English IV Advanced Placement
Mr. Ryan Reese
Room 205
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The Classroom
Discussions & Class Participation: Discussions are the heart of your learning experience in this course. In order to foster genuine and dynamic conversation, it will be vital that you respectothers’ comments and contributions to class discussion. If you ridicule what someone else has said in a derogatory or disrespectful manner, you will be penalized. Participation grades are not taken every day, but when you are clearly making efforts to produce and present ideas and conversation pertaining to the subject matter, you will receive the credit you deserve. Discussion and participation is a classwork grade and is scored thusly:
1. Active participation (insightful responses to questions generating further questions or perpetuating discussion) = 100
2. Attention without active participation (clearly engaged, but not participating unless called on) = no credit, no penalty
3. Disruptive behavior, phone usage, sleeping, or other distractions that disengage you from participation = zero
**If a student receives a zero, the reasons for the score will be noted in TxConnect, accessible to parents as well as students**
Late work: Late work is accepted until the close of the quarter for a forty point deduction, resulting in a maximum passing grade of a 60 prior to teacher assessment.
Tutoring hours: I am available for tutoring/additional instruction from 7:30-8:00 and 3:30-3:55, or by appointment
Reading Material
Heart of Darkness, by Joseph Conrad ISBN-10:0486264645 (Dover Thrift Edition)
Hard Times, by Charles Dickens ISBN-10:0486419207 (Dover Thrift Edition)
Things Fall Apart, by Chinua Achebe ASIN:B01182XUUU
The Plague, by Albert Camus ISBN-10:0679720219
Hamlet NoFear edition
King Lear: NoFearedition
Course Overview
The units' designations are malleable and I have the ability to add and/or subtract from the available material as I see fit. The units are broad in scope and ensure that students will have plenty of work throughout the year. During this time students will compose several formal papers and two or three in-class essays per quarter. In addition to this, students' material will be assessed via quizzes (pop or otherwise), and classroom presentations--solo or group. The structure of this course is intended to follow the AP English Course Description framework ().
Course Requirements
The course includes an intensive study of representative works such as those by authors listed below cited in the AP English Course Description. (Note: The College Board does not mandate any particular authors or reading list). By the time the student completes AP English Literature and Composition she or he will have studied high school literature from both British and American writers, as well as works written in several genres from the sixteenth century to contemporary times.
The course teaches students to write an interpretation of a piece of literature that is based on a careful observation of textual details, considering the works':
- Structure, style, and themes
- The social and historical values it reflects and embodies
- Such elements as the use of figurative language, imagery, stymbolism, and tone
The course includes frequent opportunities for students to write and rewrite formal, extended analyses and timed, in-class responses. The course requires:
- Writing to understand: informal, exploratory writing activities that enable students to discover what they think in the process of writing about their reading.
- Writing to explain: Expository, analytical essays in which students draw upon textual details to develop an extended explanation/interpretation of the meanings of a literary text
- Writing to evaluate: Analytical argumentative essays in which students draw upon textual details to make and explain judgments about a work's artistry and quality, and its social and cultural values
The AP Development Committee is committed to careful review of potentially controversial material; and, because Antonian College Preparatory is a Catholic institution, additional reviews are required when selecting reading materialconforming to Catholic teachings.Recognizing the universal value of literary art that probes difficult and harsh life experiences and so deepens understanding, the committee emphasizes that fair representation of issues and peoples may occasionally include controversial material. Since AP students have chosen a program that directly involves them in college-level work, the AP English Literature and Composition Exam depends on a level of maturity consistent with the age of 12th-grade Catholic school students who have engaged in thoughtful analysis of literary texts. The best response to a controversial detail or idea in a literary work is a question about the larger meaning, purpose or overall effect of the detail or idea in context. AP students should have the maturity, the skill and the will to seek the larger meaning through thoughtful research.
