English
Suffolk Public Schools
Honors to AP
Preparation Marks Success
AP Literature and Composition
Pre-requisite: B or better in Honors English 11 or AP English Language and Composition
Expectations:
Expect to read approximately 5 novels, selected plays, short stories,
and poems throughout the course of the year. The number of novels
may vary according to teacher’s discretion.
Expect to write numerous papers of varying lengths analyzing
selected reading material.
Expect practice AP Literature tests to be administered throughout the
year.
Expect to read poetry representative of various time periods, written
in various forms, and focusing on various subject matter.
Expect reading material that caters to a mature audience.
Suggested websites:
Purdue OWL: owl.english.purdue.edu/owl
Classic Short Stories: http://www.classicshorts.com/
Classic Poets and Classic Poems: www.poemhunter.com/classics/
College Board: www.collegeboard.org/
http://freevocabulary.com/
http://www.bartleby.com/141/
http://www.virtualsalt.com/rhetoric.htm#Self
Suggested reading:
Students study works from some of the following authors selected for the range and quality of reading
expected in this course:
Poetry
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; Samuel
Taylor Coleridge; H. D. (Hilda Doolittle); Emily Dickinson; John Donne; Rita Dove; 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; Alfred, Lord Tennyson; Derek Walcott; Walt Whitman;
Richard Wilbur; William Carlos Williams; William Wordsworth; William Butler Yeats
Drama
Aeschylus; Edward Albee; Samuel Beckett; Anton Chekhov; Lorraine Hansberry; Lillian Hellman; David
Henry Hwang; Henrik Ibsen; Ben Jonson; Arthur Miller; Molière; Sean O’Casey; Eugene O’Neill; William
Shakespeare; George Bernard Shaw; Sam Shepard; Richard Brinsley Sheridan; Sophocles; Tom Stoppard;
Luis Valdez; Oscar Wilde; Tennessee Williams; August Wilson
Fiction (Novel and Short Story)
Chinua Achebe; Margaret Atwood; Jane Austen; James Baldwin; Saul Bellow; Charlotte Brontë; Emily
Brontë; Raymond Carver; Willa Cather; Sandra Cisneros; John Cheever; Kate Chopin; Colette; Joseph
Conrad; Stephen Crane; Anita Desai; Charles Dickens; George Eliot; Ralph Ellison; Louise Erdrich; William
English
Suffolk Public Schools
Honors to AP
Preparation Marks Success
Faulkner; F. Scott Fitzgerald; E. M. Forster; Thomas Hardy; Nathaniel Hawthorne; Ernest Hemingway;
Zora Neale Hurston; Henry James; James Joyce; Maxine Hong Kingston; D. H. Lawrence; Katherine
Mansfield; Gabriel García Márquez; Carson McCullers; Herman Melville; Toni Morrison; Bharati
Mukherjee; Vladimir Nabokov; Flannery O’Connor; Katherine Anne Porter; Jean Rhys; Jonathan Swift;
Leo Tolstoy; Mark Twain; John Updike; Alice Walker; Eudora Welty; Edith Wharton; Virginia Woolf;
Richard Wright
Summer Assignment:
Suffolk Public Schools wishes to promote a summer reading program to encourage critical
reading of both classical and contemporary literature. The following assignments are designed
to promote a serious academic attitude that demonstrates a high degree of self-discipline and
self-motivation. Students also have an opportunity to express their talents and personalities
while enjoying a variety of novels. Each of these assignments will count as a quiz grade for the
first nine weeks.
Assignment 1:
Read Thomas C. Foster’s book, How to Read Novels Like a Professor: A Jaunty Exploration of the
World’s Favorite Literary Form. For each chapter, using MLA format, type a well-developed
response for any 15 of the 36 guided reading questions (questions are on the back of this page).
Assignment 2:
From the list below, choose ONE reading selection. After reading the text, select a poem that
shares the same theme(s) as the literary work. Using MLA format, type a one page analytical
response showing how the similar theme(s) contributed to the overall meaning of both literary
works.
