Syllabus for Ap English Language

SYLLABUS FOR AP ENGLISH LANGUAGE

FIRST QUARTER

We begin our year with an emphasis on close textual reading, with special attention to the rhetorical and literary devices used by an author to achieve his purposes, and with an eye to the writer’s perspective (including biases), as revealed by his or her deployment of these resources of language. Gary Lindbergh’s critical reading journal, as he describes it in “The Journal Conference: from Dialectic to Dialogue” (in Toby Fulwiler’s The Journal Book) guides us in a three-phased process of writing analytical mini-essays on the diction, figurative language, syntax, and other resources of language in passages of a text, and drawing from these their rhetorical purposes; writing meta-cognitive comments on what our own analytical writing reveals to us about our reading habits, and areas in which we perceive a need for growth; and an engaging in conversations with me, on your ongoing development as a critical, analytical reader.

Vladimir Nabokov’s essay “Good Readers and Good Writers” will be the first text you journalize in this way, because it examines the act of reading, the responsibility of the reader to the writer, and the writer’s creation of a fictive world in ways you probably have not yet considered. You may find his language provocative, but your trusty critical reading journal will help you to appreciate his rhetorical purposes, by getting inside his direct and assertive verbs, his arresting images and choices of detail, and his way of casually demonstrating what a fiction-writer does, rather than merely describing that fiction-making process, you’ll come to appreciate Nabokov’s insistence on our attention to the details of the fictive world. From corollaries we draw from Nabokov’s “Good Readers and Good Writers,” we will derive our first statements of the notion of fictive truth, or “the real frogs in an imaginary pond,” as Marianne Moore described it. I always say it takes a week, but don’t be surprised if it takes us two weeks of journaling and conversing to complete this introduction to close reading and to the idea of fictive truth. Your critical reading journal entries on Nabokov must also list at least five (up to ten) vocabulary words, literary terms, or cogent phrases from “Good Readers and Good Writers,” plus the first two chapters of Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran, which you will use in sentences of your own. I will furnish another five vocabulary words, literary terms / concepts, and / or original and useful phrases from these works.

Our first multi-phased essay will be a part-to-whole essay on Camus’ short novel The Stranger, but it won’t be the kind of essay you might expect. After journaling passages from Part I and Part II of the novel and discussing it in class, you will be asked to assume the persona of a young writer on the staff of a literary magazine who proposes a concept for the next issue, to his chief editor (me!) This essay will thus reflect your sensitivity to your audience, and create a dramatic context for your proposal. This purpose for writing, this need for you to “sell” your gruff boss on an idea is crucial, and will require your shrewd choice of rhetorical strategies to win the editor’s Go-Ahead on your proposal. But there is another purpose to this proposal: your editor gravitates toward well-delineated, well-supported arguments, so you must clearly, convincingly delineate your argument that a single small detail in The Stranger , perhaps a short phrase, an image, or a seemingly insignificant object that recurs in interesting ways, reveals profound and highly original insights into Meursault’s world. I will confer with you on likely “details” for your proposal, based on your critical reading journal entries and interviews. You will be expected to respond to my questions and suggestions on your early drafts of the proposal, which will be aimed at sharpening your focus and strengthening your use of rhetorical analysis to support your idea about the little detail that reveals large truths. Your critical reading journal entries on the Introduction to The Stranger and my handouts on Camus must include at least five (up to ten) vocabulary words, literary terms / concepts, or cogent phrases that you use in meaningful sentences of your own. There will be two vocabulary quizzes per month, based on your reading and journaling this quarter.

Once your proposal for an article is approved, you will write the second multi-phased essay, in which you argue your part-to-whole analysis and interpretation of the novel as compellingly as you can, but write now for a wider audience. That is, you will write for the readership of our literary journal. We will examine the editorial stands of publications like the Northwestern University Tri-Quarterly, the Kenyon Review, and also some book reviews from The New York Times Literary Supplement, the New Yorker to determine the kind of audience you mean to reach, and the levels of diction, controlling tonality, and other stylistic and strategic choices you need to make as a writer, in order to sell that wider audience on your interpretation. This, too, will be a multi-phased essay, with writer’s conferences on how convincingly you argue your interpretation of the novel through sound rhetorical analysis, and how shrewdly you reach your reader, through emotional, intellectual, value-based appeals, and well-placed disclaimers. How will you school yourself on these rhetorical strategies? While you write these draft-articles independently and confer with me personally on them, we’ll be reading and discussing essays from Everything’s an Argument. In-class small group discussions and collaborative writing on these argumentative essays will sharpen your understanding of the anatomy of an argument, and when, why, and how different kinds of appeals are made, in order to win over specific kinds of audiences, whom these writers target. You will do short exercises from Hephzibah Roskelly and David A. Jolliffe’s, EVERYDAY USE: Rhetoric at Work in Reading and Writing (AP* Edition), which will provide similar models for rhetorical strategies, and you will be asked to select styles and rhetorical approaches from these books on rhetoric that you would like to emulate in your own article. Our writer’s conferences for this “actual article” will focus, then, not only on the clarity and soundness of your part-to-whole essay itself, but on your strategic thinking as a rhetorician, as you go about “pitching” your argument not just to me, but to your wider audience out there, of people who subscribe to your literary journal. Well-controlled forays into personal, narrative writing, brief reportorial or historic exposition, or well-placed moments of rich descriptive writing, and other modalities of writing can all be harnessed to your over-arching purpose of reaching your readers with an appealing as well as convincing argument. As always, write critical reading journal entries on the readings from the literary magazines, and from the Roskelly and Jollife and the Lunsford, Ruszkeweicz, and Walters texts as well. This includes the entries on vocabulary and literary / rhetorical, terminology you encounter in your reading.