Poetry
W. H. Auden; Elizabeth Bishop; William Blake; Anne Bradstreet; Edward KamauBrathwaite; Gwendolyn Brooks; Robert Browning; George Gordon, Lord Byron; Lorna Dee Cervantes; Geoffrey Chaucer; Lucille Clifton; Samuel Taylor Coleridge; Billy Collins; H. D. (Hilda Doolittle); Emily Dickinson; John Donne; Rita Dove; Paul Laurence Dunbar; T. S. Eliot; Robert Frost; Joy Harjo; Seamus Heaney; George Herbert; Garrett Hongo; Gerard Manley Hopkins; Langston Hughes; Ben Jonson; John Keats; Philip Larkin; Robert Lowell; Andrew Marvell; John Milton; Marianne Moore; Sylvia Plath; Edgar Allan Poe; Alexander Pope; Adrienne Rich; Anne Sexton; William Shakespeare; Percy Bysshe Shelley; Leslie Marmon Silko; Cathy Song; Wallace Stevens; Alfred, Lord Tennyson; Derek Walcott; Walt Whitman; Richard Wilbur; William Carlos Williams; William Wordsworth; William Butler Yeats
Drama
Aeschylus; Edward Albee; Amiri Baraka; Samuel Beckett; Anton Chekhov; CarylChurchill; William Congreve; Athol Fugard; Lorraine Hansberry; Lillian Hellman; David Henry Hwang; Henrik Ibsen; Ben Jonson; David Mamet; Arthur Miller; Molière; Marsha Norman; Sean O’Casey; Eugene O’Neill; Suzan-Lori Parks; Harold Pinter; Luigi Pirandello; William Shakespeare; George Bernard Shaw; Sam Shepard; Sophocles; Tom Stoppard; Luis Valdez; Oscar Wilde; Tennessee Williams; August Wilson
Fiction (Novel and Short Story)
Chinua Achebe; Sherman Alexie; Isabel Allende; Rudolfo Anaya; Margaret Atwood; Jane Austen; James Baldwin; Saul Bellow; Charlotte Brontë; Emily Brontë; Raymond Carver; Willa Cather; John Cheever; Kate Chopin; Sandra Cisneros; Joseph Conrad; EdwidgeDanticat; Daniel Defoe; Anita Desai; Charles Dickens; Fyodor Dostoevsky; George Eliot; Ralph Ellison; Louise Erdrich; William Faulkner; Henry Fielding; F. Scott Fitzgerald; E. M. Forster; Thomas Hardy; Nathaniel Hawthorne; Ernest Hemingway; Zora Neale Hurston; Kazuo Ishiguro; Henry James; Ha Jin; Edward P. Jones; James Joyce; Maxine Hong Kingston; Joy Kogawa; JhumpaLahiri; Margaret Laurence; D. H. Lawrence; Chang-rae Lee; Bernard Malamud; Gabriel GarcíaMárquez; Cormac McCarthy; Ian McEwan; Herman Melville; Toni Morrison; BharatiMukherjee; Vladimir Nabokov; Flannery O’Connor; OrhanPamuk; Katherine Anne Porter; MarilynneRobinson; Jonathan Swift; Mark Twain; John Updike; Alice Walker; Evelyn Waugh; Eudora Welty; Edith Wharton; John Edgar Wideman; Virginia Woolf; Richard Wright
Expository Prose
Joseph Addison; Gloria Anzaldúa; Matthew Arnold; James Baldwin; James Boswell; Jesús Colón; Joan Didion; Frederick Douglass; W. E. B. Du Bois; Ralph Waldo Emerson; William Hazlitt; bell hooks; Samuel Johnson; Charles Lamb; Thomas Macaulay; Mary McCarthy; John Stuart Mill; George Orwell; Michael Pollan; Richard Rodriguez; Edward Said; Lewis Thomas; Henry David Thoreau; E. B. White; Virginia Woolf
2017-2018Syllabus
Semester 1
Unit 1: Summer reading and the standards of writing
After informal discussion of the summer reading, students' mastery of their summer reading material will be evaluated with a quiz following a day of discussion of the material--one day per work. Students will read two sections of Strunk and White's Elements of Style per night. Over the following of the unit, students will complete exercises associated with the chapters. Students will also be quizzed, assessing their understanding for specific sections per the areas needing improvement. This unit will establish the writing standards for the year, from critical analyses to personal essays. Students will often see "See S&W" in notes I write on their papers.
Unit 2: Essays for College Admission/Scholarship Application
Students will understand and work with personal writing--including, but not limited to, anecdote, dialogue, details, language, syntax, and varied sentence structure. They will work within conventions and explanations established in Unit 1. They will engage in peer editing and revision and complete at least two personal essays for college admission.
Unit 3: Poetry
Students will encounter poetry throughout the year. Any works not readily available online, in their designated textbooks, or anthologies available in class will be provided to them. These works will range from pre-nineteenth century writing--especially poetry by Donne, Dryden, and Wordsworth--to contemporary poetry dealing with social subjects like gender, race, and war. The majority of subject matter and assignments will come from two anthologies: The Bedford Introduction to Literature: Reading, Thinking, Writing, and eighth edition of The Norton Introduction to Literature.
Students will keep a poetry-reading journal, where they will record initial questions, impressions, and responses to the poems they are reading. In other words, they will use the TP-CASTT (Title, Paraphrase, Connotation, Shift, Title, Theme) system in a prosaic manner.
