AP English

elcome to AP Lit!  We begin our journey with a little bit of summer work to give you a taste of the class before we come together in the fall.

      I’m still in the process of designing reading lists and the like for the course, building on those from your ELA11 courses or AP Language.  If you have ideas about writings/authors/periods/styles we should look at, I’m open to suggestions via e-mail (MrChiz@comcast.net).  I want the course to be driven by you as much as me.  I’ll have several works that we’ll tackle together (some which I know well and some that will be as new to me as to you!).  You will also choose several projects to pursue on your own.  Be thinking . . . .

Summer Reading Selection

How to Choose: Choose a reading you have never done before. Many of these are taught in earlier classes, but for a reason: you should know them. My goal here is to broaden your reading experience, not repeat it. Try to choose an author who is new to you or a type of story that is different from your previous reading experiences.

Note on film versions: There are several film versions of these readings. The AP test does not recognize film adaptations as valid sources and viewing the films without doing the reading will not aid your work at all--many AP questions are based upon the writing techniques of the author, not the plot! Nevertheless, I also recognize that films can enhance or destroy the reading experience. I've offered recommendations should you wish to watch a film in addition to the reading!

1.      Margaret Atwood, Alias Grace.  Contemporary Canadian novel about a woman who is imprisoned for murder but doesn't recall the crime.  Insightful character development and a bit of a mystery, the story of 19^th century asylums is based on a true account.  Though written in 1996, Atwood adopts the style of a Victorian writer!  No film version exists.

2.      Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange. The most disturbing reading on this list, a British novel, is a futuristic morality tale of a battle between society and socio-paths. If we could win, should we? Caution: extreme violence, rape, language, and disturbing images (Don't read these warnings as encouragement to choose this one, okay?). The 1971 film, rated R, is equally distressing; the anti-hero lead is played by a young Malcolm McDowell.

3.      Kate Chopin, The Awakening.  One of the first American novels of feminism, the story is of extra-marital love and miscegenation (another good vocabulary word!)—it was criticized and essentially buried for years, but was rediscovered in the 1960s.  Note, just to understand Chopin’s nuance, how the protagonist is dressed throughout the work.  The 1980 film of this title is about a mummy that possesses an archaeologist’s daughter—don’t rent it by mistake!J Online text: http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/160

4. Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five.  Written in 1969, this is one of the American sci-fi writer’s masterworks about a the WWII fire-bombing of Dresden and a time-traveling man who encounters aliens and attempts to change the world.  The characters struggle to be human in the face of powerful forces.  The British film version is marginally okay, but can hardly capture the power of Vonnegut’s broken plotlines and alienation and absurdity.

Write a 2-4 page typed (double-spaced) analysis of the novel or play you’ve read.  You may choose any of the prompts below which best fit your interest.  You may design your own prompt if you first clear it with me in August.  Do not attempt to change the topic of the paper without first gaining my approval—I’m looking for critical analysis of the novel that can’t be found from SparkNotes!

Deadline:  The essay should be submitted by e-mail or turned in on the first day of class.

Prompt One:  Discuss the meaning of one of the author’s symbols or references and its importance to establishing the meaning of the work as a whole.

Prompt Two:  Discuss how the style of the author’s work (use of language, sentence structure, vocabulary, point of view, or construction of the narrative) work to achieve his/her desired effect. 

Prompt Three:  Find irony or satire in the work and discuss its meaning and impact on theme.  (Note that irony is not merely a strange coincidence, but often the failure of a protagonist to see the whole picture clearly, thus creating the conflict or resolution.  Thus Luke Skywalker is ironic in that he does not recognize that Darth Vader is his father, thus nearly destroying the rebel alliance in The Empire Strike Back; and Harry Potter is an ironic hero over and over when he fails to recognize in book after book that he does not need the support of substitute father figures.) 

Prompt Four:  Discuss the role of internal conflict within our protagonist or other major character.  How has the author developed that conflict through external events?  In other words, how do external conflicts in the novel reflect the conflict experienced internally?  (Note, for instance, that Rowling keeps placing father figures before Harry to test his internal dependency issues—mirrored family, Sirius, Dumbledore, etc.).  Finally, note how this internal conflict drives the theme of the work.

Prompt Five:  Most literature centers around choice as a defining moment for a character’s humanity.  Discuss the choice one major character makes in your chosen work and explore how that choice becomes critical to understanding the larger conflicts/themes of the work.