AP English: Literature and Composition
Curriculum Guide

Course Description

Additional prerequisite: submission of writing portfolio and an on-demand analytical piece of writing

AP English Literature is a specialized course for students who demonstrate an exceptional interest in and commitment to the study of literature. Students in this course will have already developed strong writing and analytical skills. In this course, students are engaged in the careful reading of literary works. Through such study, they sharpen their awareness of literature, language and their understanding of the writer's craft. They develop critical standards for the appreciation of any literary work. To achieve these goals, students consider and explore the structure, meaning, and value of each work and its relationship to contemporary experience as well as to the time in which it was written. Student/teacher writing conferences are held regularly outside of class meeting times in the Writing Center. Students are prepared to take the AP examination to earn college-level credits. Summer reading is required.

Course Overview and Components

The AP Literature and Composition course at Mt. Ararat combines a fairly traditional study of British Literature with a more theory-based focus on the process of literary interpretation and analysis. Our goal is to make students aware of current issues in literary and cultural criticism, to give them critical skills that will let them be equally "at home" in a sonnet by Donne, a cartoon in The New Yorker, and in a challenging piece of contemporary fiction or performance art.

First Quarter: Introduction to Hermeneutics

Most students in the course have completed a year of AP Language and Composition in the 11th grade and build on language awareness developed there. This quarter introduces the analytical tools of the course, by examining works in terms of both didactic and aesthetic considerations, and in terms of the degree to which a text allows itself to be subject to rational analysis. Among the topics are intentionality, validity in interpre tation, reductionism, theory-based interpretation, (such as psychoanalytic), multivalence, and the personal and social construction of meaning. Papers have included such topics as a close analysis of an ambiguous proverb ("a rolling stone"), an analysis of a fairy tale as an instance of covert psychological teaching, discussion papers on issues in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance , analysis of Barthelme stories, and journals responding to specific issues in the readings. The final test for the quarter asks students to apply the concepts of the course to a set of new short materials-cartoons, poems, short stories, parables.

Short Readings have included:

Assorted proverbs from Western & non-Western cultures
New Testament parables
Zen, Taoist, & Sufi parables & other wisdom literature
Grimm's fairy tales
Excerpts from Bettleheim, The Uses of Enchantment
Selected poetry
Cartoons from artists such as Larson, Steinberg, Chast, Koren, Ziegler, and Steig
Short fiction from writers such as Kafka, Barthelme, Calvino, Sontag.

Texts have included:

Austen, Pride and Prejudice
Hesse, Siddhartha
Brautigan, In Watermelon Sugar
Pirsig, Zen & and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Tyler, Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant
Vonnegut, Cat's Cradle
Weschler, "Boggs's Bills"
Selected readings in Linguistics
Christo's Running Fence (documentary film)
Irwin, Regarding Flight (performance video)
Sondheim, Into the Woods (musical on video)

November to April: Survey of British Literature

The next part of the course varies considerably from year to year and from teacher to teacher, and may also include a component of classic Greek drama. Rather than simply survey British Lit, it builds on the theoreti cal structure of the first quarter, often with the intention of looking at the "world view" of a particular historical period through the literature and of juxtaposing a classic work against a modern revision, such as Beowulf with Gardner's Grendel, Hamlet with Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead , or Antigone with Anouilh's revision. In recent years, these pairings have been used along with other readings to help students establish working definitions of "zeitgeist" concepts: classic, romantic, modern, post-modern. The Shakespeare play is treated intensively, including a paper of close textual analysis. Students often work with Shakespeare on computer disk to search for patterns of imagery In poetry, careful attention usually goes to the reading of the Shakespeare sonnets, Donne's metaphysical poetry, Blake, Wordsworth, and the early 20th century. Some versions of the course offer a focussed unit on Romanticism in the 19th century and its residue in contemporary culture. In other years, the course offers a focussed unit on the Courly Love System and its effects on our concepts of love and marriage.

Texts have included:

Beowulf (selections)
Gardner, Grendel
Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales
Capellanus, The Art of Courtly Love
Readings in The Courtly Love System
Shakespeare, Hamlet
Shakespeare, King Lear
Shakespeare, Sonnets
Stoppard, Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead
Metaphysical poetry
Swift, Gulliver's Travels
Romantic poetry
Shelley, Frankenstein
Readings in Romanticism
Dickens, Hard Times
Dickens, David Copperfield
Bronte, Wuthering Heights
Hardy, Return of the Native
Hardy, The Mayor of Casterbridge
Conrad, The Heart of Darkness
Readings in early 20th century poetry
Selections from Gertrude Stein
Scorcese, "Life Lessons" in New York Stories (film)
Kennedy, ed. Poetry: An Anthology
Tarnas, The Passion of the Western Mind (selections)

May to June: Contemporary Fiction and Poetry

Students read fiction and poetry from the 60's through the 90's. The continued study of poetry is one of the avenues of preparation for the Advanced Placement test. At the year's end, students give presentations to the class on authors of their choice. In addition, study of contemporary short stories leads to the writing of students' own fiction. The year generally ends with a student-produced, desktop-published book of their own fiction published as the last project of the class.

Texts vary from year to year, and generally include emerging new authors along with more established names. Books used in recent years have included story collections by:

Margaret Atwood
Donald Barthelme
John Barth
Ann Beattie
Jorge Luis Borges
T. Coraghesson Boyle
Richard Brautigan
Raymond Carver
Woody Allen
Amy Hempel
Franz Kafka
Garrison Keillor

Senior Paper

Like all seniors, those in AP English Literature and Composition must complete a senior reference paper on a topic of their choice in order to graduate. Students are introduced to the college library at Bowdoin, given library cards, and instructed to build their reference papers out of college-level sources found there. Time management is one additional factor in the AP senior paper. AP students complete the senior paper earlier in the year than others and with greater time constraints. Rather than presenting the reference paper as the best and final work of their high school career, we present it as part of the realistic time-management problems they will encounter when juggling more than one demanding assignment in their college load.

Outside Reading

Reading literature is an on-going project in AP Literature and Composition. In addition to required read ings for the course, students are given a choice of readings from a list of suggested classic and contemporary books compiled by the instructors and based primarily on books that have appeared in AP tests or have been discussed among teachers in the AP "network." Generally, students read one extra book a month. Methods of reporting on the book vary.

Commonplace Book

In most years, students are required to keep an on-going "commonplace book" beginning in the summer before their senior year. Students select passages from their reading that speak to them and for them, to create a "scrapbook" of quotations.

Core Assignments

Assignments vary from year to year. Even assignments that are standard to the course are examined and revised annually. Below is a representative sample of major assignments that students have completed in the past two years of Advanced Placement Literature. These handouts are offered in the spirit of providing a closer look at what is expected of students in the course, but with this caution: a handout is not an assignment. Behind each handout are many hours of discussion, preparation, and clarification with students.

Summer reading
Outside reading
Writing About Literature
"the line"
Rolling Stone
Grimm
Hamlet
Courtly Love
Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant
Grendel
Zen and Motorcycle assignments
Romanticism
AP Fiction Assignments
Fiction writing
Fiction Friday
Senior Paper
Sample mid-term exam
Sample cartoon analysis
Valediction

www.mta75.org/curriculum/english/ap4.html
Revised 10-May-2010

AP English: Literature and Composition Curriculum Guide