Unit 6: Shakespearean Drama: King Lear
As we read the play in class, I gloss over the text and stop frequently to raise discussion questions. For example, I ask them to consider why Cordelia refuses to play along with her sisters in the opening scene and whether she is right in doing so. Discussions that follow often supply insights and force students to examine the text closely.
Short in-class writing assignments also ask students to show their understanding of the text. These assignments will relate to students' understanding of selected readings in Aristotle's The Poetics, and Machiavelli's The Prince.
Students will be asked to keep a dialectical notebook on King Lear. In the notebook they will record impressions of the text as they read it, noting themes, concerns, and settings. The notebooks are used in group discussions and to prepare for future writing assignments.
Unit 7: The novel (part one): Hard Times
Unit Expectations
Study includes the great chain of being; Dickens’s language, form, and function of tragedy; and religious, scientific, and cultural beliefs of the Elizabethan age. By the end of the unit, students will be able to compose the following:
1. An essay test/timed write using question #3 from earlier AP English Literature and Composition Exams.
2. Literary analysis paper — formal, persuasive essay evaluating Hamlet based on one of the two questions above. Direct composition instruction: format — clear thesis, incorporation of lines and quotes, pronoun usage, support paragraphs, introduction necessary for audience, thesis followed throughout, strong concluding paragraph.
Unit 8: Short Fiction
Essential Question: How does the short story work on many levels to create a unified effect?
Students should be able to pinpoint and clearly explain the particular effect an author achieves in a piece of short fiction and how the author achieves that effect through the use of such elements as symbols, imagery, diction, and organization. At the end of the unit, students write a two to three page essay applying this to a story of their choice.
Research Assignment
I call this paper a “modified research paper” because I am not interested in having students quoting extensively from a number of sources to show they know how to do that. Rather, students need to find only one source to apply to one of the short stories or novels they have read in class or for summer reading and then write an original and complete evaluation of the story’s artistry, quality, and social and cultural values. The analysis of the short story must be based on some published work that offers a theory of why people behave the way they do. For example, a student might find a work that explores how childhood friendships and/or traumas may become fixations in adult life and then use this work to discuss what happens in Margaret Atwood’s “Death By Landscape.” Citations throughout the paper come from only two sources — the short story itself and the work the student chooses as the basis for the analysis. Students may analyze the story according to the theories of Sigmund Freud, the student must read Freud, not someone’s interpretation of Freud. Theories of why people behave the way they do may come from the fields of psychology, philosophy, theology, political science, or sociology.
Christmas Break!
Semester 2
Unit 9: The novel and writing about it: The Plague
Students will read the novel and take a test comprised of multiple-choice questions--pertaining to objective knowledge as well as critical reading--and a timed (40 minutes) analytical, argumentative essay that attempts to persuade its reader that the novel is making specific socio-historical commentary on an issue of social concern. In the opening paragraph of the essay, students will argue for specific ways that each novel reflects the social concern detected and articulated in writing, using illustrations from the texts.
Unit 10: Modern Prose and Poetry: Heart of Darkness
Students will explore Joseph Conrad's literary techniques of impressionistic writing, frame narrative, inference, and symbolism.
Unit 11: The Waste Land
On an individual basis, students will engage in in-depth analyses of the poem's sections. Then, in assigned groups, they will prepare presentations of their collective findings, explaining their case using literary elements/techniques including, but not limited to, title, paraphrasing, context, allusion, shift, theme, and tone.
Unit 12: Modern Drama: A Streetcar Named Desire
Students will read the play in class as well as on their own. By the end of this unit, they student will be able to:
1. Analyze the significance of the play within the context of the development of twentieth-century American drama.
2. Trace the development of the major and secondary themes of the play: • The Old South cannot survive the industrialized, modern world. • Desire leads to sorrow, loneliness, and death. • Life is inherently lonely. • Fantasy and reality are incompatible with one another. • Human beings are animals.
3. Identify the common motifs used throughout the play.
4. Analyze the use of music, costumes, scenery, and lighting.
5. Identify the characteristics and components of a tragedy, including: a. exposition b. conflict c. rising action d. crisis e. climax f. falling action g. denouement h. catastrophe
6. Analyze the significance of the title of the play and its relationship to the central themes of the work.
7. Respond to writing prompts similar to those that will appear on the Advanced Placement in English Literature and Composition exam.
8. Respond to multiple-choice questions similar to those that will appear on the Advanced Placement in English Literature and Composition exam.
Unit 13: Preparation for AP exam