2010 AP ENGLISH LITERATURE AND COMPOSITION FREE-RESONSE QUESTIONS
Question 3
(Suggested time – 40 minutes. This question counts as one-third of the total essay section score.)
Palestinian American literary theorist and cultural critic Edward Said has written that “Exile is strangely
compelling to think about but terrible to experience. It is the unhealable rift forced between a human
being and a native place, between the self and its true home: its essential sadness can never be
surmounted.” Yet Said has also said that exile can become “a potent, even enriching” experience.
Select a novel, play, or epic in which a character experiences such a rift and becomes cut off from
“home,” whether that home is the character’s birthplace, family, homeland, or other special place. Then
write an essay in which you analyze how the character’s experience with exile is both alienating and
enriching, and how this experience illuminates the meaning of the work as a whole. You may choose a
work from the list below or one of comparable literary merit. Do not merely summarize the plot.
The American by Henry James
Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner
Another Country by James Baldwin
As You Like It by William Shakespeare
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
Jasmine by Bharati Mukherjee
Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy
King Lear by William Shakespeare
The Little Foxes by Lillian Hellman
Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy
My Ántonia by Willa Cather
Obasan by Joy Kogawa
The Odyssey by Homer
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by
Alexander Solzhenitsyn
The Other by David Guterson
Paradise Lost by John Milton
The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara
Kingsolver
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by
James Joyce
The Road by Cormac McCarthy
Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead by
Tom Stoppard
Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser
Sister of My Heart by Chitra Banerjee
Divakaruni
Snow Falling on Cedars by David Guterson
The Tempest by William Shakespeare
Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
The Women of Brewster Place by Gloria
Naylor
Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë