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AP Literature and Composition

Instructors: Ashley Dugan and Catherine Sims
E-Mails: adugan@casciahall.org; csims@casciahall.org
Description: This is the second Advanced Placement course in the English department. It follows the curricular requirements as described by the AP English Course Description. All students should have taken A.P. Language and Composition prior to enrolling in this course.

Objectives:

• To help students grow in their knowledge and love of literature and their regard for the people who create it
• To teach them to read, write about, and discuss works within and without the evolving literary canon with precision, sensitivity, energy, and imagination
• To encourage them to develop a deep and abiding resonance with some literary texts
• To allow them to shape their own values and preferences with respect to both the style and substance of others.

Assessments:

Journal: A notebook in which students include the names and brief descriptions of all the main characters in a work, a concise summary of the work, at least five high-level, challenging vocabulary words with their correct definitions as used in the text, and at least five significant passages from every main section. Students should examine the relevance of these passages to the work’s characterization, conflict, setting, point of view, symbols, and/or theme or generate a discussion question pertaining to the passage. The journal for each text should include 10 to 20 passages. This major project will be utilized for class discussions in which the students will lead the discourse by reading aloud passages and presenting their informal analysis as well as sharing their findings on literary elements in the text. The class will also talk about some of the vocabulary noted in the journals; in addition to learning new words, students will have the opportunity to discuss the author’s use of diction. This journal also will serve as an excellent study aid for the A.P. examination. It will be reviewed at the end of the year, at which time students will choose at least three works which they will review in depth.

Quizzes: Quizzes will be composed of a series of quotations and analytical questions about each work studied. Each question will be answered in a paragraph format. This will aid students in composing well-structured and cohesive paragraphs with abundant and relevant textual support. Instructor’s grading and comments will encourage sophisticated and varied sentence structure and apt word choice. This is excellent preparation for the essay portion of the AP Exam.

Discussion: Class discussion is our primary classroom activity. All students are expected to take part in the dialogue of the classroom. Discussion will be centered on the student-generated questions and observations from student journals with teacher input. Students are encouraged to question and challenge others’ comments in order to support deeper textual analysis. Further, students should be ready to defend their interpretation of the text if necessary. This promotes precision and research. Finally, we will focus on the themes of the works, and students will compose a variety of themes for discussion, with emphasis on the fact that themes are not one-word subjects, but statements that reflect the author’s ideological purposes for composing the work.

Timed Writings: These are essay responses written in forty minutes during class. These will be taken from previous Advanced Placement exams and will prepare students for the spring Advanced Placement exam. The focus will be on Question 3 during the 1st quarter, Question 2 during the 2nd quarter, and Question 1 during the 3rd quarter. For each Question 3 essay, the text chosen will be one we have studied in class so that students will be able to practice both composition and evaluation and demonstrate their grasp of the content of class discussions. Students are encouraged to craft a thesis statement that follows the guidelines set forth during discussion. They should answer the question in the prompt, and each essay should point to a thematic element of the text in question. The essay will also include references to either the literary strategies used to reinforce the theme, the social/historical context of the work of literature, or both.

During each quarter, students are given the opportunity to revise one timed writing for an improved grade. Using the instructor’s written feedback on the original essay and verbal feedback from conferences, students will revise their essays so that they are improved in the areas of clarity, organization, sentence structure and style, use of vocabulary, and supporting evidence. The instructor will also provide the class with positive and negative models of essays so that students may have a better understanding of effective organization, use of detail, voice, sentence structure, phrasing, transitioning, and word choice.

Formal Paper: During first semester, students will compose an extended essay from a list of suggested topics. Many students decide to complete a comparative analysis of several of the poems from the Bedford anthology. After conferencing with the instructor about topic selection, students will complete an outline before writing and revising this essay. It is expected that this analysis will use many examples of textual support in its focus on the selected structure and literary elements of the chosen poems. Examination of these elements will lead to a greater elucidation of theme.

Critical Presentations: During each unit, students will be divided into groups of approximately three students and will research a critical article pertaining to a text currently being studied. Students will write a précis of the critical article in their journals and then present the main points of the article to the class. These articles are to be fairly recent publications, and the study of these articles will allow students to become increasingly familiar with the various critical approaches and vocabulary widely used in academic discourse today.

