Skip to main content

Moon Palace - 3rd lesson

Hello everyone, 

After not posting for a while, we're back with new content!
This week, we studied 3 different critics of Moon Palace. They all gave their opinions on the novel authentically and they dealt with different aspects of Moon Palace. The first critic was called "an Overview of Moon Palace" in which Nathan Hobby shared his opinion. The second one was called "Moon Palace and the art of Paul Auster" and it focused more on Paul Auster's writing style. The last one was called "The Remarkable Journey of Marco Stanley Fogg" and explained how Fogg was an unconventional hero. 

Then, each student was given an extract of the novel and had to analyse it grammatically. Some students had to study "would", while others had to do the "comparative and superlative form", others "If", and the rest "parallel progression (the more...,the more...)". Not only this exercise reinforced  our grammatical knowledge as we're not English Native speakers, but it also made us realise how grammar gives meaning to a text. For instance, Paul Auster used "would" in his novel to describe an action that took place in the past, but also to highlight on its repetition, and that it was part of a routine.

Before knowing that the March exams were cancelled, Mrs Bowley decided to give us a translation test in which we had to translate an English extract of Moon Palace into French. Not all students had the same extracts which gave diversity to the test. Moreover, we could help ourselves with an unilingual dictionnary as if we were taking the exam. 

To dive deeply into Moon Palace, we focused on the different themes Moon palace dealt with and Mrs Bowley divided the class into 4 groups: the first group had to present orally the title of the novel, the second one the story telling, the third one the notion of identity, and the last one the aspect of loss and recovery.

Finally, Mrs Bowley asked each student to gather 10 words we didn't know their meaning while reading Moon Palace. She collected our worksheets and gathered out of all of them 15 words we must learn for a future test. You can check out the 15 words we have to learn: 

 

 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Moon Palace - 1st lesson

After several months of excitement, we finally get to study Moon Palace by Paul Auster. We started this new year by watching a French interview of Paul Auster, who speaks French well, in a show called "Apostrophe" in the 90s. In this interview, Paul Auster answers to questions of the host and literary critics, and he confronts their opinions on his work. We had to summarise the French interview into English as if we had to explain it to a non-French speaker.  Here is the link of the French interview :  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=afu-OMdM9Nk Then, we focused on Paul Auster's writing and what the steps of a great writing are according to him. For example, he believes that you must write with passion, we must put our ego aside and be patient because sometimes inspiration doesn't come as fast as we want it to be. Finally, we learnt that in the United States, being a writer is a job and you can undergo some training.  Here is the link of the article of Paul Auster...
2 comments
Read more

Moon Palace - 2nd lesson

Hello everyone,  For our second week of working on Moon Palace, we focused on its characters and the different aspects the novel holds. First of all, each student had to form groups, study a specific character and present it orally. We focused on Marco Stanley Fogg, Thomas Effing and Salomon Barber (the 3 main characters), but we also focused on Uncle Victor, Kitty Wu and Zimmer who played an important role in the protagonist's life. We studied each character and their complex role in the book.  MS Fogg, raised by his uncle Victor after the death of his mother, is a Columbian student who becomes homeless and is saved by his former college classmates, Zimmer and Kitty Wu. They are very faithful to him. To survive, he works for a wheelchaired man and discovers that his father is Barber, who is the son of Effing. In fact, Effing recruits Fogg to write his own unbelievable story. They eventually bond and establish a relationship. When Effing dies, he makes Fogg promise to meet B...
4 comments
Read more

Moon Palace - Final lesson

Hello everyone,  It's with a lot of sadness that we announce the end of our chapter on Moon Palace. This week, we started by connecting Moon Palace with Bildungsroman. We were once again divided into 3 groups and had to analyse, thanks to articles, to what extent the novel was a Coming-of-Age story. The 1st article was called "A Picaresque Search for Father and for Self" and explained that Moon Palace contained the most important element of a bildungsroman which is the character's evolution. Marco evolves throughout the book, from a miserable and unlucky orphan to a man who thanks to his experiences gained maturity and is ready to start his life all over again. Moreover, Moon Palace contains a lot of dialogues, flashbacks and emotional transmission.The second article was in French and was called "Les Tribulations d'un Américain en Amérique". It explained how the time setting highlighted the characters' evolution and how Marco being an orphan and ther...
1 comment
Read more