Please put your PowerPoint on the X-drive before 9:30 a.m. on the day you're assigned to present.  X://Teacher Folders/Rose/A2 or A4 Powerpoints. Be sure your last name appears in the file name.

Please put your PowerPoint on the X-drive before 9:30 a.m. on the day you're assigned to present.  X://Teacher Folders/Rose/A2 or A4 Powerpoints. Be sure your last name appears in the file name.

Actually "Holmesian Deduction" is inductive reasoning (rather than deductive reasoning). See chart below

During class today (Monday), you will be completing the Holmes & Watson puzzler worksheet that corresponds to a Powerpoint presentation I am giving in class.

    DOWNLOAD: Holmes Puzzler Worksheet (DOC)

For Class 40: British terms & Curious vocabulary quiz

Please put your PowerPoint on the X-drive before 9:30 a.m. on the day you're assigned to present.  X://Teacher Folders/Rose/A2 or A4 Powerpoints. Be sure your last name appears in the file name.

Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time
To we'll begin reading our final book of the year -- a short novel by contemporary English author Mark Haddon from 2003. In conjunction with this short novel, we'll also be reading the Sherlock Holmes story "Silver Blaze," which features some of Arthur Conan Doyle's most effective plotting, hinging on the "curious incident of the dog in the night-time."

We'll be discussing the short story and the novel over the next two classes, after our IRP presentations each day. Check out the Curious incident resources page below

     LINK: Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time (WEB)

Semester Exam
Your semester exam will focus exclusively on "Silver Blaze" and Curious Incident.

For Next Class
Read "Silver Blaze." You will have a one-question quiz on this short story!

Through innocent eyes
John Mullan analyzes The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon. Part One: The Inadequate Narrator

The (London) Guardian, April 23, 2004

There is a special type of first-person narrative that requires the reader to supply what the narrator cannot understand. Much of what "happens" in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time is not grasped by Christopher, its narrator. The reader comprehends, as Christopher never will, the farcical drama of parental discord that he witnesses. Even when he discovers the truth about his mother, but living in London with a lover, he has no idea of his father's reasons for lying (his cowardice and protectiveness).

Christopher, the book jacket tells you, has Asperger's syndrome, though this is never named in the novel. He has no understanding of others' emotions, though he doggedly records their symptoms. "He looked at me for a long time and sucked air in through his nose," he observes,   when his father is, we infer, near despair. Yet requiring the reader to fill in these gaps allows for a tragicomic intuition of characters' feelings that a more adequate narrator could not manage.

The "inadequate narrator" is not an established critical term. Yet the more usual "unreliable narrator" seems inaccurate for a narrator who, however un-comprehending, is entirely trustworthy. We are not invited to be sceptical about what Christopher tells us. As he says several times, "I always tell the truth". Indeed, his very truthfulness is a kind of limitation on his understanding of the world. He cannot negotiate his way through conversations.

Narrative inadequacy is not so unusual in fiction. Think of Alice Walker's The Color Purple, whose narrator is qualified by her inarticulacy. We infer what she suffers through her inability to express it. Then there is the model for the inadequate narrator, the eponymous heroine of Samuel Richardson's Pamela (1740). A 15-year-old servant girl, she is too innocent to comprehend the schemes of her predatory master, though we as readers see them all too clearly. These narrators are innocent, like Christopher, but they are also limited by their language. One effect is a satirical indictment of those nominally sophisticated adults whom each narrator describes and tries to understand.

Christopher's peculiar ingenuousness is as much fictional device as medical condition. You do not have to check him against a psychiatric textbook to believe in him as a narrator. The reader is left to piece together the meanings and motives of the characters around him; he never explains or interprets. "When I was little I didn't understand about other people having minds... But I don't find this difficult now." He has decided to turn life into a detective story,  for "if something is a puzzle there is always a way of solving it".

