Major concepts/content

AP^®English Literature and Composition is designed to be a college/university-level course that will provide students with the intellectual challenges and workload consistent with a typical undergraduate university course. At the end of the course, students are encouraged to take the AP^® English Literature and Composition Exam.

Information about the AP English Literature and Composition Exam can be found at the following site:

http://www.collegeboard.com/student/testing/ap/about.html

Course Goals

1. The experience of literature: subjective dimension of reading and responding to literary works

To study representative works from various genres and periods, focusing mainly on American lit but also including some British lit.
To understand the way writers use language to provide meaning and pleasure.
To write responses and reactions, free writing and journaling, to involve students in literature.

2. The interpretation of literature: analysis of literary works through close reading

To carefully read and critically analyze imaginative literature
To understand a work’s complexity, to absorb richness of meaning, and to analyze how meaning is embodied in literary form.
To consider the social and historical values a work reflects and embodies.
To write analyses and interpretations of literature to explain concepts of literature.

3. The evaluation of literature: assessment and quality of artistic achievement

To consider a work’s structure, style, and themes as well as such smaller scale elements as the use of figurative language, imagery, symbolism, and tone.
To critically analyze literature to sharpen understanding of writers' accomplishments and deepen appreciation of literary artistry.
To write evaluations of literature through analysis, interpretation, and argument.
To participate in Socratic discussions and group presentations.

Writing Outcomes

The students will learn to make careful observations of textual detail, establish connections among their observations, and draw from those connections a series of inferences leading to an interpretive conclusion about a piece of writing’s meaning and value. Chapters from Writing About Literature (11th edition) will supplement composition instruction.

Students will:

write formal essays including passage analysis, character analysis, setting analysis, problem analysis, tone/point of view analysis.
incorporate primary and secondary sources as support for original claims/arguments.

learn and apply MLA style for documenting their sources.
write timed responses to AP-style prompts.
keep reader-response journals, 5-part summaries, and graphic organizers.
be evaluated using a variety of self, peer, and teacher assessments.

Course Texts

· Summer Reading: The Kite Runner (Hosseini) and The Pact (Davis, Jenkins, Hunt)

· Roberts, Edgar V. Writing about Literature. 11^th Ed. New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 2006.

· Lunsford, Andrea, John Ruszkiewicz, and Keith Walters. Everything’s an Argument. 4^th Ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s,

· Guerin, Wilfred, et al. A Handbook of Critical Approaches to Literature. 4th Ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.

· Hunter, J. Paul, Allison Booth, and Kelly J. Mays. Norton’s Introduction to Poetry 8^th Ed. New York: W.W. Norton &

· 2-section spiral notebook to be used only for this class: front section to be used for 5-part lit summaries, back section to be used

· Written Work- 33 percent (out-of-class research based essays, AP-Style free response essays)

Essays completed out-of-class are expected to be turned in on the due date, whether or not the student is in class. If a student is not in class, he/she is expected to email the essay to his/her teacher. A 10% reduction will be applied for each day that an essay is late.

If a student has an excused absence on the day of an objective test, he/she is allowed a maximum of 3 days to make up the test.

If a student has an excused absence on the day of a Socratic discussion, he/she must make arrangements to complete a written make-up assignment.

· Daily Work- 33 percent (reading quizzes, group presentations, journal entries, 5 part summaries, in-class participation)

Students are expected to keep up with the daily syllabus. No extensions will be granted for incomplete daily work. If a student has

an excused absence on the day of a reading quiz, he/she is allowed a maximum of 3 days to make-up the quiz. Reading quizzes

· Word-processed, Times-New Roman font, 1 ¼” side margins, 1” top/bottom margins

· Any sort of academic dishonesty (such as plagiarism) will result in loss of credit, disciplinary

Protect yourself: check with me if you are uncertain about documentation of sources.

Students will learn how to actively respond to literature through various spoken and written techniques. Students will understand form, content, details, ideas, and implications in literature and will learn how to articulate their own emotional responses. Students will be introduced to ACT and AP test forms.

Students will become acquainted with various approaches to interpreting literature such as traditional, formalistic, mythological/archetypal, feminist, and psychological.

Students will become acquainted with problems in literature, i.e. questions that cannot be easily answered. Students will learn how to argue a position, convincing the reader with sound conclusions.

Students will analyze and develop conclusions about characters’ external and internal qualities. Through an assessment of various aspects such as their strengths, motivations, behaviors, societal expectations, students will realize that a character is a verbal representation of human beings as presented to us by authors and his/her own interpretive quality.

The students will discover the important details in a piece of literature and explain their function. Students will evaluate setting and its relationship to character, structure, atmosphere, irony, symbols, and other aspects of the story.

Students will review grammar, rhetoric and writing in preparation for the exam. Students will practice ACT style English, Reading and Writing assessments.

The students will realize that tone refers not to attitudes themselves but instead to those techniques and modes of presentation that reveal or create attitudes. Students will also recognize the writer’s attitude toward materials and toward the reader.

Students will combine knowledge about poetry and prose structure to understand a sixteenth century Shakespearean drama. The students will interpret the play based on careful observation of structure, style, themes, figurative language, imagery, symbolism, tone and the social and historical values it reflects and embodies. As a bridge to the AP Language and Composition course students will compare and contrast the movie version to the text version of the drama. This will give students the opportunity to analyze how visual images both relate to written text and serve as alternative forms as text themselves.

In preparation for college application, students will practice writing the personal essay.