A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

Hi everyone,

Just 1 week left until the end of term, I imagine you are all ready for a break by now!

Today we are going to do some work on two sections of AHWOSG - the opening section we looked at last week, and an extract from pages 12-16 in which Eggers is describing his mother's body. Our next few lessons will be focused on the mother, so these extracts will lead us in.

Task 1

We have already covered this section, so I would like you to try and spend no more than 30 minutes on this task.

Use the same section of this extract that you were assigned in last week's lesson, and write up 1-2 paragraphs about the extract. Use the following points as prompts:

• What is it about? Who is involved? What do we find out about them? What do we find out about the narrator? Does it touch on any of the key themes? Can you identify any key language patters or interesting uses of language? How does it match our expectations of autobiography?

Reminder of the key themes:

1. Death and loss
2. Family and relationships (parental/sibling)
3. Friendship
4. Love
5. Sex
6. Coming of age/growing up/responsibility
7. Change
8. Guilt
9. Fiction vs. Reality
10. Self-awareness

Some language focus:

1. Use of dialogue
2. Symbolism
3. Repetition
4. Pronoun use
5. Use of bracket (parentheses)
6. Length and punctuation of sentences
7. Use of humour
8. Descriptive language - use of adjectives and noun phrases
9. Use of tense - past/present
10. Colloquialisms and expletives

Post your work on your blog, and put it onto the Padlet page (you can copy and paste). Title your post with the page number and the focus of your paragraph: Padlet Wall

NOTE: This is the centralised Padlet Wall for our study of the text. I will be asking you to update the wall regularly. The more you do this, the better revision resource you will have.

An example of how you could write about this section:

"In the extract Eggers describes the time when his mother was diagnosed with stomach cancer for a second time.  The way in which Eggers writes about the personal recount of this time in his life is very emotive, the declarative ‘people have indigestion; people take Tums’ sounds like a reassurance to himself; understandably he does not want his mother to have cancer and is trying to avoid the worst case scenario.  He goes on to personify his mother’s cancer, the adjectives ‘swarming, shimmering, wet and oily’ create an image of something alien, something that should not be in his mother’s body.  His description of the cancer as a ‘city’ with ‘environmentally careless citizenry and no zoning laws whatsoever’ turns it into something it is not, through this metaphor Eggers reinforces the idea of something alien, the intruders have colonised his mother’s body, made the city theirs with no thought about the destruction it will cause. Eggers disguises his feelings amongst the imperatives ‘Turn off. The fucking. Light’ and ‘Go. The. Fuck. Away’, though these words are from the ‘cancer’ it is likely that this is how he is feeling himself.  He is exploring his feelings within this text and hidden in these words are his anger and fear, just as the cancer ‘glared at the doctor’ he has similar feelings towards the cancer." 

Task 2

(Spend around 45 minutes on this task)

Read the extract on pages 12-16. This extract focuses on Dave's mother and his description of her body with forensic accuracy. This seems for him an almost academic exercise, a creative writing task that allows him to stretch his descriptive powers with pride. 

Again focusing on the key themes, do the same kind of analysis for this extract as you have done for Task 1, but focusing on the entire extract rather than just a section.

Additional themes to look for in this extract:

1. Emotional disconnection
2. Protection
3. Memories
4. Blending fiction and reality
5. Physicality
6. The juxtaposition of vitality in youth and weakness in illness

Language focus for this section (but not limited to):

1. Use of humour: still prominent, but this extract is far more serious in tone. Contrast this with the opening extract. Why does he use humour here? Is it a coping mechanism?
2. Definite article ('the') as a form of emotional disconnection
3. Use of dialogue
4. Negative lexis (i.e. verbs/adjectives/nouns)
5. Repetition
6. Sibilance
7. Juxtaposition
8. Detailed description and imagery - graphic
9. Dynamic verbs to describe one's body - contrast for illness and for health
10. The blending of fiction/fantasy, again is this a coping mechanism?

Again, write up your analysis as 1 or 2 paragraphs, and then post them to the Padlet wall, with the page of the extract and the theme of your paragraph as the title for your post.

Homework
Again, our primary focus for next week's lessons will be the mother, so from pages 1-45, start building up a bank of quotations which relate to the mother. You can post these to Padlet, but try not to include quotations that are already there.