… and other American Literature


 Reading Standards for Literature: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, and 9
 Writing: 1a, 3a, 7, 8, 9a, 9b, 10,
 Speaking and Listening: 1, 1a, 1b, 1c, 1d, 2, 3, 4, 4a, 5
 Language: 1, 1a, 1b, 2, 2a, 2b, 3, 3a, 4, 4a, 4b, 4c,
4d, 5a, 5b, 6




 Analyze Huck Finn for situations of cognitive dissonance, reasoning and problem solving and/or judgment.
 Analyze John Dewey’s How we Think for explanations of cognitive dissonance, reasoning and problem solving and/or judgment text to text with Huck Finn.
 Analyze Flannery O’Connor’s Good Country People for situations of cognitive dissonance, reasoning and problem solving and/or judgment text to text with Huck Finn.
 Analyze W.E.B. Du Bois, On the Souls of Black Folks for situations of cognitive dissonance, reasoning and problem solving and/or judgment text to text with Huck Finn.

For I mention a stone or the sun, when the things themselves are not present to my sense, yet images of the things are present in my memory… Can the memory  things is absent from the eye but not from the memory – as any visible body may be
– its image is held within us and is sought for until the thing itself is restored to our sight. And when it has been found, it is recognized by the image within us. We do not say that we have found what was lost unless we recognise it, nor can we recognise it unless we remember it. It was only lost to the eyes; it was preserved in the memory. ~Augustine of Hippo, Confessions (397 A.D.)
Question:
Hypothesize how your memory retains and recalls information that you previously absorbed through your senses and processed through your brain. How do you recall and interpret the information from your previous experience?

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


In psychology and cognitive science, a schema (plural schemata or schemas), describes an organized pattern of thought or behavior. It can also be described as a mental structure of preconceived ideas, a framework
 influence attention and the absorption of new knowledge: people are more likely to notice things that fit into their schema, while re-interpreting contradictions to the schema as exceptions or distorting them to fit.
Schemata have a tendency to remain unchanged, even in the face of contradictory information. Schemata can help in understanding the world.
A schema is the rule of associations that establish what you know, and that comes to be your foundational knowledge.
Knowledge Organization: Schemata and Scripts http://education-portal.com/academy/lesson/knowledgeorganization-schemata-and-scripts.html#lesson

Think back on a time when you learned a new rule that you internalized. It could be a rule of natural law or a convention (a rule made by humans). How do you think this rule came to be embedded within your brain’s structure? In your own words, define schema.


Natural law: A law or body of laws that derives from nature and is believed to be binding  or in conjunction with laws established by human authority.
Convention: General agreement on or acceptance of certain practices or attitudes: By convention, north is at the top of
most maps. 2. A practice or procedure widely observed in a group, especially to facilitate social interaction; a custom: the
convention of shaking hands.

 Cognitive dissonance is a psychological theory that suggests that human beings
 consistency.
 This theory was developed by Leon Festinger (1957) his research and studies suggests that we have an inner drive to hold all our attitudes and beliefs in harmony and avoid disharmony (or dissonance).
 For example, when people smoke (behavior) and they know that smoking causes cancer (cognition); therefore their behavior and their beliefs are inconsistent, and he/she may try to seek consistency by quitting smoking.
 An important factor here is the principle of cognitive consistency, the focus of
Festinger's (1957) theory of cognitive dissonance. This theory is premised in the idea that humans seek consistency in our beliefs and attitudes in our reasoning, in any situation where two cognitions (ideas) are inconsistent within the person.
 Leon Festinger (1957) proposed cognitive dissonance theory, which states that a powerful motive to maintain cognitive consistency can give rise to irrational and sometimes maladaptive behavior. According to Festinger, we hold many cognitions about the world and ourselves; when they clash, a discrepancy is evoked, resulting in a state of tension known as cognitive dissonance. As the experience of dissonance is unpleasant, we are motivated to reduce or eliminate it, and achieve consonance (i.e. agreement).

