Advanced Placement Literature and Composition students and parents:
Welcome, in advance, to Advanced Placement Literature and Composition!
Please keep this letter for future reference as it contains important information about the
AP Literature and Composition class for the 2014-2015 school year, such as:
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Goals of the AP Literature and Composition course
Website for accessing more information from the College Board
Book list for the course
Summer reading assignment
Suggested reading list
Information on the Adler-style method of annotating a text
The goal of the AP English Literature and Composition course is described below:
"An AP English course in Literature and Composition should engage students in the careful reading and critical
analysis of imaginative literature. Through the close reading of selected texts, students deepen their understanding of
the ways writers use language to provide both meaning and pleasure for their readers.
“As they read, students should consider a work's structure, style, and themes as well as such smaller-scale elements as
the use of figurative language, imagery, symbolism and tone. Students should read deliberately and thoroughly, taking
time to understand a work's complexity, to absorb its richness of meaning, and to analyze how that meaning is
embodied in literary form. In addition to considering a work's literary artistry, students should consider the social and
historical values it reflects and embodies. Careful attention to both textual detail and historical context should provide a
foundation for interpretation, whatever critical perspectives are brought to bear on the literary works studied" (The
College Board).
The AP Literature test will be given in early May. Students who receive an acceptable
score on the test qualify for college credit. For more information on the Advanced
Placement program and tests, see the College Board website at
http://www.collegeboard.com/student/testing/ap/about.html
Textbooks and other materials
During the year-long class, students will read the following texts:
The Awakening by Kate Chopin
Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller (included in Perrine’s textbook)
Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison (NOT The Invisible Man by H.G. Wells)
Perrine’s Literature: Structure, Sound and Sense 9th edition. (poetry and short stories)
While most of these books will be provided, I strongly recommend that you purchase
your own copies, which will allow you to annotate the text. The books listed can be
purchased used at Amazon.com or Half Price books for a reduced price. A recent search
at Amazon.com showed the textbook is available used, for as little as $15. You may also
purchase a book from a student who has previously taken the class.
Summer reading assignment
In order for students to remain “sharp” over the summer break and to begin the school
year discussing and writing about the same books, students will read either Snow Falling
on Cedars by David Guterson or Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier and complete the
assignment that follows before school starts in the fall. You will submit the assignment
to turnitin.com by the 3nd day of class. I would recommend reading the book in August,
so that it is fresh in your memory when school starts. Also, there will also be an essay
test on the book the first week of school. I strongly recommend purchasing a copy, as it
will allow you to annotate the text as you read.
Assignment: In order to make the best use of your reading time, prepare for discussion,
and to be able to use this book on the AP exam in May, complete the following task:
Use post-it notes to mark interesting, thought-provoking, and important
passages in the book. When you have finished, choose 5 passages that you feel
are worth discussing. For each of these five, type up the passage and include the
page number. Then type up a well-developed (at least 8 sentences), oneparagraph reaction in which you discuss the significance of the quote, what it
reveals or suggests. (Do not explain the quote.) You should be writing about the
quotes after you’ve finished the novel, so write about how the quote connects to
the novel as a whole.)
Example: (reduced to single space here to save space. You should double space your
analysis, although the quote itself can be single spaced.)
Passage Analysis # 1
“The man before them was noble in appearance, and the shadows played across
the planes of his face in a way that made their angles harden; his aspect connoted dignity.
And there was nothing akin to softness in him anywhere, no part of him that was
vulnerable. He was, they decided, not like them at all” (Guterson 412).
The citizens in the courthouse feel that Kabuo Miyamato is different from them
based on his physical appearance. Throughout the whole trial, Kabuo Miyamato does not
express any kind of emotion. He sat straight and poised. Therefore, the citizens feel as if
there was no “softness in him anywhere” (Guterson 412) because of his expressionless
countenance. This conduct, the citizens feel proved that Kabuo Miyamato, a Japanese
man, was different from them, the white people of San Piedro. Their judgments based on
his visage portray racial prejudice toward the Japanese community. These prejudices
depict the injustice of his trial. In addition, his demeanor shows his similarity to the other
war veterans in the novel, like Ishmael Chambers and Carl Heine, who physically display
a cold, ridged isolated personality in their countenance. Carl Heine, a tall strong man,
made “no gestures to suggest to others his harmlessness” (Guterson 53). Similarly, Carl
Heine like Kabuo Miyamato does not convey anything that was “akin to softness” in his
appearance. This similarity between the two men highlights the racial bias presented by
the citizens’ judgments. Furthermore, his concealment of emotions reverts back to his
Japanese cultural ways of acting with “composure” (Guterson 154). The inability for the
white citizens of San Piedro to see this action as a Japanese cultural aspect shows that the
two communities are ignorant of one another’s customs. This ignorance describes the
racial separation between the two communities, which emphasizes the citizens’ reason for
prejudice.
