To: Students enrolled in Social Justice Literature Academic, Honors, and AP for the 2019-20 School Year
From: English Department and Center for Social Justice
In preparation for your work in Social Justice Literature 11 next year, the English Department is requiring that you read the following novel for all levels:
In the Time of the Butterflies by Julia Alvarez
In addition to this text, all students interested in taking AP Literature and Language must read and complete “Notes and Quotes” for:
Fences by August Wilson
Students are responsible for acquiring the text on their own. It is easily available through Amazon or other book sellers.
A link for Fences online is available here:
https://archive.org/stream/WilsonFences/Wilson%20Fences_djvu.txt
You must complete the attached assignments by first day of school in September. All work must be typed, use 12- point font, and 1.5 spacing. You will be assessed on your outside reading at some point during the first quarter.
Respond to the book through “Quotes and Notes” journal entries. Record ten crucial passages, and then develop your own response explaining why the passage is important.
Choose the passages based on the following guidelines:
a. Discuss two passages that describe the main character;
b. Discuss two passages that reveal the setting and establish the mood;
c. Discuss two passages that develop the plot (exposition, conflict, climax, resolution);
d. Discuss two passages that communicate the theme;
e. Discuss two passages in order to develop a Text-to Self, Text-to-Text, and/or Text-to-World Connections
✓ Cite a passage from the novel here, in quotation marks. Identify the page number.
✓ Analyze the passage according to a, b, c, d, or e above (clearly identify).
✓ Use complete sentences and thoroughly explain the significance of the passage.
Set during the waning days of the Trujillo dictatorship in the Dominican Republic in 1960, this extraordinary novel tells the story of the Mirabal sisters, three young wives and mothers who are assassinated after visiting their jailed husbands.
From the author of How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents comes this tale of courage and sisterhood set in the Dominican Republic during the rise of the Trujillo dictatorship. A skillful blend of fact and fiction, In the Time of the Butterflies is inspired by the true story of the three Mirabal sisters who, in 1960, were murdered for their part in an underground plot to overthrow the government. Alvarez breathes life into these historical figures--known as "las mariposas," or "the butterflies," in the underground--as she imagines their teenage years, their gradual involvement with the revolution, and their terror as their dissentience is uncovered.
Alvarez's controlled writing perfectly captures the mounting tension as "the butterflies" near their horrific end. The novel begins with the recollections of Dede, the fourth and surviving sister, who fears abandoning her routines and her husband to join the movement. Alvarez also offers the perspectives of the other sisters: brave and outspoken Minerva, the family's political ringleader; pious Patria, who forsakes her faith to join her sisters after witnessing the atrocities of the tyranny; and the baby sister, sensitive Maria Teresa, who, in a series of diaries, chronicles her allegiance to Minerva and the physical and spiritual anguish of prison life.
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and the Tony Award for Best Play. Now a Major Motion Picture directed by and starring Denzel Washington.
From August Wilson, author of The Piano Lesson and the 1984-85 Broadway season's best play, Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, is another powerful, stunning dramatic work that has won him numerous critical acclaim including the 1987 Tony Award for Best Play and the Pulitzer Prize. The protagonist of Fences (part of Wilson's ten-part Pittsburgh Cycle plays), Troy Maxson, is a strong man, a hard man. He has had to be to survive. Troy Maxson has gone through life in an America where to be proud and black is to face pressures that could crush a man, body and soul. But the 1950s are yielding to the new spirit of liberation in the 1960s, a spirit that is changing the world Troy Maxson has learned to deal with the only way he can, a spirit that is making him a stranger, angry and afraid, in a world he never knew and to a wife and son he understands less and less.