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Part 1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WIpacdGcyJc
Part 2 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dovNDYaZDdo

1. In your own words, explain cognitive dissonance? Can you provide an experience of cognitive dissonance? Include your reasoning and resolution.

2. According to cognitive dissonance theory how could shame or social shame influence one’s reasoning?






W.E.B. Du Bois
(1868-1963)

Flannery O’Connor
(1925-1964)
Mark Twain
(1835-1910)
John Dewey
(1859-1952)

Textual Analysis Questions
1.
Identify the major theme(s) present in the passage(s).

2.
Explain the situation of cognitive dissonance present within the text?
3.
How does an inconsistent consciousness (cognitive dissonance) inspire (open) or deny (deceive) moral reasoning in the following passages?
4.
How would you, the reader reason through and resolve
(problem solve) the situation presented in the text?

And at last, when it hit me all of a sudden that here was the plain hand of Providence slapping me in the face and letting me know my wickedness was being watch all the time from up there in heaven, whilst I was stealing a poor old woman’s nigger that hadn’t ever  dropped in my tracks I was so scared. Well, I tried the best I could to kinder soften it up somehow for myself, by saying I was brung up wicked, and so I warn’t so much to blame; but something inside of me kept saying, “There was the Sunday school, you could a gone to it; and if you’d a done it they’d a learnt you, there, that people that acts as I’d been acting about that nigger goes to everlasting fire.”
It made me shiver. And I about made up my mind to pray, and see if I couldn’t try to quit being the kind of boy I was, and be better. So I kneeled down. But the words wouldn’t come. Why wouldn’t they? It warn’t no use to try and hide it from Him. Nor from me, neither. I knowed very well why they wouldn’t come. It was because my heart warn’t right; it was because I warn’t square; it was because I was playing double. I was letting on to give up sin, but away inside of me I was holding on to the biggest one of all. I was trying to make my mouth say I would do the right thing and the clean thing, and go and write to that nigger’s owner and tell where he was; but deep sown in me I knowed it was a lie – and He knowed it. You can’t pray a lie – I found that out.
Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (New York, New York: Barnes & Noble
Classics, 1885), pgs. 215-216.


1. How does Huck exhibit cognitive dissonance in this passage?
2. What are the opposing ideas that he is trying to reason through?
3. What is his final synthesis and understanding of his reasoning?
4. Does his understanding and his actions contradict one another, or do they aligned consistently?
5. To what degree does society shape who we are?

Readers Response:

 Text to Self (T-S): refers to connections made between the text and the reader’s personal experience.
 Text to Text (T-T): refers to connections between a text being read and a previous text that was read to examine similar themes and ideas.
 Text to World (T-W): refers to connections between a text being read and something that occurs in the world.

Making Connections - model
Text to Self – Huck Finn Text to Text Text to World
Ideas from Text: Personal
Reactions and Connections

Compare and Contrast
Huck Finn and Cognitive
Dissonance
Ideas or themes from Texts:
Relate/Connect/Compare and Contrast/ Speculate and Generalize

Example:
Making Connections
Text to Self – Huck Finn Text to Text Text to World
Ideas from Texts/Reactions and Connections
Ideas or themes from

I can relate to Huck’s selfcriticism in this passage.
Though this problem is a social one, and much bigger than he, he reasons through it in such a way that you can see he takes it very personally, and he holds himself accountable for not knowing what to do, rather than society. I do this too, even when I can see that some problems are institutional or systematic. I tend to internalize rather than blame.
In this passage we see Huck reasoning about how he needs to turn Jim in, in order to be straight with God and thus straight with society, so he could “be better”. However, he is torn. Though he believes that turning Jim into the authorities is “right”, he feels he is tempted to do “wrong” by not.
Here we see Huck struggling with cognitive dissonance, as he reasons through this tension to figure out his own moral value.
Ideas or themes from
Text/Relate/Connect/Com pare and Contrast/
Speculate and Generalize
While the slave trade was instituted and legal in this region and at the time, this passage shows the complexity of the social thought and public discourse. Twain used the reasoning of a child to demonstrate that one’s intellect
(social norms) and one’s heart
(human conscious) can collide.
Though slavery is no longer practiced in the United States, I see other forms of economic slavery or oppression still exist under the guise of different practices and terms.

