An 11th Grade Literature Summer Sampling

Introduction

Greetings Juniors!

Welcome to a sampling of the literature that is available to you this year and for the rest of your life. In this Webquest you will explore American, British and World Literature titiles. Come on in, and take a look around. 

Task

Journey through the American, British and World Literature titles. Choose one book from each area you would like to read and tell me why. Then choose one read from either the Poetry, Non-fiction or Drama genre. Begin your list on a word document. Keep traveling through!

This WebQuest is based on the standard:

Range of Reading and Level of Text Complexity:

CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.11-12.10

By the end of grade 11, read and comprehend literature, including stories, dramas, and poems, in the grades 11-CCR text complexity band proficiently, with scaffolding as needed at the high end of the range.

American Literature

American literature is the written or literature produced in the area of the United States and its preceding colonies.

  1. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn - Mark Twain
  2. Autobiography - Benjamin Franklin 
  3. The Crucible - Arthur Miller
  4. Death of a Salesman - Arthur Miller
  5. For Whom The Bell Tolls - Ernest Hemingway
  6. Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
  7. The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
  8. Moby Dick - Herman Melville
  9. Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
  10. Our Town - Thornton Wilder T
  11. The Scarlet Letter - Nathaniel Hawthorne
  12. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
  13. Walden - Henry David Thoreau

British Literature

British literature refers to literature associated with the United Kingdom, Isle of Man and Channel Islands. This includes literatures from England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales. By far the largest part of British literature has been written in the English language, with English literature developing into a global phenomenon, because of its use in the former colonies of Britain.

  1. Things as They Are or the Adventures of Caleb Williams - William Godwin
  2. Wuthering Heights - Emily Brontë 
  3. Frankenstein - Mary Shelly
  4. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde - Robert Louis Stevenson
  5. The Picture of Dorian Gray - Oscar Wilde 
  6. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
  7. And Then There Were None - Agatha Christie
  8. The Fellowship of the Ring - J.R.R. Tolkien
  9. The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro

World Literature

World literature is sometimes used to refer to the sum total of the world’s national literatures, but usually it refers to the circulation of works into the wider world beyond their country of origin.

  1. Twelfth Night - Shakespeare
  2. The Dubliners - James Joyce
  3. The Song of Roland - Anonymus
  4. Till We Have Faces - C.S. Lewis
  5. The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas

Literature Genres

Poetry

Poetry is a form of literary art which uses aesthetic and rhythmic qualities of language—such as phonaesthetics, sound symbolism, and metre—to evoke meanings in addition to, or in place of, the prosaic ostensible meaning.

  1. Borges: Selected Poems - Jorge Luis Borges                   
  2. Because I Could Not Stop for Death - Emily Dickinson
  3. Mending Wall - Robert Frost
  4. The Latin Deli: An Ars Poetica - Judith Cofer Ortiz
  5. A Valediction Forbidding Mourning - John Donne
  6. Ode on a Grecian Urn - John Keats
  7. Song of Myself - Walt Whitman

Non fiction

Non-fiction is one of the two main divisions in prose writing, the other form being fiction. Non-fiction is a story based on real facts and information . Non-fiction is a narrative, account, or other communicative work whose assertions and descriptions are believed by the author to be factual.

  1. Reading Lolita in Tehran - Azar Nafisi                                    
  2. Leap of Faith: Memoirs of an Unexpected Life - Queen Noor                                    
  3. The Last Samurai - Mark Ravina                                   

Drama

Drama is the specific mode of fiction represented in performance.

  1. The Tragedy of Macbeth - William Shakespeare
  2. Death of a Salesman - Arthur Miller
  3. A Raisin in the Sun - Lorraine Hansberry
  4. The Importance of Being Earnest - Oscar Wilde
  5. The Glass Castle - Jeannette Walls 
  6. Rule of the Bone - Russell Banks 

 

Process

Research a few of the books you would like to read. Write a three to five line summary of each title you have chosen. Then include a sentence about why this piece of literature interests you. After you have done some research you will come to the conclusion of what book you will read over the summer. You will list that on your fianl document as well.

You will then create a word document and email it to me with all of your discoveries.

For example:

Title: 1984

Author: George Orwell

The story of one man’s nightmare odyssey as he pursues a forbidden love affair through a government that controls not only information but also individual thought and memory, 1984 exposes the worst crimes imaginable: the destruction of truth, freedom, and individuality. This interests me because I like stories that are dystopian and post apocalyptic and from what I read it seems to follow suit.

Evaluation

Your grade on the WebQuest is based on your participation and cooperation in following through all of the activities created within the WebQuest. 

Your grade is based on:

1) Completion of one book summary for each area of literature- 5 points each (15 possible points)

2) Emailed to me in a word processing document. (5 points)

3) One elective book summary based on another genre. (5 points)

4) The name of the book you will read over the summer. (5 points)

Conclusion

The goal of this WebQuest was to introduce you to three areas of literature: American, British and World and three genres: Poetry, Non-Fiction and Drama. After this activity you will have chosen which book to read over the summer break.

Credits