AP English Literature and Composition
This course is designed
- to encourage students to investigate the self and its relationship to its surroundings (families, societies, cultures, civilizations, nature).
- to prepare students—through active-reader strategies, knowledge of literary techniques, exploratory writing in journals, focused classroom discussions, the process of formal writing, etc.—to analyze, understand, explain, and evaluate works of imaginative literature from many time periods and many places.
- to help students write with purpose, style, sophistication, and a command of the English language and its conventions.
- to equip students with the reading, writing, and critical thinking skills necessary to succeed on the AP English Literature and Composition Exam.
Unit 1a: The Search for Self (pre-reading over the summer)
Thematic Essential Questions:
- What is the “self”? What is an “identity”?
- What affects the formation of an identity? In what ways is one’s identity a matter of choice? In what ways is one’s identity a matter of factors beyond one’s control?
- How do conflicting allegiances, conflicting desires, conflicting roles, conflicting conceptions of our identities create identity crises? How do we resolve (or manage) these identity crises?
Skill-based Essential Question:
- What are the habits of an active reader? How does one become an active reader?
- How does journal writing help create a deeper understanding of a text?
Learning Activities
- Read Invisible Man (Ralph Ellison), Wide
- Complete directed active-reader response journal.
Unit 1: The Search for Self (and an introduction to AP writing)
THREE WEEKS
Thematic Essential Questions:
- What is the “self”? What is an “identity”?
- What affects the formation of an identity? In what ways is one’s identity a matter of choice? In what ways is one’s identity a matter of factors beyond one’s control?
- How do conflicting allegiances, conflicting desires, conflicting roles, conflicting conceptions of our identities create identity crises? How do we resolve (or manage) these identity crises?
Skill-based Essential Question:
- How do authors use language to create and dramatize fictional selves and identities in novels?
- How does one fully experience and understand novels from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries?
- How does one write insightfully and clearly about a complex novel under the constraints of time?
- How does one write extended analyses and evaluations of novels?
Learning Activities
- The students will have read Invisible Man, Wide Sargasso Sea before beginning the first unit.
- During this unit students will keep an active-reader journal while reading Jane Eyre.
- In this unit students will explore the theme of identity formation and practice timed, in-class response writing.
- Students will learn literary terms and techniques relevant to writing about the modern novel and romantic/modern poetry.
- Students will learn concepts specific to considering the self and identity (including the ideas of Erik Erikson, James Marcia, and W.E.B. Du Bois)
- Students will refresh close reading and active reading techniques learned in grades 9-11.
- Students will discuss and refresh the timed-writing process, including understanding the prompt, planning, writing, and editing.
- Students will practice timed-writing using adapted AP prompts.
- Students will evaluate their timed-writing using a scoring guide and anchor essays.
- Students will rewrite essays using feedback and a scoring guide.
- Students will define and understand concepts including self, identity, identity formation (Erik Erickson), identity status (James Marcia), double consciousness (W.E.B. Du Bois).
- Students will apply concepts to an analysis of the novels studied during this unit.
- Students will write extended analyses and evaluations of the novels using identity concepts.
Unit 2: The Search for Self (in Poetry from the English Renaissance through Romanticism to Modernism)
FOUR WEEKS
Thematic Essential Questions:
- What is the “self”? What is an “identity”?
- What affects the formation of an identity?
Skill-based Essential Question:
- How do poets use language to present, express, explore, and dramatize understandings of self? How do poets use language to present, express, explore, and dramatize the relationship between the self and the world?
- How does one fully experience and understand poetry from many time periods?
- How does one use close reading and explication to arrive at a deeper understanding of poetry?
- How does one write insightfully and clearly about complex poems under the constraints of time?
- How does one write extended analyses and evaluations of poetry?
Learning Activities
- Students will have read William Carlos Williams’ early poems and Whitman’s Song of Myself before beginning this unit.
- Students will read poetry (and prose about poetry) relevant to the exploration of the self: Shakespeare’s sonnets, metaphysical poets (Donne, Herbert, Marvell), Wordsworth’s “Preface to Lyrical Ballads,” Keats’s “Negative Capability” letter, poems by Wordsworth and other English Romantics (Coleridge, Shelley, Keats), Dickinson (and excerpts from Susan Howe’s My Emily Dickinson), Whitman, Hopkins (and “inscape”), Pound and Eliot’s personae, Fernando Pessoa’s heteronyms, Frank O’Hara (and “Personism”), Sylvia Plath (and other “Confessional Poets”), etc.
- Students will gain experience reading, thinking critically, and writing about poetry.
- Students will learn literary terms and techniques relevant to poetry. (An understanding of personas and poetic voice as distinct from the poet-author is extremely important in this unit.)
- Students will identify techniques, analyze how the techniques are used, and synthesize meaning for poems.
- Students will learn to explicate poetry through models and practice.
- Students will apply the social, historical, political context of poems (especially pertaining to changing concepts about self and identity) to help determine meaning.
- Students will complete informal journal assignments in which they practice poetry analysis and in which they respond more personally to the poems.
- Students will practice, evaluate, and rewrite timed essays about three poems. (The focus will be on “close reading”: interpreting poetry by attending to textual details.)
- Students will write extended analyses and evaluations about three poems that they select from the unit.
Unit 3: The Search for Self (and writing personal essays for college)
THREE WEEKS
Thematic Essential Questions:
- How does one form an identity and how does one come to an understanding of oneself?
- How does personal writing reveal (and conceal) the self?
- How is the personal essay (or personal narrative) different from other related genres (especially the expository essay and fictional narrative)?
Skill-Based Essential Question:
- How does one write an excellent college essay?
- How does one write an excellent literary personal essay?