Textual Analysis Questions
1.
1. Identify the major theme(s) present in the passage(s).

2.
Explain the situation of cognitive dissonance present within the text?
3.
How does an inconsistent consciousness (cognitive dissonance) inspire (open) or deny (deceive) moral reasoning in the following passages?
4.
How would you, the reader reason through and resolve
(problem solve) the situation presented in the text?

The moment he begins to reflect, he begins of necessity to observe in order to take stock of conditions. Some of these observations are made by direct use of the  present location, recalls the place where he should arrive at one 'o'clock, and brings back to mind the means of transportation with which he is acquainted and their respective locations. In this way he gets as clear and distinct a recognition as possible of the nature of the situation with which he has to deal. Some of the conditions come to him by direct perception or by memory, they form the ‘facts of the case.’ They are the things that are there, that have to be reckoned with. Like all facts, they are stubborn. They cannot be got out of the way by magic just because they are disagreeable. It is no use to wish they did not exit or were different. They must be taken for just what they are. Hence observation and recollection must be used to the full so as not to glide over or to mistake important features. Until the habit of thinking is well formed, facing the situation to discover the facts requires an effort. For the mind tends to dislike what is unpleasant and so to sheer off from an adequate notice of that which is especially annoying.
John Dewey, “Analysis of Reflective Thinking,” in The Essential Dewey Vol. 2 Ethics,
Logic and Psychology, ed. By Larry Hickman and Thomas Alexander (Indianapolis:
Indiana University Press, 1933), pgs.137-138.


2. How does one’s senses, observations and experiences affect their thinking and being?
3. How to facts affect a person’s reasoning?
4. Why can facts be “annoying”?
5. How is Huck Finn practicing reflective thinking in this passage?
6. What facts from this experience does he take into account? What is his synthesis of understanding?
What is his response?
7. To what degree does society shape who we are?


I thought all this over for two or three days, and then I reckoned I would see if there was anything in it. I got an old tin lamp and an iron ring and went out in the woods and rubbed and rubbed till I sweat like an Injun, calculating to build a palace and sell it; but it warn’t no use, none of the genies come. So then I judged that all that stuff was only just one of Tom Sawyer’s lies. I reckoned he believed in the Arabs and the elephants, but as for me I think different. It had all the marks of a
Sunday school (16).

Making Connections
Text to Self – How We
Think
Ideas from Text: Personal
Reactions and Connections
Text to Text Huck Finn and
How We Think

Compare and Contrast
Text to World
Ideas or themes from Texts:
Relate/Connect/
Compare and Contrast/
Speculate and Generalize

Mark Twain and John Dewey

Explain how Dewey’s analysis of reflective thinking is evident in
Huck Finn’s reasoning about genies, Arabs and elephants.
Does Huck look for evidence and facts to develop a final synthesis in this situation?
How? What is Huck’s final judgment?

Textual Analysis Questions
1.
1. Identify the major theme(s) present in the passage(s).

2.
Explain the situation of cognitive dissonance present within the text?
3.
How does an inconsistent consciousness (cognitive dissonance) inspire (open) or deny (deceive) moral reasoning in the following passages?
4.
How would you, the reader reason through and resolve
(problem solve) the situation presented in the text?

She points to the valise and asked, “Why did you bring your
Bibles?’ He took her elbow, smiling down on her as if he could
 was actually happening… They crossed half the pasture without saying anything and then, putting his hand easily on the small of her back, he asked softly, ‘Where does your wooden leg join on?’
She turned an ugly red and glared at him and for an instant the boy looked abashed. “I didn’t mean you no harm,’ he said. ‘I only meant you’re so brave and all. I guess God takes care of you.’ ‘No,’ she said, looking forward and walking fast, ‘I don’t even believe in God.’ At this he stopped and whistled. ‘No!’ he exclaimed as if he were too astonished to say anything else…
(Pointer, the Bible salesman, gets her to show him where the wooded leg connects – at her knee – and he removes it when they reach the attic of the barn)…

‘Take a swig,’ he said, offering her the bottle. He held it in front of her, but like one mesmerized, she did not move. Her voice when she spoke had an almost pleading sound. “Aren’t you,” she murmured, ‘aren’t you just good country people?” The boy
 curling his lip slightly, ‘but it ain’t held me back none. I’m as good as you any day in the week... ‘Give me my leg!’ she screamed and tried to lunge for it but he pushed her down easily.
‘What‘s the matter with you all of a sudden?’ he asked, frowning as he screwed the top on the flask and put it quickly back inside the Bible. ‘You just a while ago said you didn’t believe in nothing,
I thought you was some girl!’ Her face was almost purple.
‘You’re a Christian!’ she hissed. ‘You’re a fine Christian! You’re just like them all – say one thing and do another. You’re a perfect
Christian, you’re…” The boy’s mouth was set angrily. “I hope you don’t think,” he said in a lofty indignant tone, ‘that I believe in that crap! I may sell Bibles but I know which end is up and I wasn’t born yesterday and I know where I’m going!

‘Give me my leg!’ she screeched. He jumped up so quickly that she barely saw him sweep the cards and the blue box into the
Bible and throw the Bible into the valise. She saw him grab the leg and then she saw it for an instant slanted forlornly across the
 ends… ‘One time I got a woman’s glass eye this way. And you needn’t to think you’ll catch me because Pointer ain’t really my name. I use a different name at every house I call at and don’t stay nowhere long. And I’ll tell you another thing, Hulga,’ he said, using the name as if he didn’t think much of it, ‘you ain’t so smart. I been believing in nothing ever since I was born!’ and then the toast-colored hat disappeared down the hole and the girl was left, sitting on the straw in the dusty sunlight. When she turned her churning face toward the opening, she saw his blue figure struggling successfully over the green speckled lake.
Flannery O’Connor, “Good Country People,” The Complete Stories, (New York, New
York: The Noonday Press, 1955), pgs. 285-291.

1.How do you think Pointer would connote the word “smart”? Why is Hulga not “smart” in his eyes?
2. Do you think Pointer confirmed Hulga’s earlier suspicions about Christians, or altered them? Explain.

3. Judging by the context of this passage, how does Hulga believe Christians are obliged to act?
4. And, judging by the context of this passage, how does Hulga perceive
Christian to act in reality?
5. How does she reason through these two distinct perceptions and ultimately judge Christians?
6. If Hulga believes that Christians are hypocrites, why do you think she still trusted the Bible salesman, Pointer?
7. Does her trust in Pointer demonstrates cognitive dissonance between her thinking and acting or something else? If something else, what is it? Explain.
8. How do you think Hulga connotes the phrase “good country people”?
9. How does Pointer understand the phrase “good country people” when
Hulga asks him if he is “good country people”?
10. After this experience occurred, how might Hulga’s understanding of
“Christian,” “good country people” change yet again?
11. To what degree does society shape who we are?

‘Don’t it ‘sprise you, de way dem kings carries on, Huck?’
‘No,’ I says, ‘it don’t.’
‘Why don’t it, Huck?’

