AP English Literature
Syllabus
Theresa Vara-Dannen
University High School of Science and Engineering
351 Mark Twain Drive
Hartford, CT 06112
tvdannen@sbcglobal.net
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School Profile
Name
University High School of Science and Engineering
School Location and Environment
University High School of Science and Engineering
is located in the capital city of Hartford, Connecticut, in an urban
environment.
Grades
9-12.
Type
Public magnet school, early college model with a focus on
mathematics and sciences.
Total Enrollment
Approximately 410 students in grades 9-12.
Percentage of Minorities
Approximately 70% of students are minority students from the city
of Hartford, with the balance coming from surrounding rural and
suburban areas.
College Record
As of this year, 100% of UHSSE graduates have gone on to either
2-year or 4-year colleges, or gone into the military.
Class Size
Classes usually average 24 students.
AP Credit
University High School does weight grades for honors or AP
classes.
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Course Overview
Many students sign up for AP English Literature fearing the workload
and most of all, the poetry. From the first day of class, I advise students
to let go of their preconceptions about both the burdens of the class and
the challenges of poetry. Literature, in general, was written not to torture
us, but to make our lives fuller and more thoughtful. We will not be
discussing the insignificant in class: this is the stuff of life itself- love,
death, passion, lies, good and evil.
As for poetry, in it students will find comfort in knowing that others have
suffered the same questions and uncertainties that we suffer. In poetry,
we may find some answers, but we are likely to find more questions too.
The key is to be open-minded and open-hearted.
Our class is a workshop in which to analyze poems, read great work
closely, debate meaning and significance. Students must be educated to
read deeply, widely, constantly. They must not accept the literal, shallow
meaning of the words they read; they must see through a text and hear
the author’s voice in their ears.
One way to appreciate the beauty of the works they read is to assign
students the task of trying to imitate a certain style, like Faulkner’s
perhaps, or to write a sonnet. In doing so, students recognize the skill
and art necessary to produce literature, and often in the process,
produce some beautiful pieces themselves.
In addition, on a daily basis, we take passages from the texts we are
reading to examine their significance in light of the work as a whole or to
determine what these passages elucidate on their own. This practice,
though it takes only 15 minutes or so per day, eases the way for students
when they must write prose essay on the AP Exam. Furthermore, after
completing each book, students are given an old AP Open Question
prompt so they can apply our class analysis and discussion.
Key Elements of the Course:
*Grammar instruction on common errors and as errors crop up in
papers.
*Weekly recycled SAT vocabulary
*Daily AP Lit sample question sets
*Literary devices practiced and tested
*Poetry Project on a specific poet, presented to the class
*Daily preparation for the AP Exam
*Acquisition of college level vocabulary so that students will
understand the readings and be able to respond with the
appropriate subtlety and nuance of language
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*Active student participation in every aspect of class activities and
assignments
*Completed, revised and proofread essays every two weeks,
rewrites and corrections mandatory
*Daily reading analyses on excerpts from texts
*Occasional creative writing in several genres, inspired by readings
*Daily journal and free writing to encourage fluency
*Daily class discussion of texts
*Writing workshops and tutorials individually and in small groups
to teach the skills of careful reading, revision and rewriting
in their own work and in the work of others
*Review and/or teaching of the proper use of citations, attribution,
paraphrasing and a full understanding of the dangers of
plagiarism
*End of book analytical essays written clearly and powerfully with
advancing argumentation supported by the text
*Familiar and fluent use and detection of literary devices and
advanced vocabulary required for analysis
*Literary analysis of poetry, plays, and novels
*By the end of the course, students will have in their writing
portfolio forty-five pages of their revised and reworked formal
prose.
*Both an in-class midterm and final essay will be required.
*Because students will not have access to a University TA, the
class size will be limited to fifteen students. Students will be
required to meet either individually or in a group with the
instructor during scheduled tutorials at Advisement time.
*Students will be required to write a short research paper on a
topic of interest to them in order to practice their research,
writing, synthesizing, documenting and citation skills.
*Tardy assignments will lose ten 10% value per late day, not per
school day. Assignments must be printed BEFORE arrival to
class, not in class. Failure to do so will result in a 10% tardy
subtraction.
Performance Tasks
*Timed essays based on AP prompts
*End of book essays written at a college level
*Familiar and fluent use of necessary literary terms and advanced
vocabulary required for analysis
*Creative writing in several genres
*Literary analysis papers of both poetry and novels
*Daily short paragraph analyses of excerpted texts
*Personal essay writing for college applications
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Course Units
Unit One: Writing the Personal Essay
*Student writers will explore various topics in personal essay writing,
including writing about a formative experience; a political issue of great
personal import; a reminiscence shedding light on the present; an
inspiration or insight; or the significance of a particular event.
*Students will also experiment with humor, persuasion and irony in their
essays.
*Students will complete at least two essays deemed suitable for college
applications.
Essential Questions:
What do you want your potential college to know about you that would
not be visible on your application?
What true information can you provide in an essay that would convince a
college to choose you?
The Art of the Personal Essay by Phillip Lopate
Unit Two: What is truth? Reality from the perspective of delusional
and dishonest narrators.