While it is not required, I suggest you do some other reading during the summer.
Students who have read a wide variety of texts are best prepared for class and the
AP test.
Other suggested reading:
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How to Read Literature Like a Professor by Thomas C. Foster
Any of the titles from the recommended reading list of books/plays below.
Keep in mind that much of the AP college-level texts we read are written for a
mature audience and therefore contain mature, sensitive themes and content,
including violence, sexual situations, and profane language.
Note to students who have not taken Honors English 10:
I strongly suggest you do some extra reading this summer, so that you have additional
experience in reading literary texts that you were not required to read in your 10th grade
English class. The honors class read Shakespeare’s MacBeth, Dickens’ A Tale of Two
Cities, Austen’s Emma, and Shelley’s Frankenstein, as well as English poetry from the
Restoration, Romantic, and Victorian eras.
Recommended reading list for AP literature:
A, B
Julia Alvarez (In the Time of the Butterflies)
Kingsley Amis (Lucky Jim)
Martin Amis (Time's Arrow)
Rudolfo Anaya (Serafina's Stories)
Margaret Atwood (Alias Grace, Surfacing)
Jane Austen (Pride and Prejudice)
James Baldwin (Go Tell It on the Mountain)
Saul Bellow (The Adventures of Augie March)
Charlotte Bronte (Jane Eyre)
Emily Bronte (Wuthering Heights)
C
Albert Camus (The Plague, The Stranger)
Truman Capote (In Cold Blood)
Raymond Carver (Cathedral)
Willa Cather (Death Comes for the Archbishop, O Pioneers!)
Sandra Cisneros (The House on Mango Street)
John Cheever (The Wapshot Scandal)
D
Don DeLillo (Libra)
Charles Dickens (A Tale of Two Cities, Great Expectations)
E.L. Doctorow (Ragtime)
Fyodor Dostoevsky (Crime and Punishment, Notes from Underground, The Idiot)
Theodore Dreiser (Sister Carrie)
E, F
George Eliot (Middlemarch)
Louise Erdich (Antelope Wife)
William Faulkner (As I Lay Dying, The Sound and the Fury)
Henry Fielding (Tom Jones)
F. Scott Fitzgerald (Babylon Revisited)
Ford Madox Ford (The Good Soldier)
E.M. Forster (A Passage to India)
G, H
Myla Goldberg (Bee Season)
Graham Greene (The Heart of the Matter)
Jane Hamilton (A Map of the World, The Book of Ruth)
Thomas Hardy (Tess of the D'Urbervilles)
Nathaniel Hawthorne (The Scarlet Letter, The House of the Seven Gables)
Ernest Hemingway (The Sun Also Rises, Islands in the Stream)
Hermann Hesse (Siddhartha)
Zora Neale Hurston (Their Eyes Were Watching God)
I, J, K
Kazuo Ishiguro (Remains of the Day)
Henry James (The Aspern Papers, The American)
Ha Jin (Waiting)
James Joyce (Dubliners)
Maxine Hong Kingston (The Woman Warrior)
Joy Kogawa (Obasan)
Milan Kundera (The Unbearable Lightness of Being)
L, M
Bernard Malamud (The Fixer, The Natural)
Gabriel Garcia Marquez (One Hundred Years of Solitude)
Bobbie Ann Mason (In Country)
Cormac McCarthy (Blood Meridian)
Carson McCullers (The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, The Member of the Wedding)
Herman Melville (Moby Dick, Billy Budd)
Toni Morrison (Jazz, Beloved, Song of Solomon)
N, O, P
Vladimir Nabokov (Lolita)
Joyce Carol Oates (We Were the Mulvaneys)
Tim O'Brien (Going After Cacciato, In the Lake of the Woods)
Flannery O'Connor (Wise Blood)
George Orwell (1984)
Alan Paton (Cry the Beloved Country)
Iain Pears (An Instance of the Fingerpost)
Katherine Anne Porter (Ship of Fools)
R, S, T
Erich Maria Remarque (All Quiet on the Western Front)
Jean Rhys (Voyage in the Dark)
JeanPaul Sartre (No Exit)
Jonathan Swift (Gulliver's Travels)
Leo Tolstoy (Anna Karenina)
Jean Toomer (Cane)
Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev (Fathers and Sons)
Mark Twain (A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court)
U, V, W
John Updike (Gertrude and Claudius)
Kurt Vonnegut (Slaughterhouse Five)
Eudora Welty (The Optimist's Daughter)
Edith Wharton (The House of Mirth)
Virginia Woolf (To the Lighthouse)
DRAMA
A, B, C
Aeschylus (Prometheus Bound)
Edward Albee (Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?)
