AP English Literature and Composition
Mrs. Karla Hilliard, Room 208
Spring Mills High School, 2014-2015
As mentioned in your course description, AP Literature and Composition can be an intellectually
transformative course. The curriculum goals are outlined by the College Board and the course is aligned
with entry-level college literature classes. Students are required to read literature deeply, write
intelligently about it, and be an active participant in class. Remember: I am another rider on the road.
My job is to create an environment of inquiry that allows all students to participate, productively
struggle, and thrive.
We will be reading and writing a lot from August to June, and you will have plenty of
opportunities to practice your skills and improve upon them in preparation for the AP exam in May. In
short, AP Literature is about reading great, canonized works and demonstrating how you understand
them, but it’s also about developing critical thinking skills and habits of mind that, I believe, will serve
you students well beyond any exam.
With that said, for our day-to-day, you must have the following supplies:
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Highlighter
Pencils or pens
Composition book
2” binder
5 tab dividers
In addition, I strongly suggest that you purchase1 your own copies of texts for annotations. We
will study the following:
As a class, we will cover at a minimum:
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Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut
The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien
Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton
A Doll’s House by Henrik Ibsen
Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller
The Stranger by Albert Camus and/or The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
Hamlet by William Shakespeare
You will also choose and read one additional novel per semester from the most frequently
tested AP titles list that I will provide for you in class.
Books A Million can hook up you with a “bundle” of all of these texts for $59.84. You can use my 25% teacher
discount, which makes the price $44.88 before tax. Online orders are cheaper, but you must order them on
your own.
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*This schedule is intended only as an outline. There will be changes and adjustments
depending on student needs, school functions, and teacher discretion.
SHORT FICTION
Representative writers:
Chinua Achebe; Sherman Alexie; Isabel Allende; Rudolfo Anaya; Margaret Atwood; Jane Austen; James
Baldwin; Saul Bellow; Charlotte Brontë; Emily Brontë; Raymond Carver; Willa Cather; John Cheever; Kate
Chopin; Sandra Cisneros; Joseph Conrad; Edwidge Danticat; Daniel Defoe; Anita Desai; Charles Dickens;
Fyodor Dostoevsky; George Eliot; Ralph Ellison; Louise Erdrich; William Faulkner; Henry Fielding; F . Scott
Fitzgerald; E . M . Forster; Thomas Hardy; Nathaniel Hawthorne; Ernest Hemingway; Zora Neale Hurston;
Kazuo Ishiguro; Henry James; Ha Jin; Edward P . Jones; James Joyce; Maxine Hong Kingston; Joy Kogawa;
Jhumpa Lahiri; Margaret Laurence; D . H . Lawrence; Chang-rae Lee; Bernard Malamud; Gabriel García
Márquez; Cormac McCarthy; Ian McEwan; Herman Melville; Toni Morrison; Bharati Mukherjee; Vladimir
Nabokov; Flannery O’Connor; Orhan Pamuk; Katherine Anne Porter; Marilynne Robinson; Jonathan
Swift; Mark Twain; John Updike; Alice Walker; Evelyn Waugh; Eudora Welty; Edith Wharton; John Edgar
Wideman; Virginia Woolf; Richard Wright
POETRY
Representative poets:
W . H . Auden; Elizabeth Bishop; William Blake; Anne Bradstreet; Edward Kamau Brathwaite; Gwendolyn
Brooks; Robert Browning; George Gordon, Lord Byron; Lorna Dee Cervantes; Geoffrey Chaucer; Lucille
Clifton; Samuel Taylor Coleridge; Billy Collins; H . D . (Hilda Doolittle); Emily Dickinson; John Donne; Rita
Dove; Paul Laurence Dunbar; T . S . Eliot; Robert Frost; Joy Harjo; Seamus Heaney; George Herbert;
Garrett Hongo; Gerard Manley Hopkins; Langston Hughes; Ben Jonson; John Keats; Philip Larkin; Robert
Lowell; Andrew Marvell; John Milton; Marianne Moore; Sylvia Plath; Edgar Allan Poe; Alexander Pope;
Adrienne Rich; Anne Sexton; William Shakespeare; Percy Bysshe Shelley; Leslie Marmon Silko; Cathy
Song; Wallace Stevens; Alfred, Lord Tennyson; Derek Walcott; Walt Whitman; Richard Wilbur; William
Carlos Williams; William Wordsworth; William Butler Yeats
In addition to the above works, your summer reading was as follows:
The Road by Cormac McCarthy
A choice of:
- Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
- Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
- Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
- To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
- The Sound and the Fury or As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
- Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
*This schedule is intended only as an outline. There will be changes and adjustments
depending on student needs, school functions, and teacher discretion.
FIRST QUARTER: August 18 – October 20
8.18-9.19
Week 1: Course Introduction
Summer Reading & AP Lit Warm-Up; Baseline timed writing
Weeks 2: Passage Analysis
AP Lit Warm-Up continued, Short Fiction
Week 3: Passage Analysis
Short Fiction
Week 4: Poetry
The Basics – Reading, interpreting, annotating
Week 5: Poetry
The Basics – Metaphor and meaning
9.22-10.15
Weeks 6-9: Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut
Conventions of the novel; crafted language; themes explored, literature as rhetoric, New
Criticism
10.16-17
Week 9: Quarter Exam
Thursday – Timed Essay
Friday – Selected Response
Unit sketches and calendars are forthcoming.
*This schedule is intended only as an outline. There will be changes and adjustments
depending on student needs, school functions, and teacher discretion.
SECOND QUARTER: October 21 – December 23
10.20-10.24
Week 1: Test Analysis, Portfolio, Reflections & Revisions
10.27-11.18
Weeks 2-3: The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien
Literature as rhetoric, crafted language, interpretation and analysis, writing about literature
Week 4: The Things They Carried: Group project, presentations - November 17-18
11.19- 12.19
Weeks 5-6: Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton
Point of view, symbolism, relationships and societal norms
Weeks 7-8: A Doll’s House by Henrik Ibsen
Drama, symbolism, relationships and societal norms
Week 9: Historical & Social Values essay
12.22-12.23
Semester Exams – Schedule TBA
THIRD QUARTER: January 5 – March 10
1.5-2.6
Weeks 1-5: Big Poetry Unit
2.9-2.20
Weeks 6-7: Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller
2.23-2.27
Week 8: The Stranger by Albert Camus and/or The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
Existentialist literature, allegory,
*This schedule is intended only as an outline. There will be changes and adjustments
depending on student needs, school functions, and teacher discretion.
3.2-3.6
Week 9: End-Unit Projects
3.9-3.10
Quarter Exam
Monday – Timed Essay
Tuesday – Selected Response; Vocabulary
FOUR QUARTER MARCH 11 – MAY 29
3.11-13
Week 1: Test Analysis, Portfolio, Reflections & Revisions
3.16-4.3
Weeks 2-4: Hamlet by William Shakespeare
4.6-4.10 SPRING BREAK
4.13-4.24
Weeks 5-6: Hamlet Extension & Analysis
April 23 – ASC Hamlet Field Trip!
4.27-5.5
Weeks 7-9: Putting It All Together
Test Prep, Review, and Go-Get-‘Ems
WEDNESDAY MAY 6, 8:00 AM
AP English Literature and Composition EXAM!
Rest of the Year Until Graduation: Senior Footprint Project!
*This schedule is intended only as an outline. There will be changes and adjustments
depending on student needs, school functions, and teacher discretion.