>American Literature Component

This culminating lesson reiterates many of the points and themes found in previous unit lessons. As such, students use a literary approach to draw conclusions and develop points of view in language arts about general themes. Several learning standards in writing and language arts apply to this final lesson.

Students will read selected epitaphs from Edgar Lee Masters's Spoon River Anthology (in Hodgins: pp. 437-439) which more often than not capture the bitterness of spiritual isolation in the lives of the people who are buried in a small town cemetery. Predicting their own future and demise, students will write their own epitaphs on an illustrated tombstone. In a second activity, students will select one of Masters's epitaphs and match it to a person depicted in a Hopper painting, and will justify their matches with reasons based on Lee's poems and Hopper's paintings.

Students will read and analyze Edward Arlington Robinson's poem, "Richard Cory" (in Hodgins: p. 43l). Students will complete a "quickwrite" to explain why Richard Cory would "put a bullet through his head."

Students will read two excerpts from Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio: "The Thinker" and "Loneliness." Students will complete a double entry journal which consists of four quoted passages and four personal responses per excerpt. The passages should illustrate isolation, alienation, or loneliness.

Students will read Ernest Hemingway's two short stories, "The Killers" and "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place." Students will analyze how Hemingway's realistic, cool, and detached writing style echoes the distance Hopper seems to portray between his subjects and himself.

Students will read Lisel Muelle's modern poem "American Literature" (in Levin) which refers directly to "the vacancies Edward Hopper left to poets and storytellers." Students will evaluate how her poem epitomizes the mood of Hopper's paintings.

Guided Field Trip
The students for whom this unit was designed took a guided field trip of downtown Los Angeles art and architecture and wrote one or two of the following questions:

o How does public art help beautify and humanize downtown Los Angeles?

o What do the photographs of Lewis Hine remind us about urbanization and industrialization?

o What do the paintings of Edward Hopper remind us about alienation and isolation?

o How does downtown Los Angeles of the l990s compare to Fritz Lang's Metropolis of l927?

o What did you want your photographs to reflect? How did you do?

Interdisciplinary Essay

Students will select a painting by Edward Hopper and write a story about it. Incorporating the depicted characters, setting, and mood, students will tell what has happened and what is about to happen. The story should take into account the details of the painting and reflect an understanding of the social, economic, and political changes wrought by urbanization and industrialization including feelings of alienation and isolation.

US History Component