AP Language Class Notes
Objective(s): APELC students 1) analyzed the context, speaker, audience, and text (argument, message) of a dramatic speech, and 2) evaluate the rhetorical effectiveness of the same in multiple formats.
Since it was on our still-non-functional SMART Board (tell your parents to make some noise if you want its functionality to change) from first and third periods, we did a quick level-question-analysis of the Automat by Edward Hopper. (See the post immediately preceding this for a look at the text.) Nice quick-and-dirty job on that. And after that opening analysis, I led you quickly over the fundamentals of how to scan a poem with the first four lines of Wordsworth’s autobiographical Prelude and asked you to do the same on a few lines from Henry’s speech. Rhythm, stress, and meter can be used to rhetorical effect, so the ability to scan a poem can prove useful, as it has in our analysis of Henry’s St. Crispin’s Day speech to his men.
Then we picked up from where we left off Monday and oriented ourselves to the speech by reviewing, consolidating, and categorizing observations, questions, answers and ideas and distilling these into the four fundamental parts of the triangle. This left us with a preliminary analysis and evaluation of the text from which we could elaborate through focused questions about rhetorical strategies. (Whew! The words that describe the process are much more cumbersome than the process itself, and it’ll become automatic as you progress over the next few weeks. Howard Hughes’ instructions for opening a can of soup were worse.)
Then we compared two presentations of the same speech from two different Shakespearean actors for differences in context, speaker persona, audience, and text.
Laurence Olivier as Henry (1944)
Kenneth Brannagh as Henry (1989)
I was surprised at how many seemed to prefer the first, although perhaps I was mistaken.
Your homework, “A Vile Proposal”, has been posted. Get to it.
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