Mr. Raber’s
Congratulations on signing up to participate in honors English your senior year. I promise we will have a very fun, yet challenging, year together. In order to keep our literary minds and writing skills in top form, we must do some summer reading and writing. I know, you are sighing and moaning in your head or quite possibly even out loud when you are receiving and reading this. However, this summer reading assignment is not an assignment that is overly taxing or grueling; you are only going to be required to read one novel, analyze a list of quotes, and complete one major writing assignment. Why am I only requiring you to read one novel and complete a few writing assignments? The answer is quite simple. I am only requiring you to read one novel because I want it read thoroughly , and I want the writing assignments done thoroughly and thoughtfully .
Overall, I want this assignment to reflect your BEST work. With this being said, the exact parameters of the assignment are listed below:
Assignment:
Obtain a copy of Silas Marner The Weaver of Raveloe by George Eliot.
Read and annotate the entire book. (Annotation means actively reading by writing and marking in your book.
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Such elements that you should take note of while annotating are vocabulary terms, literary terms, major plot events, themes, symbols, interesting/important quotes and passages, and your own thoughts and feelings as reading certain sections of the book.)
Explain the meaning, significance, and your response to the list of quotes on the back of this page.*
Write a clear, coherent, and well-developed complete essay selecting and explaining a major theme and symbol in Silas Marner .*
*All writing assignments should be typed in 12 point Times New Roman font, double spaced, and have 1” margins.
Please approach this book and assignment with an open mind and positive attitude. Also, please do not procrastinate! If all the students completing this assignment put it off until August, you may have trouble obtaining a copy of the novel, and the quality of your work will suffer. All of the required work is due on the first day of school; you should also be sure to bring your copy of the novel with you. Finally, if you have any questions or concerns, please do not hesitate to contact me by e-mail (a_raber@dukes.stark.k12.oh.us) or phone
(330-206-5035). Good luck and have a fun, safe, and productive summer.
Sincerely,
Mr. Raber

1. “To have sought a medical explanation for this phenomenon would have been held by Silas himself, as well as by his minister and fellow-members, a willful self-exclusion from the spiritual significance that might lie therein.”
2. “Strangely Marner’s face and figure shrank and bent themselves into a constant mechanical relation to the objects of his life, so that he produced the same sort of impression as a handle or a crooked tube, which has no meaning standing apart. The prominent eyes that used to look trusting and dreamy, now looked as if they had been made to see only one kind of thing that was very small, like tiny grain, for which they hunted everywhere; and he was so withered and yellow, that, though he was not yet forty, the children always called him ‘Old Master Marner.’”
3. “This strangely novel situation of opening his trouble to his Raveloe neighbours, of sitting in the warmth of a hearth not his own, and feeling the presence of faces and voices which were his nearest promise of help, had doubtless its influence on Marner, in spite of his passionate preoccupation with his loss. Our consciousness rarely registers the beginning of a growth within us any more than without us: there have been many circulations of the sap before we detect the smallest sign of the bud.”
4. “Godfrey was silent. He was not likely to be very penetrating in his judgments, but he had always had a sense that his father’s indulgence had not been kindness, and had had a vague longing for some discipline that would have checked his own errant weakness and helped his better will.”
5. “I can’t say what I should have done about that, Godfrey. I should never have married anybody else.
But I wasn’t worth doing wrong for—nothing is in this world. Nothing is so good as it seems beforehand—not even our marrying wasn’t, you see.”