At the end of the quarter you will take a pre-test AP multiple-choice exam. (I will use your test scores on this pre-test to measure your growth in analytical thinking and critical reading at the end of the third quarter, when you take a post-test of the same AP multiple choice exam.) You will write five entries on the exam questions and answers, analyzing the reading skills measured on them. You must also note all unfamiliar literary / critical vocabulary terminology encountered on this exam, and define them in your critical reading journal. These words and concepts will appear on your twice-monthly vocabulary quizzes also.

The First Quarter Evaluation will be as follows:

Critical reading journal and interview grades = 25%

Participation in online and in-class discussions= 10%

Twice-monthly vocabulary quizzes= 10%

Proposal and “Actual Article” Essays on Part-to-Whole Analysis of The Stranger = 55%

SECOND QUARTER:

In her literary memoir” Reading Lolita in Tehran, the Iranian literature professor Azar Nafisi supports Nabokov’s arguments about the purely imaginative nature of the fictive world, which the writer re-constitutes out of bits and pieces of reality. Without this fabrication of the “fairy tale” world of the novel or story, mere “reality” alone would hardly be enough to satisfy the largely symbolic and imagined world in which the writer—or we readers live. She takes this idea even further, claiming that fictional literature “transforms” our lives! The first three weeks of the second quarter will be devoted to small group DVD-productions, in which student teams closely examine Nafisi’s claims for the “transformative” power of literature in our lives, based on the non-fictional “literary memoir” of her experiences, teaching American and European novels to young women at an Tehran university, at the height of the Ayatollah Khomeini’s regime. In three-person groups, you will analyze the rhetorical devices (i.e., different kinds of appeals, diction, imagery, choice of details, literary features, syntax, etc) in which she expresses her literary critical arguments. You will also read Nabokov’s Lolita, and Prof. Apel’s introductory essay on the “inward-turning,” “self-referential” language in Lolita, and Edgar Allan Poe’s “Anabel Lee.” Write critical reading journal entries on rhetorical strategies and apparent rhetorical purposes in “Anabel Lee,” in at least five moments of your choosing from Lolita, and on Prof. Apel’s introductory essay. At least one of you will comment on well-chosen snippets from one of the film versions of the novel. Your group’s DVD will include “scholarly-but-humorous” collaborative presentation, based on each student’s critical reading journal findings, on these questions, at a minimum:

1. How does the “solipsism” which Prof. Nafisi finds in Lolita actually grow out of Nabokov’s re-combining of elements from Poe’s “Anabel Lee”? Why do you suppose Nafisi never examines this question? Relate your collective thoughts on this question to the topic of fictive truth.
2. In what ways does Nafisi herself blur the lines between non-fiction and fiction? Discuss moments in her novel in which she imaginatively renders actual events, “doctors” her accounts of interactions with students, re-tells her experiences in ways that creatively re-combine elements of reality as she crafts her “memoir” into a work art.
3. Do creators of fiction and non-fiction share the impulse to artistically render, re-interpret, mediate “reality” into a higher or emotional truth? Does that higher truth somehow reside in that shared space of imagination between reader and writer, fiction and non-fiction writer? Is this how fiction “transforms” our relationship with our “real” worlds?
4. In what ways do you find the movie version of the film succeeds or fails in re-creating the closed-in, interior landscape Nabokov creates in the novel Lolita? What effects do the casting, acting, cinematography and other cinematic features of the movie have in creating a fictive world of its own?
5. Highly successful groups will comment on one or two of the other novels in Nafisi’s literary memoir, and on the ways she claims these works affected her students’ lives.

Transcripts of the e-mail traffic among your group members, the more scripted presentations of your presentations, and the record of your answers to the class’ questions will be evaluated as examples of your informal writing on serious projects, as well as your critical, analytical writing on the subject.

