AP Lit: Second Semester Required Reading, Spring '19

While we will supply you with a number of poems and short stories, you will need to acquire three books on your own for second semester:

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886)
by Robert Louis Stevenson

Macbeth
by William Shakespeare

The Handmaid's Tale
by Margaret Atwood


The links above take you to the B&N website, but you are welcome to find copies wherever you prefer. For Jekyll and Hyde, make sure you have an unabridged version of the original text. For "the Scottish Play," make sure your version aligns with the Folger Library edition. And for The Handmaid's Tale, you do not necessarily need the edition that ties in with the current Hulu series; an older edition will do.


Please have The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde read for when we return from the winter break in January.


Happy Holidays!

AP Lit: Death by Poster - Six Degrees of Joseph Conrad

Death by Poster: Six Degrees of Joseph Conrad

Your Semester 1 Final Exam is as simple – and as complex – as this: working alone or with a single partner, and using any of the following elements, connect every piece of literature we’ve studied this six weeks with at least one other piece of literature. You may illustrate your work however you want, but your ties between pieces of literature must take the form of a legibly handwritten, complete, grammatically correct, comparative analytical statement you would be proud to include in an AP essay. You will have the period before the exam and the exam period itself to work on this in class, and you may work outside of class during scheduled tutoring time or flex. Your poster is due by the end of your scheduled ACP period, no exceptions.

 

Analytical Elements:

• Theme (s)
• Motif(s)
• Characterization
• Syntax and Diction
• Symbolism
• Figurative Language
• Imagery
• Structure
• Nomenclature
• Poetic form
• Genre/sub-genre
• Schools of literary criticism popularly applied
• Periodization

 

Literature List:

• “Lineage” – Ted Hughes
• “Night, Death, Mississippi” – Robert Hayden
• “The Second Coming” – William Butler Yeats
• Heart of Darkness –Joseph Conrad
• “The White Man’s Burden” – Rudyard Kipling
• Death and the King’s Horseman – Wole Soyinka
• “A Rose for Emily” – William Faulkner
• “A Good Man is Hard to Find” – Flannery O’Connor
• “Extracts from Gosschen’s Diary” – Blackwood’s Magazine, 1818
• “Porphyria’s Lover” – Robert Browning
• “Love the Way You Lie” – Eminem
• “My Last Duchess” – Robert Browning
• “The Pied Piper of Hamelin” – Robert Browning
• “It’s All Over Now Baby Blue” – Bob Dylan
• “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” – Joyce Carol Oates
• “Saboteur” – Ha Jin

SAMPLE COMPARATIVE ANALYTICAL STATEMENT

FOR OUR DEATH BY POSTER EXAM:

In Scott Tatum’s novella “Ms. Townsel Was Once a Goddess, In Possession of Exceptional Wisdom and Even Better Taste,” he paints a picture of a crazed, unkempt English teacher, broken by the vagaries of life and who, as a result of her student-induced mental illness, has fallen so far from the graces of society that we find her living below her desk with only her coffee maker affording her comfort and solace. Smith’s picture of the mentally ill Townsel is evocative of Dr. Cedric Barrett’s Booker Prize-winning portrait of a similarly disturbed Patrick McGhee in his stunning poem “AP Teacher Snaps His Twig,” with its disturbing imagery of the ginger-bearded instructor using a prop sword to pummel his flex class into submission. Both works not only share a theme of the psychosis that often affects teachers, they instill in their readers a feeling of melancholy, of dread, of spiritual need for escape from the confines of an academic world that crushes not just students but, in great numbers, their instructors.

Grading Rubric: 100 points

• All works studied this semester included and comparatively analyzed: 30 points
• All required comparative literary statements completed: 30 points
• All required comparative literary statements accurate and effective: 20 points
• Conventions: 15 points
• Appearance (including neatness): 5 points