‘Well, it don’t because it’s in the breed. I recon they’re all alike.’
‘But, Huck, des king o’ ourn is reglar rapscallions; dat’s jist what dey is; dey’s reglar rapscallions.’
‘Well, that’s what I’m a-saying; all kings is mostly rapscallions, as fur as I can make out.’
‘Is dat so?’
‘You read about them once – you’ll see. Look at Henry the Eight; this’n ‘s a Sunday-
School Superintendent to him. And look at Charles Second, and Louis Fourteen, and
Louis Fifteen, and James Second, and Edward Second, and Richard Third, and forty more; besides all them Saxon heptarchies that used to rip around so in old times and raise Cain. My, you ought to see old Henry the Eight when he was in bloom. He was a blossom. He used to marry a new wife every day, and chop off her had next morning.
And he would do it just an indifferent as if he was ordering up eggs. ‘Fetch up Nell
Gwynn,’ he says. They fetch her up. Next morning, ‘Chop off her head!’ And they chop it off. “Fetch up Jane Shore,” he says; and up she comes. Next morning, ‘Chop off her head’ – and they chop it off. ‘Ring up Fair Rosamun.’ Fair Rosamun answers the bell.
Next morning ‘Chop off her head’… All I say is, kings is kings, and you got to make allowance. Take them all around, they’re a mighty ornery lot. It’s the way they’re raised’… What was the use to tell Jim these warn’t real kings and dukes? It wouldn’t a done no good; and besides, it was just as I said; you couldn’t tell them from the real kind‘ (156-157).

Making Connections
Text to Self – Good
Country People
Ideas from Text: Personal
Reactions and Connections
Text to Text Huck Finn and
Good Country People

Compare and Contrast
Text to World
Ideas or themes from Texts:
Relate/Connect/
Compare and Contrast/
Speculate and Generalize

Mark Twain and Flannery O’Connor
 Hulga (Good Country People) and Jim  experiences of deception, in these two passages, which leads to experiences of cognitive dissonance, where their previous beliefs are challenged by their real experience.
As they reason through their experiences, infer how their distinct temperaments, dispositions and personalities might factor into their final synthesis and judgment.
 Finally, it is apparent that Huck has already internally resolved this experience of dissonance. What was his conclusive judgment? Explain how he might have come to this understanding about Kings and Dukes.

Textual Analysis Questions
1.
1. Identify the major theme(s) present in the passage(s).

2.
Explain the situation of cognitive dissonance present within the text?
3.
How does an inconsistent consciousness (cognitive dissonance) inspire (open) or deny (deceive) moral reasoning in the following passages?
4.
How would you, the reader reason through and resolve
(problem solve) the situation presented in the text?

They approach me in a half-hesitant sort of way, eye me curiously or compassionately, and then, instead of saying directly, How does it feel to be a problem? they say, I know an excellent colored man in my town; or, I fought at Mechanicville; or, Do not these Southern outrages make your blood boil? At these I smile, or am interested, or reduce the boiling to a  different from the others; or like, mayhap, in heart and life and longing, but shut out from their world by a vast veil. I had thereafter no desire to tear down that veil, to creep through; I held all beyond it in common contempt and lived above it in a region of blue sky and great wandering shadows… Why did God make me an outcast and a stranger in mine own house?
The shades of the prison-house closed round about us all: walls strait and stubborn to the whites, but relentless narrow, tall, and unsalable to sons of night who must plod darkly on in resignation, or beat unavailing palms against the stone, or steadily, half hopelessly, watch the streak of blue above. After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and
Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world -- a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this
double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others,
of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.
One ever feels his two-ness, -- an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, who dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.
W.E.B. Du Bois, On The Souls of Black Folk (New York, New York: Dover Publications, INC.,
1903), pgs. 1-2.

1. Du Bois writes that society has informed him as if he is “a problem.” What is Du Bois intended connotation of “problem” in this context?

2. Why do you think he came to the conclusion that he is “a
problem”?
3. What kind of “problem” is he? Can this problem be solved?
4. How would you define and describe Du Bois term double-
consciousness?
5. Compare and contrast the idea of double-consciousness with
cognitive dissonance.
6. Compare and contrast double-consciousness with Huck’s words “playing double.”
7. To what degree does society shape who we are?