Amiri Baraka (Dutchman)
Samuel Beckett (Waiting for Godot)
Anton Chekhov (The Cherry Orchard)
William Congreve (The Way of the World)
G, H, I
Oliver Goldsmith (She Stoops to Conquer)
Lorraine Hansberry (A Raisin in the Sun)
Lillian Hellman (The Children's Hour, The Little Foxes)
David Henry Hwang (M. Butterfly)
Henrik Ibsen (The Wild Duck, A Doll's House, Hedda Gabler)
M, O, P
Moliere (The Misanthrope, Tartuffe)
Sean O'Casey (The Harvest Festival)
Eugene O'Neill (Long Day's Journey into Night, The Iceman Cometh)
Harold Pinter (Homecoming)
Luigi Pirandello (Six Characters in Search of an Author)
S, V, W
William Shakespeare (Hamlet, King Lear, Othello)
Sophocles (Antigone, Oedipus Rex)
Tom Stoppard (Arcadia, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead)
Luis Valdez (Zoot Suit)
Oscar Wilde (The Importance of Being Earnest)
Tennessee Williams (A Streetcar Named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, The Glass Menagerie)
August Wilson (Fences)
The following is an excerpt from “How to Mark a Book,” by Mortimer J. Adler,
Ph.D. Please read the excerpt, paying special attention to Adler’s recommended
ways to annotate a book. As you read the assigned book this summer, use his
method when making book notes.
You know you have to read "between the lines" to get the most out of anything. I want to persuade
you to do something equally important in the course of your reading. I want to persuade you to
write between the lines. Unless you do, you are not likely to do the most efficient kind of reading.
Why is marking up a book indispensable to reading? First, it keeps you awake. (And I don't mean
merely conscious; I mean awake.) In the second place; reading, if it is active, is thinking, and
thinking tends to express itself in words, spoken or written. The marked book is usually the
thought-through book. Finally, writing helps you remember the thoughts you had, or the thoughts
the author expressed. . . . But, you may ask, why is writing necessary? Well, the physical act of
writing, with your own hand, brings words and sentences more sharply before your mind and
preserves them better in your memory. To set down your reaction to important words and
sentences you have read, and the questions they have raised in your mind, is to preserve those
reactions and sharpen those questions.
There are all kinds of devices for marking a book intelligently and fruitfully. Here's the way I do it:
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Underlining (or highlighting): of major points, of important or forceful statements.
Vertical lines at the margin: to emphasize a statement already underlined.
Star, asterisk, or other doo-dad at the margin: to be used sparingly, to emphasize the
ten or twenty most important statements in the book. (You may want to fold the bottom
comer of each page on which you use such marks. It won't hurt the sturdy paper on which
most modern books are printed, and you will be able take the book off the shelf at any time
and, by opening it at the folded-corner page, refresh your recollection of the book.)
Numbers in the margin: to indicate the sequence of points the author makes in
developing a single argument.
Numbers of other pages in the margin: to indicate where else in the book the author
made points relevant to the point marked; to tie up the ideas in a book, which, though they
may be separated by many pages, belong together.
Circling or highlighting of key words or phrases.
Writing in the margin, or at the top or bottom of the page, for the sake of: recording
questions (and perhaps answers) which a passage raised in your mind; reducing a
complicated discussion to a simple statement; recording the sequence of major points right
through the books. I use the end-papers at the back of the book to make a personal index
of the author's points in the order of their appearance.
Or, you may say that this business of marking books is going to slow up your reading. It probably
will. That's one of the reasons for doing it. Most of us have been taken in by the notion that speed
of reading is a measure of our intelligence. There is no such thing as the right speed for intelligent
reading. Some things should be read quickly and effortlessly and some should be read slowly and
even laboriously. The sign of intelligence in reading is the ability to read different things differently
according to their worth. In the case of good books, the point is not to see how many of them you
can get through, but rather how many can get through you -- how many you can make your own. A
few friends are better than a thousand acquaintances. If this be your aim, as it should be, you will
not be impatient if it takes more time and effort to read a great book than it does a newspaper.