The inadequate narrator lets us glimpse the inadequacies of all the adults he encounters. The reader senses the torments and forbearance of Christopher's father, uncomprehended by him. Christopher knows things about others only by their conventional signs. When his father shouts, this means anger. When there are tears "coming out of his eyes", he must be sad, though he wrongly and characteristically supposes that the cause must be the death of their
neighbour's dog, Wellington.

Christopher is also detached from his own torments. When things become too much, he curls into a ball and hides in a small space, or simply screams. When he reads the letters from his mother that his father has hidden from him, he has no description to offer of his feelings, just an account of a kind of seizure. "I couldn't think of anything at all because my brain wasn't working properly." This is no figure of speech. When the patterns of thought and habits of behaviour on which he depends collapse, there is nothing else.

The irony is that his inadequacy as a guide to human psychology is balanced by a fastidious accuracy in matters of report. "I am really good at remembering things, like the conversations I have written down in this book, and what people were wearing, and what they smelled like." His exactitude shows up the evasions of the other characters. Imagining things is what makes Christopher frightened. "And this is why everything I have written here is true."

· John Mullan is senior lecturer in English at University College London

For Friday...
The so-called English Whodunit Unit Exam will cover The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, Hound of the Baskervilles, W.H. Auden's "The Guilty Vicarage," Ronald Knox's "Ten Commandments..." and the other whodunit material we've covered in the past two weeks.

I highly advise you to consult the following document:

    DOWNLOAD: Whodunit Unit Exam Study Sheet (DOC)

I will collect the LRJs on Friday in order to grade them during the exam. You have three due: Curious Incident #1 and Hound of the Baskervilles #1 and #2.

Again, the IRP materials are all due on Thursday, December 20. A2 students may also turn those in on December 18 during the exam time, if desired.

Today we'll be reading "The Guilty Vicarage," the seminal essay by W.H. Auden on the whodunit genre. Complete The Guilty Vicarage Worksheet and dropbox it before the end of class today.

DOWNLOADS:
ARTICLE: "The Guilty Vicarage: Notes on the Detective Story, by an Addict" (DOC)
WORKSHEET: Guilty Vicarage In-class worksheet (DOC)

Next class we'll begin with the Whodunit Sleuth presentations. Email me your Powerpoint BEFORE class begins on Tuesday.

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time is the beginning of our Whodunit Unit. As part of this unit, you will complete a Whodunit Group Research Project, due December 4. You should download the following documents:

1. Whodunit Detectives Research Assignment (DOC)
2 Whodunit Team Research Worksheet -- blank
3. Whodunit Team Research Worksheet sample -- for Dupin

Sherlock Holmes (by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)
A2: Myers, Nabor, Orkwis, Josephson 
A3: Bugada, Greve, Himes

Father Brown (by G.K. Chesterton)
A2: Griffiths, Hanna, Hoderlein, Pappalardo
A3: King, Shaffer, Shade

Hercule Poirot (by Agatha Christie)
A2: Abeln, Asgian, Bruggeman, Bruns
A3: Kincaid, Reed, Kunkel
            
Miss Jane Marple (by Agatha Christie)
A2: Paz, Rieger, Schlueter, Schumacher
A3: Rumsey, Strottman, Wheat

Lord Peter Wimsey & Harriet Vane (by Dorothy L. Sayers)
A2: Verilli, Zimmerman, Williams
A3: McCreary, Mills, Nymberg
          
Brother Cadfael (Ellis Peters)
A2: Smallwood, Worobetz, Voss, Wick

Today, you will begin reading Mark Haddon's Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time and we'll begin our English Whodunit unit, which will also include a study of Sherlock Holmes' methods and a reading of The Hound of the Baskervilles.

For Wednesday -- Curious vocabulary + British terms quiz
For Friday -- have the book read in its entirety (comp quiz)

Download: Curious Incident Vocabulary List -- includes British terms and expressions
Link: Curious Incident Flashcard deck at Dictionary.com (Word Dynamo)

Full searchable text of book in PDF:
Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon (2002)