Abbreviated Course Overview

The AP English Literature and Composition course at Gloucester High School 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 many aspects of the English language, including vocabulary and sentence structure;
• To prepare students to write logically coherent analytical and critical essays that offer insightful generalities illustrated by specific details;
• 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)

• Read Invisible Man (Ralph Ellison), Wide Sargasso Sea (Jean Rhys), Translations (Brian Friel), Song of Myself (Walt Whitman) and take active reader notes.
• Write essays that (one) containing insightful, interpretive assertions about how authors use literary techniques to develop themes and (two) develop these assertions with specific textual evidence and clear explanations.

Unit 1: The Search for Self (and an introduction to AP writing)

• Read Jane Eyre (Charlotte Bronte) and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (James Joyce).
• Learn concepts relevant to the self, identity, and identity formation.
• Learning literary terms and techniques relevant to novels. (Literary style will be emphasized in the unit.)
• Participate in student led discussions.
• Write analyses explaining the relationship between specific passages and the work as a whole.
• Write analyses that explain how literary style and technique affects meaning.
• Write analyses that compare novels in meaningful ways, especially with regard to style, technique, and the theme of identity formation.

Unit 2: The Search for Self (and writing personal essays for college)

• Examine facets of one’s own identity through free-writing, open-responses, reflective self-questioning, and small and large group discussion.
• Read and analyze college essays and literary personal essays (from among other places The Best American Essays of the Century). Evaluation will take the form of written response and discussion.
• Write and revise a personal essay and/or personal statement for college admission.
• Write and revise a “not for college” literary essay in which one explores one’s own identity formation.

Unit 3: The Search for Self (in Poetry from the English Renaissance through Romanticism to Modernism)

• 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, William Carlos Williams’ imagism, Fernando Pessoa’s heteronyms, Frank O’Hara’s “Personism”, Sylvia Plath (and other “Confessional Poets”), Charles Olson’s Projective Verse, etc.
• Participate in student led discussions about poetry.
• Learn literary terms and techniques relevant to poetry.
• Write analyses explaining how poetic style and technique contributes to meaning.
• Write and revise analyses comparing how particular poems address similar themes.
• Create a poetry anthology with an introduction.

Unit 4: The Self, Family, and Society

• Read Antigone (Sophocles) and King Lear (Shakespeare), as well as a “choice” play from a list of titles including Enemy of the People (Ibsen), Long Day’s Journey into Night (O’Neill), Death of a Salesman (Miller), Fences (Wilson), and others. (This year instead of the choice play we may be reading Brecht’s play Galileo. This is dependent upon a grant from the Education Foundation.)
• Read As I Lay Dying (Faulkner), as well as a “choice” novel from a list of titles including East of Eden (Steinbeck), One Hundred Years of Solitude (Marquez), Anna Karenina (Tolstoy), One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest (Kesey) and others.
• Participate in student led discussions about drama and fiction in relation to appropriate literary terms and the theme of the self’s relationship with family and society.
• Learn literary terms and techniques relevant to drama.
• Continue to write and revise essays about the relationship between style, technique, and meaning.
• Continue to write and revise essays comparing works that deal with a similar theme.

Unit 5: The Self, the Journey, and the World beyond the Known

• Read (and do a “staged reading” of) Waiting for Godot (Beckett). (This play is an anti-journey of sorts.)
• Read Heart of Darkness (Conrad) and view Apocalypse Now! (Coppola)
• Reading excerpts from Moby Dick (Melville), Call Me Ishmael (Olson), and The Inferno (Dante).
• Understand concepts related to this unit’s theme: the journey, the quest, the walkabout, “the other,” etc.
• Practice timed-writing: one on a poem and one on an excerpt from a work of fiction. At this point in the year students will have identified aspects of their writing that are in need of improvement before the AP exam. During the drafting, assessing, and revising process students will be asked to pay special attention to the aspects of essay writing—vocabulary, sentence structure, organization, generalizations, and/or supporting detail—which are in need of improvement.
• Write, evaluate, and rewrite an extended analysis and evaluation of the conflicts between self, family, and society in the literature of this unit.

Unit 6: The World and the Self: Attention, Imagination, and Innovation (After the AP Test)

• Read literature in which authors use imagination and imaginative language to transform attentive perceptions of “real world” particulars into artistic expression: Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essays, The Maximus Poems (Charles Olson), Zero Hour (Ernesto Cardenal), Century of the Wind (Eduardo Galeano) to examine ways that.
• Read non-realist imaginative literature: 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).
• Watch an excerpt from the film Six Degrees of Separation that deals directly with competing definitions of “imagination.”
• Write, evaluate, and revise an extended essay on the role of the imagination (and imaginative language) in the literature they have studied.
• Create imaginative works based on close examination of the world and imaginative use of language.
• Read, research, and analyze the work of an inventive, innovative modern or post-modern literary artist. You will choose from a list or propose your own.
• Create imaginative works in response to the work of the aforementioned artist.