Reading Literature at Grade 12: Range, Independent Choices and Strategies for Challenging Texts

Hook: the last day of a century

Picture the last evening of a century. People everywhere are making speeches about progress. One English poet goes for a walk in the frozen countryside instead, and writes a poem that sounds like a funeral. Then, in the middle of all that gloom, a small, scruffy bird starts to sing.

That poem is Thomas Hardy's The Darkling Thrush, dated 31 December 1900. It is our first text this year because it shows the main idea of Grade 12 reading: a short text can hold a whole historical moment, and you need more than one strategy to unlock it.

What ENG4U asks you to read

The Grade 12 University course asks you to read a variety of challenging literary texts from different periods, countries and cultures, for different purposes, and to choose some of those texts yourself. In this unit you will read:

• Poetry: Hardy, Christina Rossetti, Gerard Manley Hopkins, W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot and Dylan Thomas (Lessons 1, 2, 5 and 6).
• Short fiction: James Joyce's Araby (Ireland) and Katherine Mansfield's The Garden Party (New Zealand), with Canadian and Indigenous short fiction to choose from (Lessons 3 and 4).
• Modern drama: Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House (Norway), with Canadian and Indigenous plays (Lesson 7).
• The novel: George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, compared with Canadian dystopian and Indigenous futurist novels (Lessons 8 to 10).
• Shakespearean tragedy: King Lear (Lessons 11 to 14).

Lesson 2 introduces literary criticism and critical lenses, which you will use in every lesson after it. The sibling unit Reading Informational and Graphic Texts covers essays, non-fiction and graphic texts, and Writing Essays and Literary Analysis turns this reading into essays.

Choosing texts yourself

Many Grade 12 courses include an independent study: you pick a novel (or several texts), read it on your own, and write or present about it. A good choice is:

• Challenging: it stretches your vocabulary and patience a little.
• Rich enough to discuss: it has layers (symbols, structure, a question it does not fully answer).
• Varied: across the year your list should include different periods, countries, genres, and Canadian voices, including First Nations, Métis and Inuit authors.

Some widely taught Canadian and Indigenous choices (preview for mature content first):

• Richard Wagamese (Ojibwe, Wabaseemoong Independent Nations), Medicine Walk (2014): a teenage boy, Franklin Starlight, guides his dying, estranged father into the British Columbia back country so he can be buried in the way he asks, and hears his father's story along the way.
• Cherie Dimaline (Métis, Georgian Bay Métis community), The Marrow Thieves (2017): a dystopian novel discussed in Lesson 10.
• Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale (1985): a dystopian novel set in a future theocracy, discussed in Lesson 10.

These are copyrighted, so this unit describes them instead of quoting them. Read them in print or through your public library's e-book app.

Read the context and paratext first

Before the first line, read everything around the text. For The Darkling Thrush:

• Date: 31 December 1900, the last day of the 19th century (the century counted 1801 to 1900).
• Place: first printed in a London newspaper, The Graphic, at the turn of the century. Its first title was By the Century's Deathbed.
• Title: darkling is an old word for in the dark. A thrush is a songbird.

The paratext already tells you to watch for endings, darkness and song. Here is the first stanza (public domain):

I leant upon a coppice gate When Frost was spectre-grey, And Winter's dregs made desolate The weakening eye of day.

Glossary: coppice = a small wood of trees cut back to grow new shoots; spectre = ghost; dregs = the last, worst bits left at the bottom of a cup; the weakening eye of day = the setting sun.

What happens in the rest (paraphrase): the speaker sees broken stems against the sky, like the strings of broken harps, and notices that everyone else has gone indoors to their fires. In stanza 2 the whole landscape looks like the corpse of the century, with the clouds as its tomb and the wind as its funeral song; nothing seems alive, including the speaker. In stanza 3 an old, thin, wind-ruffled thrush suddenly sings a joyful evening song into the gloom. In stanza 4 the speaker says there is nothing around that could explain such joy, so perhaps the bird knows of some hope that he does not. The poem ends: And I was unaware.

Combining strategies

No single strategy is enough for a challenging text. A strong Grade 12 reading of a poem might go:

1. Context first (date, title, place).
2. First read for the gist, aloud if you can: poems are written for the ear.
3. Paraphrase stanza by stanza.
4. Double-entry journal on the key words and images.
5. Question ladder on the second and third readings.
6. Check a reference (a dictionary for coppice, a note on the date) only after you have tried yourself.

For a novel or play, add a reading log (from Grade 11) and a character and motif tracker, which you will build in the Orwell and King Lear lessons.