The goals AP English Literarture are to acquaint students with the content and expansive effect of the canon of literature and to engage them in active individual and cultural exploration. The primary focus, therefore, is to involve students in both the study and practice of writing and in the study of literature. Students write Analytical Reading Notes (ARNs) and regularly submit short exploratory or expository essays in response to readings. These essays focus on one or two specific passages--they are close-reading essays that explore one of several aspects of the text: structure, style, theme, conflict, figurative language, symbolism, historical or socio-political context, etc.
Independent critical reading and annotation.
Critical reading and thinking; tracing ideas central to Western philosophy (Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian) through multiple texts and genres over several literary periods.
Readings may include: Genesis, Milton's Paradise Lost, Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita, Steinbeck's East of Eden.
In this unit, students have an overview of literary periods from the Classical through Post-Modern. Individuals, working in groups, become class experts on a specific period.
Skills include:
Intertextual analysis that considers common characters and storylines and common literary period and style.
Readings may include: Bronte's Jane Eyre, Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea, Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury.
Critical reading skills focused on interpreting poetic devices and figurative langauge. Student annotation of poetic and dramatic texts that generate response/reaction papers to reach critical conclusions. Students define assigned literary terms and poetic devices to create a class list and are expected to learn the definitions and apply them to poetry in class discussion and in writing.
Reading may include: Shakespeare's Hamlet, The Tempest, King Lear or Winter's Tale, excerpts from Sound and Sense and supplemental poems from a varitey of periods and forms.
In this unit, the students
Analysis of society's impact on the individual through such works as Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, Woolf's Orlando or Mrs. Dalloway, Dostoyevky's Crime and Punishment, Achebe's Things Fall Apart. Individual and/or group exploration of the "social and historical values" that the novel "reflects and embodies."