Online discussion: Students are expected to contribute on a weekly basis to the Cascia Hall A.P. Literature web log. Comments may relate to the work currently being studied or to works read in the past. Students may choose to extend a point of discussion that originated in class or they may introduce new ideas. This blog gives students from both sections of this course the chance to communicate about our studies.

*All of the formal and informal writing detailed above should be completed with an emphasis on demonstrating the writer’s best skills. Every assignment is an opportunity to practice and improve upon one’s skills, and all assignments will be judged, at least in part, on the quality of the writing.

Grading Scale:

All assignments are evaluated on a nine-point scale.

9 = 99% 4 = 74%
8 = 94% 3 = 69%
7 = 89% 2 = 64%
6 = 84% 1 = 59%
5 = 79%

Advanced Placement Exam:

The AP Exam is divided into two parts and will be taken in the fourth quarter at the beginning of May. Part One requires the student to write essays about selected poems, a selected passage of prose, and finally, a work of literary merit based on a specific thematic question. Part Two consists of 70 multiple choice questions concerning literary analysis. All Cascia Hall A.P. Literature students are required to take this exam.
Course Units:

Unit One: Alienation and Society

Sometimes an individual’s moral precepts are decided by society’s institutions: churches, families, laws. These guidelines can provide comfort and direction; however, many works of literature challenge these boundaries and explore the concept of people who, intentionally or not, exist outside of institutional paradigms. Understanding the fate of characters who transcend the limits of cultural and religious morality helps readers to recognize the limits of our society and whether those limits should be challenged.

Texts:

Crime and Punishment Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Stranger Albert Camus

Unit Two: The Movement from Innocence to Experience

In this unit, we examine texts that follow the individual transformations that occur as protagonists move from youth to maturity. As they mature, these characters face internal and external conflicts that impact their moral, social, and psychological development and shape their adult personas. The journey is rarely easy, and the protagonist often follows the quest pattern typical of many of these coming of age tales.

Texts:

All the Pretty Horses Cormac McCarthy
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Mark Twain

Unit Three: The Realities of War – The Realities of Human Nature

As an unfortunate ever-present occurrence in human history, war has been at the center of much of literature. This literature has presented the realities of being a soldier as well as war’s effects on those who are innocent victims and those who are left behind on the “home front.” War has the capacity to bring out both the best and worst in humanity, and the texts we study in this unit reveal the realities of human nature in times of crisis.

Texts:

The Things They Carried Tim O’Brien
Slaughterhouse-Five Kurt Vonnegut
Lord of the Flies William Golding

Unit Four: The Tension Between Society and Feminine Self-Determination

In this unit, we examine the journeys of women in very different historical moments. These women are struggling against the boundaries of cultural femininity, socioeconomic status, social expectations, and, in some cases, race, to solidify their sense of selfhood and to negotiate the balance of power in male-female relationships. The protagonists are attempting to access power and self-actualization in communities whose inherent social structures marginalize and invalidate them. We examine the choices and compromises they make, and examine how these characters negotiate the obstacles presented to them.

Texts:

Jane Eyre Charlotte Bronte
Their Eyes Were Watching God Zora Neale Hurston

Unit Five: “All the world’s a stage…”

Arthur Miller said about drama, “By whatever means it is accomplished, the prime business of a play is to arouse the passions of its audience so that by the route of passion may be opened up new relationships between a man and men, and between men and Man. Drama is akin to the other inventions of man in that it ought to help us to know more and not merely to spend our feelings.” In this unit, we will take a closer look at how both comedy and tragedy help us to know more about what it means to be human.

Texts:

King Lear William Shakespeare
The Crucible Arthur Miller

Other Texts

Poetry: an introduction Michael Meyer Bedford / St. Martin’s

Note: While not specifically mentioned above, students in this course can also expect to prepare for the A.P. examination by answering multiple choice questions based on short passages. This material will be taken either from released exams from previous years, or similar material will be created by the instructors based on the texts that we discuss in class. These exercises are intended to familiarize students with the kinds of questions they will encounter on the exam and heighten their awareness of these elements (inference, use of detail, vocabulary in context, diction, sentence structure, etc.) in prose and poetry.