In these texts, we examine the narrative as it is told by the
speaker, seeking out the real truth behind the speaker’s wish to deny
responsibility or evade the ugly consequences of his own behavior.
Students learn to recognize when an author is lifting the veil just enough
to let the reader know that his characters are not completely honest.
Students learn to detect the tone of an author; without this ability, the
reader can only superficially analyze a text.
Essential Questions:
How do we decide that a narrator is untrustworthy?
Are there “personal” truths that might contradict a more commonly held
truth?
Is there truth even in the private delusions of some characters?
How do human beings use their truths to address their own
psychological needs?
Major Texts:
We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson
Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
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Additional poems, short stories and essays.
Independent Reading Options:
The Imprisoned Guest by Elizabeth Gitter
Silas Marner by George Eliot
The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson
Unit Three: Individual vs. society. How are we shaped-or perhaps
misshaped- by the restrictions and expectations of our society?
Much as we might struggle against the norms and expectations of our
society, even the most individualistic of us is formed by the world we are
born into. Even our rebellions, such as they are, are limited by our
understanding of the world, parochial as it is, and by the narrowness of
fashion, in the world of people who are distant from us in time and place,
and from our vantage point, perhaps we can see truths that they may
have missed, or just as likely, fail to see them because of our own
contemporary blinders.
Essential Questions:
What social assumptions are so ingrained that we do not recognize them
to question them?
Are we freer that we ever realize?
Do the restrictions of a society ever liberate people?
Can we fulfill ourselves and still meet the expectations of society? Should
we try?
Major Texts:
Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
Hamlet by William Shakespeare
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
Additional poems, short stories and essays.
Independent Reading Options:
Mansfield Park by Jane Austen
The Golden Bowl by Henry James
An Anthropologist on Mars by Oliver Sacks
The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat by Oliver Sacks
Any other novel by Franz Kafka
Unit Four: How does love redeem even the most lost soul?
Fiction sometimes presents us with a portrayal of the bleakest human
suffering. At the same time, we often see the power of human love, love
that sometimes seems unrealistic or misplaced. Yet, the spirit seems
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renewed, focused and recharged by the beloved, and in such loves, great
and small, we find our reason to live.
Essential Questions:
If love can restore the wounded soul, does society have any right to judge
whether that love is appropriate or not?
How can we distinguish between love and the search for identity?
If love begins with a lie, can it be true love?
Major Texts:
A Room with a View by E.M. Forster
As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
Additional poems, short stories and essays.
Independent Reading Options:
The Exact Location of the Soul by Richard Selzer
Absalom, Absalom by William Faulkner
Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri
Unit Four: Poetry
Throughout the school year, poetry is interspersed in the curriculum,
making up about 50% of both in-class work and homework. We read a
great selection of poetry written by the following poets:
Michael Drayton
John Donne
Ben Jonson
Robert Herrick
John Milton
Anne Bradstreet
Andrew Marvell
Aphra Behn
Thomas Gray
Phyllis Wheatley
William Blake
William Wordsworth
Samuel Coleridge
Lord Byron
Percy Bysshe Shelley
John Keats
Robert Browning
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Edgar Allan Poe
Emily Bronte
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Julia Ward Howe
Matthew Arnold
Emily Dickinson
Gerald Manly Hopkins
A.E. Housman
Edna St. Vincent Millay
Wilfred Owen
e.e. cummings
Langston Hughes
Ogden Nash
Theodore Roethke
Dylan Thomas
Muriel Rukeyser
Robert Frost
Gwendolyn Brooks
Denise Levertov
Enid Shomer
Lucille Clifton
Edwina Trentham
Donald Hall
Billy Collins
Robert Pinsky
Sharon Olds
Philip Larkin
In poetry and in prose, students learn to identify the literary
devices used by authors to convey their message. Students are
encouraged to read closely, looking at diction; imagery; metaphor;
syntax; meter; irony and myriad other literary devices. The key to a
successful analysis is the careful support of a statement with textual
evidence, clearly and cogently explained. Students practice the analyses
of poetry in every class, and they must cite line and word to prove their
points.
In addition, each student prepares a major poetry project by
choosing one poet of an approved list and reading widely of that poet’s
work. They must write short analyses of four poems and a five page
analyses of one poem; they must present their favorite poem to the class
for reading and discussion. In this way, students are able to study one
poet in depth and at the same time, they will be exposed to the work of
twenty-two others as well.
Major Texts used:
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte (Penguin Classics, 2003)
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Hamlet by William Shakespeare
We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson
Norton Anthology of Poetry 5th edition ed. Ferguson, Margaret
Norton Introduction to the Short Novel 3rd edition ed. Beaty, Jerome
Merriam Webster Vocabulary Builder (1994)
A Room with a View by E.M. Forster (Bantam Classics, 1998)
Cracking the AP Literature and Composition Exam, 2006-2007 edition
Princeton Review ISBN# 0375765379
Hamlet by William Shakespeare (Folger Shakespeare Library, 2003)
The Art of the Personal Essay by Phillip Lopate (1st Anchor Books
Paperback. Edition, 1997)
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