Learning Activities
- Students will examine the facets of their identities through free-writing, open-responses, reflective self-questioning, and small and large group discussion.
- Students will read and evaluate college essays and literary personal essays (from among other places The Best American Essays of the Century). The evaluation will be in journal form and in discussion.
- Students will write personal essays and/or personal statements for college admission.
- Students will write literary personal essays in which they explore their own search for self.
- Students will evaluate their writing using a scoring guide.
- Students will revise their essays extensively.
Unit 4a: a link between the units (Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man)
Thematic Essential Questions:
- What is the relationship between our inner selves, our family selves, and our public selves?
- How does one respond when one’s family (and/or one’s society) sees one differently than one sees oneself?
- How does one choose when one is caught between one’s self, one’s family, and/or one’s society (one’s town, one’s nation, one’s religion, one’s culture, one’s civilization etc.), or being true to one’s family or being true to one’s nation or society?
- When is one’s identity a matter of choice? When is one’s identity a matter of factors beyond one’s control?
Skill-Based Essential Question:
- How does James Joyce use language to create a fictional self and to dramatize his identity conflicts?
- How does one write take active notes to prepare for expository essay writing?
Learning Activities
- During units two and three (when there is not so much reading) students will A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Unit 4: The Self, Family, and Society
SIX WEEKS
Thematic Essential Questions:
- What is the relationship between our inner selves, our family selves, and our public selves?
- How does one respond when one’s family (and/or one’s society) sees one differently than one sees oneself?
- How does one choose when one is caught between one’s self, one’s family, and/or one’s society (one’s town, one’s nation, one’s religion, one’s culture, one’s civilization etc.), or being true to one’s family or being true to one’s nation or society?
- When is one’s identity a matter of choice? When is one’s identity a matter of factors beyond one’s control?
Skill-Based Essential Question:
- How do playwrights and novelists use language to create fictional selves and to dramatize identity conflicts?
- How does one fully experience and understand drama from many time periods?
- How does one write well about plays and novels in extended essays and in timed responses?
Learning Activities
- Students will have read A Portrait of the Artist as a Young
- Students will read Antigone and King Lear, as well as a “choice” play from a list of titles including Enemy of the People, Long Day’s Journey into Night, Death of a Salesman, Fences, and others. (They will read and write journal responses about their chosen play during units two and three—in other words, before this unit begins.)
- Students will read As I Lay Dying, as well as a “choice” novel from a list of titles including East of Eden, One Hundred Years of Solitude, Anna Karenina, One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest and others. (They will read and write journal responses about their chosen novel during units two and three—in other words, before this unit begins.)
- Students will read (in translation) short stories by Clarice Lispector (including “Love”) and the novella Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka.
- Students will develop an understanding of concepts including family, society, culture, and civilization.
- Students will continue to practice timed-writing that asks them to analyze works in terms of literary techniques employed by authors in this unit.
- Students will write, evaluate, and rewrite an extended analysis and evaluation of the conflicts among self, family, and society in the literature of this unit.
Unit 5: The Self, the Journey, and the World beyond the Known
EIGHT WEEKS
Thematic Essential Questions:
- Why do journeys and quests help and/or hinder one’s identity formation and one’s search for self?
- How do writers use the journeys to examine the relationship between the self, the known world, and the world beyond?
Skill-Based Essential Question:
- {something about writing to evaluate}
Learning Activities
- Students will read Heart of Darkness and view Apocalypse Now!
- Students will deepen their understanding of the unit’s central theme by reading excerpts from Moby Dick (Melville), Call Me Ishmael (Charles Olson), The Inferno (Dante).
- Students will keep an active reader journal while reading one book from a list including Slaughterhouse-Five, The Things They Carried, Gone Boy: A Walkabout, On the Road,
- Students will read Whitman’s “Song of the
- Students will understand concepts related to this unit’s theme: the journey, the quest, the walkabout, “the other,” etc.
- Students will continue to practice timed-writing: one on a poem and one on an excerpt from a work of fiction.
- Students will write, evaluate, and rewrite an extended analysis and evaluation of the conflicts between self, family, and society in the literature of this unit.
- Students will write, evaluate, and rewrite a reflective personal essay about a literal and/or metaphorical journey beyond the known.
Unit 6: The World and the Self: Attention and Imagination
EIGHT WEEKS
Thematic Essential Questions:
- How do open-minded attention and acts of imagination allow one to see new possibilities and develop new understandings of oneself and of the surrounding world?
Skill-Based Essential Question:
- How do writers (and how can any of us) use language to communicate imaginative possibilities and understandings?
Learning Activities
- Students will read excerpts from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essays, The Maximus Poems (Charles Olson), Zero Hour (Ernesto Cardinal), Century of the Wind (Eduardo Galeano) to examine ways that authors use imagination and imaginative language to transform our perceptions of particulars and to provide essential insights.
- Students will write in active-reader journals and discuss in small and large groups.
- Students will read Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (Stevens), Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (Stoppard), selection of “Magical Realist” short fiction, selection of Surrealist poems, excerpts from Metamorphoses (Ovid), excerpts from The Truth and Life of Myth (a book-length essay by Robert Duncan) to examine less obviously “realistic” works of literature. (We’ll also watch an excerpt from the film Six Degrees of Separation that deals directly with competing definitions of “imagination.)
- Students will write in active-reader journals and discuss in small and large groups.
- Students will investigate concepts including attention, perspective, perception, imagination, creativity, reality, myth, archetype, surrealism, Theatre of the Absurd, etc.
- Students will create imaginative works based on close examination of the world and imaginative use of language. Students will evaluate their work and revise.
- Students will also write, evaluate, and revise an extended essay on the role of the imagination (and imaginative language) in the literature they have studied.
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