Your third multi-phased essay will be a personal essay on your reflections on the process of assembling this comprehensive DVD project. This essay is meant to be primarily a narrative essay, but one which includes exposition on your part in the collaborative effort, your extended definition of one key word (like “solipsism”), concept (like “self-reference” or “synchronicity”) and some rhetorical analysis of at least one of the works, to support a key insight you take from this exercise. You will meet with me at least twice during the writing of these drafts, to discuss my suggestions for revision. Class handouts from Cheryl Glenn’s , Making Sense: A New Rhetorical Reader: A New Rhetorical Readerand samples of analytical writing in X.J. Kennedy, Dana Gioia, Literature: An Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, and Drama will inform our discussion of the analytical essay, and how it necessarily involves a sensitivity much like Nabokov’s, to the writer’s artistic mediation of the world around him. E.B. White and William Strunk’s Elements of Style will also form much of the instruction in rewriting the analytical essay. My handouts will be crafted to reflect the most prevalent needs of the class during this writing project.

Your critical reading journals throughout this project period will be submitted online, via the turnitin.com anti-plagiarism program. I will evaluate your literary-critical and your meta-cognitive commentary online, also.

In-class writing: Nafisi’s blurring of the lines between non-fiction and fictional writing, her radical insight into the shared imaginative project which impels both the memoirist and the story-teller, means that we can never read non-fiction as purely “objective” or “historical” or “scientific” again. We will devote the rest of the quarter to reading, journaling, and writing in-class timed writings on the crafting of non-fictional arguments, the writer’s conscious rendering of the world around him, through skillfully mediated representations of it, and purposeful use of rhetorical appeals and devices. The non-fiction passages in other AP multiple choice exams will be read, journalized, and mined for artistically expressive, as well as conceptual vocabulary terms. We will write 40-minute essays based on the AP Free Response questions of previous years, also with a new sensitivity to the writers’ calculated, artful mediation of the “real world” for their specific audiences. The whole SOAPS approach to literary analysis will thus demand much more attention to the writers’ perspectives, his perception of his audience, his choice of occasion, in order to achieve his rhetorical purposes. New York Times media reviews, political op-ed pieces by Frank Rich (on the left) and David Brooks (on the right) will all be examined and commented on in class, and written on collaboratively, or in informal online discussions. Even non-print texts, like political cartoons and the cover-art for certain issues of the New Yorkermagazine will be de-constructed, as we learn the critical, analytical vocabulary used by visual art critics to draw the subliminal meaning and tonality out of caption-less graphic art. You will be asked to analyze the July 3, 2006 cover art of the New Yorker, titled “Dependence Day,” for example. How do the timing of this particular illustration, and the oddly gender-neutral, identical faces of the seamstresses sewing their identical American flags comprise a political argument here? How about the different intensities of color, with the drab uniforms of the seamstresses contrasting with the vibrant colors of the flags? Expect an in-class writing assignment on at least two political cartoons this quarter.

Second quarter evaluation will be based on:

1. The multi-draft reflective personal essay (narrative, expository, analytical, and persuasive) on your own experiences within your group. Here you comment meta-cognitively on your reading, journalizing, and synthesizing new insights on fictive truth, based on your perceptions of at least two novels, a literary memoir, a poem, and a movie. 25%
2. Your informal (e-mail) writing and scripted commentary during your group’s preparations for the DVD presentation. 25%
3. All your in-class timed analytical writings. 25%
4. Vocabulary quizzes: 10%
5. Participation in in-class and online discussions: 15%

THIRD QUARTER

The main thrust during the spring quarter will be the writing of a researched (documented) argument, synthesized from your examination of a field of literature on a controversial topic of your choice. The first four weeks of the quarter will lay the preparatory groundwork for this researched argument. The topic need not be literary. You are encouraged to undertake an argument about a scientific, historical, political, economic interaction with writers of opposing views on your topic. We will begin by having two-or-three-student teams teach each of the ten units of Prof. Graff’s They Say / I Say : The Moves that Matter in Academic Writing. These student-taught units in Graff’s very readable, practical program of syntactical “templates,” will make clear to you the habits of mind of an intellectually honest and convincing commentator on a crucial dispute or debate concerning us all. This book shows you how to map out the opposing sides in a disputed topic area, how to place yourself in the context of that map, and how to formulate and support your own views with compelling support from like-minded scholarly writers. Just as importantly, Graff’s handbook shows you how to “simultaneously agree and disagree” with opposing writers, in order to widen the inclusiveness of your argument, rather than appear stubbornly partisan and narrow. Once again, you will write a proposal to me, but this time I just want to make sure that you have 1) identified an important controversy, 2) established why any reader should care about this dispute, 3) mapped out the field of literature on that topic, 4) formulated, supported, and defended your own views on the topic, using a balanced selection of writings to back your claims. Since scholarly citations are required in this kind of writing, handouts from the MLA Style Sheet and class discussions of these citation formats will inform your annotative format.