Advanced Placement English Literature and Composition

Course Overview

The Advanced Placement English Literature and Composition course is a college-level class that engages students in a careful and critical analysis of complex literary texts. Close reading is emphasized over breadth of material covered. In this course, students “read deliberately and thoroughly, taking time to understand a work’s complexity, to absorb its richness of meaning, and to analyze how that meaning is embodied in literary form. This course is a combination of British, American, and World literature both classic and contemporary. In addition to considering a work’s literary artistry, students reflect on the social and historical values the literature reflects and embodies” (AP Course Description, May 2007-May 2008, page 45). Some of this contextual information is provided by the instructor and through supplementary readings; however students are also expected to seek out information on their own particularly during independent reading. Supplementary texts from various sources, genres, and time periods are used within each unit to enrich the depth of material studied and allow students to make connections with literature across the ages. While students are encouraged to use other sources, materials need to be selected from appropriate and reliable sources (Spark notes and similar websites are not acceptable or reliable sources). Selected readings from the course textbook The Bedford Introduction to Literature: Reading, Thinking, Writing and titles such as Macbeth, Frankenstein, A Doll’s House, “The Story of an Hour”, The Awakening, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Slaughterhouse-Five, A Thousand Splendid Suns, and excerpts from In Cold Blood are read and analyzed by all students in the class. Students compose formal and interpretative literary essays which involves research in terms of the historical, social and cultural values it contains, focusing on the literary elements of style, theme, figurative language, imagery, symbolism, tone, etc., used by the author or playwright.

Writing conferences and workshops comprise the second component of the course. Students compose formal and informal analytical essays in response to literature. Students may journal their “experiences” with literature using exploratory writing (AP Course Description, May 2007-May 2008, page 45). Expository writing is another requirement of the course in both timed and untimed settings. The untimed, extended analyses provide students an opportunity to edit and revise their work based on instructor and peer feedback. The timed in-class response, given at least once every two weeks, requires students to draw upon textual details to interpret the meaning of the work. All essays, including timed writes, will be edited and revised for final publication. The supplemental writing text used for this course is Kelley Griffith’s Writing Essays about Literature. Students have access to the text and readings are assigned in addition to the course literature to enhance their written interpretations of texts. All graded essays are evaluated using the nine-point AP style rubric. Written teacher feedback is provided on both formal and in-class essays. Furthermore, each quarter students are required to make an appointment and attend an after school writing conference to discuss concerns and improvements. Lastly, a program of vocabulary and grammar development is an integral part of the AP English Literature and Composition course. Through exercises in Sadlier-Oxford’s Vocabulary Workshop, Elements of Style by Strunk and White, and SAT style sentence-completion drills, students develop a wide-ranging vocabulary and improve their writing.

Course Outcomes

In this course students will:

• improve close reading and analytical strategies

• stretch their imaginative abilities in reaction to literature

• improve their ability to find and explain (through discussion and writing) what is of value in literature

• revisit the purposes and strategies of rhetoric in order to:

- develop an effective use of rhetoric, including controlling tone, establishing and maintaining voice, and achieving appropriate emphasis through diction and sentence structure

- improve organization in writing through techniques to improve coherence, such as repetition, transitions, and emphasis

- effectively state, support and explain their claims in their arguments

• advance vocabulary skills to cope with unfamiliar language