Grade Forgiveness for AR Tests.

If you are interested in improving one of your AR grades, read the following article in its entirety.

I've noticed, going through your reading logs, how many of you read the bestseller The DaVinci Code by Dan Brown, and for good reason. This is simple escapism along the lines of Michael Crichton or (my favorite) Alias. It's also a perfect example of how verisimilitude is utilized in an intriguing novel. What is frightening though are the huge numbers of people reading this work as if it were research and not fiction. Although this may say a lot about Dan Brown's abilities as a writer, I think it has more to do with our willingness to accept information as fact and without question. This is of course exactly why urban legends perpetuate even when all the evidence is there to dispel the myths.

Dan Brown has simply utilized a very effective voice of believability, and that seems to weigh much more heavily than silly details like facts. Here are some examples of erroneous verisimilitude in The DaVinci Code: 1. Dan Brown maintains that the Merovingians founded Paris, and this is important to the structure of the novel. We accept this as fact because we do not know who the Merovingians are. Utilizing the term Merovingian gives the novel credibility, in the same way that when you utilize your allusions on the AP test, the readers will accept your apparent knowledge on the subject. 2. Anyone who can read a map or has been to Paris will have great difficulty with Dan Brown's reconfigured Parisian layout. 3. Dan Brown's character Teabing, who is the source of all knowledge in the novel, states that the Dead Sea Scrolls were found in the 1950s. (They were actually discovered in the 40s.) In addition to these kinds of erroneous statements, Teabing goes on to state that "Jesus Christ was a historical figure of staggering influence, perhaps the most enigmatic and inspirational leader the world has ever seen. Understandably, His life was recorded by thousands of followers across the land. More than eighty gospels were considered for the New Testament, and yet only a relative few were chosen for inclusion – Matthew, Mark, Luke and John among them. The Bible, as we know it today, was collated by the pagan Roman emperor Constantine the Great."

Yikes! Here is where verisimilitude completely rears its ofttimes-ugly head. Jesus was by no means a staggering influence in his time. Indeed, Jesus was executed as a criminal. As far as the historians of the day were concerned, Jesus was just a "blip" on the radar screen; He was not considered historically significant; He never addressed the Roman Senate; He never traveled outside of Palestine; and finally and most significantly, He was a poor carpenter in a land of wealthy men. Indeed only followers like Matthew, Mark, Luke and John made any note of Jesus in his time. All other "significant" gospels were omitted, from inclusion in the New Testament (and not by Constantine) based on their lack of - dare I say it - verisimilitude. Isn't it suspicious, for instance, that the life of Jesus was recorded by "thousands" of followers in a time when more than 95% of the populous was illiterate! (Here is one of those occasion where I want to put a dozen exclamation points and not just one.)

If I said that Jesus put his dinner in the microwave, turned on the TV and watched the OC, you'd realize right away that my details were off base. The followers of Jesus in the 4th Century weeded through those few (not 80!) gospels and quickly determined that the modern inclusion of both old and new testaments, including the four gospels best defined Christian doctrine, that the details found within them were accurate. No conspiracy. No collusion on Constantine's part, merely the initial acceptance of the now 1700 year old Judeo-Christian tradition.

Nonetheless, Dan Brown's novel is a masterful misuse of the truth, and that's what good fiction is all about. But remember, in college you won't be writing much in the way of fiction and your details, your verisimilitude, will be under constant scrutiny. Teabing in the novel, for instance, states that the Church burned five million women as witches during the European Witch hunts. No evidence in extant suggests that any more than 50,000 woman were executed, half that many by the church and many fewer of these actually were "burned." What's significant here is that the 50,000 women executed as witches were enough of a travesty. Why did Dan Brown need to use such incredible hyperbole, such outright exaggeration to make his point? I guess the use of hyperbole, especially when the average reader is reticent to seek the truth, is just one more effective literary tool. But if Brown were in college, he'd get a C. And if he had me, he'd get a D.

Dan Brown wants his readers to believe that he is revealing the long lost truth about Jesus, Mary Magdalene and early Christianity, but more importantly about the conspiratorial nature of the early church. The novel alleges that there has been throughout Christian history a secret group of true followers of a "Gnostic Jesus and his wife, Mary Magdalene." According to Dan Brown, nearly everything that the three billion Christians throughout the world believe is a hoax. You might have thought that to disprove those three billion, Dan Brown may have wanted to check his facts. Yet again, what is more disturbing is that his readers so willingly believe what he has written. Learning about Christianity through The Da Vinci Code is like learning about dinosaurs from Jurassic Park.

The preceeding article is a scholarly representation of what I would expect college level students to be able to do if given the assignment to discuss literary terms using allusions to one major source. My literary term was verisimilitude and my source was obviously The Da Vinci Code. For those of you who did poorly on either of the AR tests, you too must tackle this kind of scholarly endeavor. (Dispite your hard work leading up to the test, I'm not simply going to hand out A's this last part of the semester.) Choose a novel, any novel, and explain in scholarly detail, why it is significant, whether it is credible in its use of detail and fact, and the types of literary devices the author utilizes. Do not use The Da Vinci Code unless you plan to skilfully debate what I have stated. If you have any questions regarding this, see me and I will explain it more thoroughly. I will suggest that if your combined AR test score is less than a 160, you do this assignment.