‘Now I can have a good look at you; and laws-a-me, I’ve been hungry for it a many and many a time, all these long years, and it’s come at last! We been expecting you a couple of days and more.
What’s kep’ you? – boat get aground?’
‘Yes’m – she –‘

I didn’t rightly know what to say, because I didn’t know whether the boat wound be coming up the river or down. But I go a good deal on instinct; and my instinct said she would be coming up – from down towards Orleans. That didn’t help me much, though; for I didn’t know the names of bars down that way. I see I’d got to invent a bar, or forget the name of the one we got aground on – or – Now I struck an idea, and fetched it out:
‘It warn’t the grounding – that didn’t keep us back but a little. We blowed out a cylinder-head.’
‘Good-gracious! Anybody hurt?’
‘No’m. Killed a nigger.’
“Well, it’s lucky; because sometimes people do get hurt. Two ear ago last Christmas, your uncle
Silas was coming up from Newrleans on the old Lally Rook, and she blowed out a cylinder-head and crippled a man. And I think he dies afterwards. He was a Baptist. Your uncle Silas knowed a family in Baton Rouge that knowed his people very well. Yes, I remember, now he did die.
Mortification sent in, and they had to amputate him. But it didn’t save him. Yes, it was mortification – that was it. He turned blue all over, and dies in the hope of a glorious resurrection.
They say he was a sight to look at.
Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (New York, New York: Barnes & Noble Classics,
1885), pgs. 223-224.

Making Connections
Text to Self – On the Souls of Black Folk
Ideas from Text: Personal
Reactions and Connections
Text to Text - Huck Finn and Souls of Black Folk

Compare and Contrast
Text to World
Ideas or themes from Texts:
Relate/Connect/
Compare and Contrast/
Speculate and Generalize

Mark Twain and W.E.B. Du Bois

Huck states that he “plays
double,” while Du Bois explains that he experiences “double
consciousness” when they have encounters where social norms conflict with their internal instincts, beliefs, reasoning, and processed experiences.
Compare and contrast these terms in their respective context.

Textual Analysis Questions
1.
1. Identify the major theme(s) present in the passage(s).

2.
Explain the situation of cognitive dissonance present within the text?
3.
How does an inconsistent consciousness (cognitive dissonance) inspire (open) or deny (deceive) moral reasoning in the following passages?
4.
How would you, the reader reason through and resolve
(problem solve) the situation presented in the text?

Within five simple words in the Declaration of Independence – “all men are created equal”
– Thomas Jefferson undid Aristotle’s ancient formula, which had governed human affairs until 1776… ‘One cannot question the genuineness of Jefferson’s liberal dreams,” write historian David Brion David. ‘He was one of the first statesmen in any part of the  slavery is his immense silence.’ And later, David find, Jefferson’s emancipation efforts
‘virtually ceased.’ Somewhere in a short span of years during the 1780s and into the early 1790s, a transformation came over Jefferson… And by looking closely at
Monticello, we can see the process by which he rationalized the abomination to the point where an absolute moral reversal was reached and he made slavery fit into
America’s natural enterprise… The critical turning point in Jefferson’s thinking may well have come in 1792. As Jefferson was counting up the agricultural profits and losses of his plantation in a letter to President Washington that year, it occurred to him that there was a phenomenon he has perceived a Monticello but never actually measured.
He proceeded to calculate it in a barely legible, scribble note in the middle of a page, enclosed in brackets. What Jefferson set out clearly for the first time was that he was making a 4 percent profit every year on the birth of black children. The enslaved were yielding him a bonanza, a perpetual human dividend at compound interest. Jefferson wrote, “I allow nothing for losses by death, but, on the contrary, shall presently take credit four per cent. Per annum, for their increase over and above keeping up their own numbers.” His plantation was producing inexhaustible human assets. The percentage was predictable.

