American Experience

Reading American Literature

Always Reading

What are you reading now? Throughout each semester, you should always be reading something - a novel, a biography, a memoir, essays, rhetoric, short stories, poetry and more. As you read, you will be developing and strengthening your critical thinking skills. This will offer you the opportunity to build an understanding of the many dimensions (e.g., philosophical, ethical, aesthetic) of the human experience found in American literature.

Author John Green offers some insight about reading and its purpose in the video below:

Fall Semester

To demonstrate the ability to comprehend, analyze and critique increasingly complex literature in a wide range of formats and multiple genres, we will read and respond to selected works from the following periods/movements in American literature together:

Neoclassicism

Evidence that you have authentically and independently read and comprehended increasingly complex texts across multiple genres and formats will come from summative assessments as well as detailed and in-depth reader's responses to works from each of these periods/movements.

Evidence will also come from a viewer's response to Arthur Miller's play The Crucible and reader's responses to a minimum of TWO independently selected works (novel-length) of American literature.


Spring Semester

To demonstrate the ability to comprehend, analyze and critique increasingly complex literature in a wide range of formats and multiple genres, we will read and respond to selected works from the following periods/movements in American literature:

Harlem Renaissance

Evidence that you have authentically and independently read and comprehended increasingly complex texts across multiple genres and formats will come from summative assessments as well as detailed and in-depth reader's responses to works from each of these periods/movements.

Evidence will also come from a viewer's response to Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman or Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun and reader's responses to a minimum of TWO independently selected works (novel-length) of American literature.

American Literature Reading List

Each semester, you must read and respond to a minimum of TWO independently selected works (novel-length) of American literature.

You can also bring in a book from home, select a book from our classroom library (brown and black bookcases), check a book out of the LMC or visit out classroom library for the following titles: