Contested Selves: Individualism, Slavery, and the Unreliable Narrator: Reading Unit 3, Grade 11 (Letters & Devotion)

Description

Contested Selves: Individualism, Slavery, and the Unreliable Narrator is Unit 3 of American Voices, American Arguments: Literature and Rhetoric in Context (Part 1) (Grade 11), the Letters & Devotion Reading course, complete in one printable PDF: 10 lessons, the unit check-up and the answer key, 93 pages.

• Emerson’s central claim in ‘Self-Reliance’ about individual authority versus social conformity
• Ethos/pathos/logos as applied to short excerpts of Douglass’s Narrative
• The difference between testimonial ethos (Douglass) and assertive/philosophical ethos (Emerson)
• Jacobs’s rhetorical purpose and audience-specific disclosure choices in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
• Constrained narration as evidence of the narrator’s social/legal situation, using slave narrative conventions
• Points of convergence and divergence between Emerson’s and Thoreau’s arguments about self-reliance and social withdrawal
• Inferring unstated meaning from a constrained narrator’s silences in a genuinely new text
• The interdependence of self-reliant authority and enslaved/constrained labor across two independently-argued texts
• Essay planning: evidence selection and organization for a comparative authority-construction argument
• Evidence-claim alignment in a comparative rhetorical-analysis paragraph

Every lesson is written for a parent with no teaching background: it opens with a short script to read aloud, names the specific wrong idea a student is likely to reach for and how to correct it, and closes with a practice sheet you may copy for your household. Scripture references are King James Version throughout. Black-and-white, 8.5 x 11 in. The whole year of this course is also in this store as a single book.

AI note: The written content of this resource was drafted with AI tools, then reviewed and edited by the author.