In another communication from the early 1790s, Jefferson takes the 4 percent formula further and quite bluntly advances the notion that slavery presented an investment strategy for the future. He writes that an acquaintance who had suffered financial reversals “should have been invested in negroes.’ He advises that if the friend’s family had any cash left, ‘every farthing of it (should be) laid out in land and Negros, which
 theorem threatened the comforting notion that he has no real awareness of what he was doing, that he was “stuck” with or “trapped” in slavery with the waning of his emancipationist fervor. Jefferson began to back away from antislavery just around the time he computed the silent profit of the ‘peculiar institution”… Jefferson mulled over whether to accept the bequest(Jefferson was given a bequest by his friend with the intention that he free his slaves with it) he had written to one of his plantation managers: ‘A child raised every 2. years is of more profit then the crop of the best laboring man. In this, as in all other cases, providence has made our duties and our interests coincide perfectly…
With respect therefore to our women and their children I must pray you to inculcate upon the overseers that it is not their labor, but their increase which is the first consideration with us.”
Wiencek, Henry. “The Dark Side of Thomas Jefferson.” Smithsonian magazine (October 2012).

1.
What would Thomas Jefferson’s philosophical position on

2.
When and why did his position begin to change? Explain.
3.
How would his “transformation in reasoning” demonstrate cognitive dissonance?
4.
Do you evaluate his later rational to be stronger or weaker that his philosophical statements in the Declaration of Independence?
Why or why not?
5.
What concrete and physical “facts” changed Jefferson’s mind?
6.
Do facts always make reasoning stronger? More moral? More trust-worthy?
7.
How can facts be used to manipulate one’s “moral” values for a desired end?
8.
To what degree does society shape who we are?

I run across a boy walking and asked him if he’d seen a strange nigger, dressed so and so, and he says: ‘Yes.’ ‘Wherebouts?’ says I… ‘Was you
 me to lay down and stay where I was; and I done it. Been there ever since; afeared to come out.’ ‘Well,’ he says, ‘you needn’t be afeared no more, becuz they’ve got him. He run off f’m down South, som’ers.’ ‘It’s a good job they got him.’ ‘Well, I reckon! There’s two hundred dollars reward on him. It’s like picking up money out’n the road’… (Huck finds out that the duke and king sold Jim. After the duke and king blame Huck for ‘stealing” the raft,
Huck states)… ‘would’nt shake my nigger, would I? – the only nigger I had in the world, and the only property.’ ‘We never thought of that. Fact it, I reckon we’d come to consider him our nigger; yes, we did consider him so goodness knows we had trouble enough for him. So when we see the raft was gone, and we flat broke, there warn’t anything for it but to try the Royal
Nonesuch another shake…. ‘Sold him?’ I says and begun to cry; ‘why he was my nigger, and that was my money. Where is he? – I want my nigger.”
‘Well, you can’t get your nigger, that’s all – so dry up your blubbering.
Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (New York, New York:
Barnes & Noble Classics, 1885), pgs. 214-219 .

Making Connections
Text to Self – The Dark Side of Thomas Jefferson
Ideas from Text: Personal
Reactions and Connections
Text to Text - Huck Finn and The Dark Side of TJ

Compare and Contrast
Text to World
Ideas or themes from Texts:
Relate/Connect/
Compare and Contrast/
Speculate and Generalize

1. Examine how Mark Twain applies subversion (under-turning) to the
 how Twain critiques the reasoning evident in Thomas Jefferson, and the common social norms at the time.
2. Furthermore, find evidence of cognitive dissonance in the two passages. Identify two (or more) inconsistent ideas, trace the reasoning and evaluate the conclusion.
3. Why do you think Huck cries for
Jim? Support your answer with evidence.
Mark Twain and a historic-critical article on Thomas Jefferson

Essential Question
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Evaluation Question
 Choose one passage from

Huckleberry Finn and another from a different realist source
(literary, artistic or musical).
Compare and contrast the applications of schema, cognitive dissonance and reasoning within and between them.