Reading Literature at Grade 11: A Variety of Texts and Strategies for Complex Ones

Hook: the 200-year-old group chat

Imagine a message that has been forwarded so many times that nobody remembers who wrote it first. A friend tells you what someone told them, who heard it from someone else. By the time it reaches you, the original sender is long gone, but the message still lands.

That is how literature works. A poem written in 1818 by a young Englishman, about a statue of an Egyptian king who ruled more than 3000 years ago, can still make a reader in Sudbury or Iqaluit think about power, pride and time. In Grade 11 English you will read texts that travel this far: across centuries, countries and cultures.

What ENG3U expects you to read

The Grade 11 University course asks you to read challenging literary texts from different periods, countries and cultures. This unit's sibling, Reading Informational and Graphic Texts, covers essays, articles, reports and graphic texts. Here we focus on literature:

• Drama: Shakespeare's Hamlet (Lessons 11 to 14).
• The novel: a full novel study using F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby (Lessons 8 to 10).
• Poetry: from Elizabethan England to Edo-period Japan, Bengal, Harlem and the Six Nations of the Grand River (Lessons 1, 5, 6 and 7).
• Short fiction: from France, the United States and Canada, including Stephen Leacock and the Mohawk writer E. Pauline Johnson, Tekahionwake (Lessons 2 to 4).

Why so many places and times? Because a reader who only reads one kind of text learns only one way of seeing. Reading widely lets you compare perspectives: how a 19th-century English poet and a 20th-century American poet each think about history, for example.

Set a purpose first

The curriculum asks you to read for specific purposes. In Grade 11 the purpose is rarely just find out what happens. Common purposes are:

• To understand the literal content (who, what, where, when).
• To interpret what it means (themes, symbols, tone).
• To analyse how it works (form, style, structure).
• To compare it with another text or perspective.
• To evaluate how well it achieves its effect.
• To enjoy and choose: reading independently for pleasure and to discover new authors.

Write your purpose at the top of the page before you start. It tells you what to notice.

Four strategies for complex literary texts

1. Annotation with a code. Use the same marks every time so your notes are quick to read later:

• Underline striking images and key lines.
• Circle words with strong connotations or words you don't know.
• ? in the margin where you are confused.
• ! where something surprises you.
• → to connect two parts of the text (an image that returns, a contradiction).
• A short margin note that says why you marked it.

2. TP-CASTT for poems. A widely used step-by-step pattern for poems (the curriculum suggests identifying organizational patterns when reading poems, and TP-CASTT is one way to do that): Title, Paraphrase, Connotation, Attitude (tone), Shifts, Title again, Theme.

3. Rereading with a new question. Complex texts are meant to be read more than once. On the first read, follow the story or argument. On the second, ask one focused question: Who is speaking? What changes? What is repeated?

4. A reading log for long texts. For a novel or play, keep one page per chapter or act: a 3-line summary, one quotation with its page or line reference, and one question. After two weeks, you have your own study guide.

Ozymandias by Percy Bysshe Shelley (published 1818; public domain)

I met a traveller from an antique land, Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand, Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown, And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed; And on the pedestal, these words appear: My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings; Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair! Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away."

Glossary: antique = ancient; trunkless = without a body; visage = face; mocked = here, both imitated (copied in stone) and ridiculed; the heart that fed = the king's heart, which fed those passions. Ozymandias is a Greek name for the Egyptian pharaoh Ramesses II.