Literature is great

What makes a story interesting to you?

• Characters: well-developed characters with interesting personalities.
• Story structure: well-developed arc with an exposition, inciting incident, rising action, climax, character dilemma, and resolution
• Creativity: a story line that is not boring or cliche.
• Mystery: knowing the answers to everything is boring. A story that leaves questions throughout and the audience wondering is intriguing.
• Problem: a challenging problem that seems impossible and is getting in the way of something important to the main character.
• Ending: "give the audience an ending that is wanted but not expected.

Literature quiz:

An act of speaking one's thoughts aloud when by oneself or regardless of any hearers, especially by a character in a play is called

• audition

• dialogue

• soliloquy

A division or contrast between two things that are opposed or entirely different is called

• dichotomy

• hyperbole

• cliche

A phrase or opinion that is overused and betrays a lack of original thought is called:

• rhetorical question

• cliche

• simile

What's the main message of the video?

1. Hamlet is very intelligent, well-educated and funny which makes him an interesting character to portray.
2. Nobody believes Hamlet as he learns the truth about his father's death, and so he goes insane.
3. Hamlet finds himself in a difficult situation because he knows the truth about his father's death and now has to decide whether to take a revenge. And so he finds an interesting way out.

What are Hamlet's personality traits?

highly educated
very analytical
idealistic
optimistic
bossy
very funny
truthful
potentially brutal
mad
rational

Put the words in to make sentences from the video.

frowned minds nature granted brutality rational sinister

1. He's an idealist, within a world, that is ____________ upon.
2. The great dichotomy that Shakespeare sets up is that you have a prince for whom you'd think freedom and power and the will to do what you want is second ___________. But at the same time, he's put under such an extreme position.
3. When Hamlet's talking to the audience, you can take it for _________ that he's giving them a truthful report about what he's feeling at the time.
4. What's great about the soliloquies is that such is the watchedness of this state that people can't speak their _______.
5. Despite his potential _____________ at times, an audience should still care.
6. In Elsinore or London, 1601, ghosts do not appear in our essentially ____________ world.
7. Every time he does something, there's that sense of, 'Well, is it madness? Or is it something more __________, more pointed?'

What makes a character interesting to you? Do you like Hamlet? why? why not?

Is Hamlet a villain or a hero?

Excerpt: The Old Man And The Sea

He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish. In the first forty days a boy had been with him. But after forty days without a fish the boy's parents had told him that the old man was now definitely and finally salao, which is the worst form of unlucky, and the boy had gone at their orders in another boat which caught three good fish the first week. It made the boy sad to see the old man come in each day with his skiff empty and he always went down to help him carry either the coiled lines or the gaff and harpoon and the sail that was furled around the mast. The sail was patched with flour sacks and, furled, it looked like the flag of permanent defeat.

The old man was thin and gaunt with deep wrinkles in the back of his neck. The brown blotches of the benevolent skin cancer the sun brings from its reflection on the tropic sea were on his cheeks. The blotches ran well down the sides of his face and his hands had the deep-creased scars from handling heavy fish on the cords. But none of these scars were fresh. They were as old as erosions in a fishless desert.

Everything about him was old except his eyes and they were the same color as the sea and were cheerful and undefeated.

"Santiago," the boy said to him as they climbed the bank from where the skiff was hauled up. "I could go with you again. We've made some money."

The old man had taught the boy to fish and the boy loved him.

"No," the old man said. "You're with a lucky boat. Stay with them."

"But remember how you went eighty-seven days without fish and then we caught big ones every day for three weeks."

"I remember," the old man said. "I know you did not leave me because you doubted."

"It was papa made me leave. I am a boy and I must obey him."

"I know," the old man said. "It is quite normal."

"He hasn't much faith."

"No," the old man said. "But we have. Haven't we?"

"Yes," the boy said. "Can I offer you a beer on the Terrace and then we'll take the stuff home."

"Why not?" the old man said. "Between fishermen."

1. What kind of boat is a skiff?

2. The old man was gaunt. Does it mean he was skinny or athletic?

3. What is a gaff?

4. What does Hemingway compare the old man's scars to? What can make scars like that?

5. What does Hemingway say about the old man's eyes?

6.What do we learn about the relationship between the boy and the old man?

Look at this example of direct speech from the text. It has been changed to reported speech. What changes do you notice?

'Stay with them.' -- The old man told the boy to stay with them.

Now look at the following example, using the verb “say” instead of “tell”.

"Santiago," the boy said to him as they climbed the bank from where the skiff was hauled up. "I could go with you again. We've made some money." - The boy said to the old man that he could go with him again.

Find the other examples of direct speech in the text and change them to reported speech using “told” or “said”. What other changes did you make?