AP Literature and Composition Self-Guided Research Paper
Objectives:
 To produce two brief analytical research papers based on some insight gleaned from a
selected list of short stories and poems provided by the teacher
 To research an argumentative thesis (short story – theme; poem – effect of devices)
through scholarly conversations with those who have written on the subject
 To use reliable, relevant, and accurate sources
 To execute MLA in-text citations as well as documentation
 To implement a workable plan to meet deadlines
Instructions:
 In addition to your own ideas about the author’s style and message, you will research
literary criticism. The type of criticism we will deal with is written on or about an author
or a piece of literature and simply means that someone has provided a close analysis of
the work. It is not a negative account of the writer or his or her work. You will read and
incorporate the critics’ views to support your thesis. Sources must be noted according to
MLA guidelines and typed up in the correct format on a Works Cited page. You must
parenthetically document each source you include. This includes excerpts from the text
as well as the critical articles you read.

Example literary analysis thesis: Zora Neale Hurston’s overtly lyrical language,
mythic imagery, accurately rendered “folk speech” and the love tribulations of women
combine to create a surprisingly soulful novel.
Specific Requirements:
1. Select one short story and one poem from the choices provided above. You may not
choose the same story or poem as someone else in the class.
2. Read and analyze the chosen short story and poem.
3. Decide on arguable thesis statements for each.
4. Read a minimum of three scholarly articles and/or literary criticisms by others regarding
the selected work and author for each paper (minimum of 6 critical sources total).
5. Read a non-fiction piece written by each author (can be an essay, an interview, from the
introduction of the chosen novel, etc.) that will help you analyze the work further.
6. Write two 750 to 1,000 words essays that follow the most recent MLA documentation
guidelines.
7. You will submit a double-entry reading journal for evaluation. This is an independent
assignment from the papers.
Suggested Essential Questions:
 How do authors use literature to display humanity’s struggle between the noblest of
ideals and the basest of emotions?
 How much control do we have over the evil within us?
 Can a situation of circumstance corrupt us?
 How does society define and shape us?
 Who exists in “otherness” and why?
 To what extent can you employ the concepts of Freudian psychoanalysis to understand
the motivations of literary characters?
Short Stories List:
1. Chinua Achebe – “Dead Men’s Path”
2. James Baldwin – “Sonny’s Blues”
3. John Cheever – “The Five-Forty-Eight”
4. Kate Chopin – “The Story of An Hour”
5. William Faulkner – “Barn Burning”
6. Nathaniel Hawthorne – “Young Goodman Brown”
7. Ernest Hemingway – “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place”
8. Zora Neale Hurston – “Sweat”
9. Ha Jin – “Saboteur”
10. James Joyce – “Araby”
11. D.H. Lawrence – “The Rocking-Horse Winner”
12. Gabriel Garcia Marquez – “The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World”
13. Flannery O’Conner – “A Good Man is Hard to Find”
14. Edgar Allan Poe – “The Tell-Tale Heart”
15. Katherine Anne Porter – “The Jilting of Granny Weatherall”
16. John Updike – “A & P”
17. Alice Walker – “Everyday Use”
18. Eudora Welty – “A Worn Path”
Poet List:
W. H. Auden
Elizabeth Bishop
William Blake
Anne Bradstreet
Gwendolyn Brooks
Robert Browning
Lucille Clifton
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Billy Collins
Emily Dickinson
H. D. (Hilda Doolittle)
Rita Dove
John Donne
T. S. Eliot
Robert Frost
Thomas Hardy
Seamus Heaney
George Herbert
Langston Hughes
Gerard Manley Hopkins
Ben Johnson
John Keats
Philip Larkin
Robert Lowell
John Milton
Marianne Moore
Sylvia Plath
Alexander Pope
Adrienne Rich
Anne Sexton
Cathy Song
Wallace Stevens
William Shakespeare
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Walt Whitman
Richard Wilbur
William Carlos Williams
William Wordsworth
William Butler Yeats