesson Before Dying.

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

Literary Elements Analysis: Setting & Theme

Assessment #2:As you read, you will need to consider the significance of these literary elements and be prepared to answer questions pertaining to each on the DID-YOU-READ-IT? test.

•Setting

•Characterization

•Conflict (both external & internal)

•Tone, Mood, and Imagery

•Figurative Language

•Symbolism

•Theme

For the chart on page 12, you will need to evaluate the significance of events in the six specific locations listed that occur throughout the book. For each location, think of an event that stands out in your mind and connect the importance of that event to a theme that you identify below.

The theme of a novel is the lesson or insight about life that the story gives the reader.

Below, list at least 3 lessons you have learned from reading the novel:

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

SETTING & THEMES(Assessment #2, cont.)

A. = List a significant event which occurs at this specific setting

B. = The setting’s significance as it relates to any one of the themes of the novel. Connect the significance to the themes (life lessons) you identified on page 11 of this packet.