Incoming 12th Grade

To: Students Enrolled in English 12 AP Literature and Composition for the 2019-20 School Year

From: The English Department

In preparation for your work in English 12 AP Literature and Composition next year, the English Department is requiring that you read the following novel:

Orange, Tommy. There There. New York: Knopf, 2018.

Students are responsible for acquiring the text on their own. We have notified the Montclair Book Center, Watchung Booksellers, Barnes and Noble, and the Montclair Public Library of the reading requirement, so copies should be available to purchase or borrow. You may also purchase a copy, new or used, from an on-line bookseller.

In a review of the novel in the New York Times, Colm Toibin writes, “In Tommy Orange’s “There There,” an ambitious meditation on identity and its broken alternatives, on myth filtered through the lens of time and poverty and urban life, on tradition all the more pressing because of its fragility, it is as if he seeks to reconfigure Oakland as a locus of desire and dreams, to remake the city in the likeness of his large and fascinating set of characters.” Toibin adds that “Orange makes Oakland into a “there” that becomes all the more concretely, emphatically and fully so in a novel that deals, in tones that are sweeping and subtle, large-gestured and nuanced, with what the notion of belonging means for Native Americans.”

During the first week of school, students will be discussing the novel and writing an in-class essay. It would be useful, therefore, to take some notes on the novel as you read.

Consider the elements of fiction: character development, plot structure, narrative voice, setting, symbols, imagery, figurative language, and tone.

If you have any questions about this reading assignment before the school year ends, please contact your teacher.

AP English Literature and Composition has its own summer assignment separate from the school-wide summer assignment. CGI 12 AP Literature and Composition is a course that prepares all students to take the AP Literature and Composition course but it can be taken in different flavors (different approaches).

In CGI 12 AP students are able to concentrate in one of three approaches while developing the skills to excel on the AP test:

Literary Criticism (traditional), in which students develop an analytical approach to literature grounded in Formalist and other lenses of literary analysis (such as feminism, Marxism, etc.) as practiced in the Western Tradition of analysis.

Humanities, in which students develop an interdisciplinary approach to literature grounded in the Western Tradition of the arts.

Philosophy, in which students develop a conceptual (rational) approach to literature grounded in the Western Tradition of philosophy.

While Literary Criticism examines how the form and experience of a literary work creates an artistic experience for the reader, the Humanities approach examines how various contemporaneous art forms can further reveal important themes and concepts in the text, and the Philosophical approach examines how a text reveals and explores metaphysical (the nature of existence), epistemological (how one knows), political (how to organize people), as well as aesthetic (notions of beauty) concerns of the author.

The summer assignment is divided by approach.

Choosing to do one assignment will NOT lock you into that approach. The choices are meant to give you a sense of the method each approach develops. Final choices in each student’s approach will be made by the end of September.

AP Literature:

Read There There. by Tommy Orange (New York: Knopf, 2018) and follow directions on back.

Humanities:

Read Antigone by Sophocles and Frogs by Aristophanes and follow directions for AP Lit on back.

Watch Ancient Greece: The Greatest Show on Earth, episode 1: The Democrats. The video is available on YouTube.

Write two pages (journaling not formal writing) on the relationship between drama and democracy.

Philosophy:

Read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig and follow directions for AP Lit on the back.

Honors students need to do a summer assignment, but most of the concentration assignments during the year is AP level work. That work culminates in literary Thesis, or philosophical Article and Presentation, or humanities Research Project and Presentation.

Honors students will have review and study times while AP students are performing additional assignments leading to these culminating displays of learning.