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Pride and Prejudice-Jane Austen
A Doll’s House-Henrik Ibsen
Metamorphosis- Franz Kafka
Death of Salesman-Arthur Miller
Bluest Eye- Toni Morrison
The above selections and authors are listed on College Board’s 101 Great Books Recommended for
College-Bound Readers.
Due Date: The summer reading assignments are due on the second day the class meets in
September with the exception of seventh block classes (seventh block -- due on the fourth day
the class meets). All written work must be typed double-spaced, using 12 point Times New
Roman font, and must include the attached coversheet.
English
Suffolk Public Schools
Honors to AP
Preparation Marks Success
How to Read Novels Like a Professor: A Jaunty Exploration of the World’s Favorite Literary Form
by Thomas C. Foster
Guided Reading Questions
Chapter I
1. How are the opening pages of a novel like a “pick up line?”
2. Foster states that there are “eighteen beauties” that readers can glean from the first
page (s) of a novel. Identify each literary device and summarize each device in your own
words.
3. After reading the first page(s) of the novel you have chosen for summer reading, which
literary devices listed above can you identify?
Chapter 2
4. Explain how settings work in a novel.
Chapter 3
5. List and briefly describe each of the seven types of point of views described in this
chapter.
Chapter 4
6. Describe the reasons why novelists employ first-person narrators? In addition, what
hinders the reader from trusting first-person narrators?
Chapter 5
7. How does a writer use "voice" to convey characterization?
Chapter 6
8. Explain Coleridge's theory of the "willing suspension of disbelief" and how it relates
to reading a novel.
Chapter 7
9. Foster reveals that, in the twentieth century, protagonists began to evolve from that
which generally accepted in fiction. How did protagonists change and what may we, as
readers, learn about these particular personalities?
Chapter 8
10. Compare and contrast the characteristics of the Victorian novel with that of modern
authors such as Joyce and Woolf.
Chapter 9
11. Why is the strategy used by Salman Rushdie in Midnight Children effective?
12. What does Faulkner mean when he describes Yoknapatawpha County as his “little
postage stamp of ground’?
13. Do all novels aspire to universal themes? Explain
English
Suffolk Public Schools
Honors to AP
Preparation Marks Success
Chapter 10
14. Explain two techniques authors employ to bring their characters to “life.”
15. Explain how “emblems” form a sort of motif in their repetition.
16. “Writers can suggest meaning and significance, but ultimately, readers make the final
call.” Explain how these “calls” are made.
Chapter 11
17. Explain how an author’s “style” affects the reader’s comprehension of text.
18. How is reading an “active element in creating meaning”?
19. In your own words, explain the “Law of Narrative Diction” as described in chapter 11?
Chapter 12
20. How do sentences expose what sort of writer and what sort of story you are reading?
21. In your own words, explain the “Law of Novelistic Style” as described in chapter 12?
22. What effect does an author’s style have on the meaning of text?
Chapter 13
23. Explain the meaning of the term “stream of consciousness” and describe what an author
attempts to accomplish by using this mode of narration.
24. Define “la durée” (durational time) and explain at least one benefit of its use.
25. What is the “legacy” of stream of conscious writers?
Chapter 14
26. In your own words, explain the “Law of Character Clarity” as described in chapter 14.
27. What is the role of “desire” in characterization?
28. How does the term “telos” relate to a character?
Chapter 15
29. Define and explain the tern “metafiction” as explained in chapter 15.
30. In terms of novels, what is “realism” and when did it begin to thrive?
31. In your opinion, is Foster correct in his assertion that “most fiction ever written has
strived for transparency.” Explain your response.
Chapters 16-22
32. Explain the following laws and insert examples of novels you have read where
appropriate:
The Law of Novel Paradox
The Law of Universal Connectedness
The Law of Us and Them
The Law of Fictional Ideation
The Law of Now and Then
The Law for All Reading
English
Suffolk Public Schools
Honors to AP
Preparation Marks Success
33. Comment on this quote by Foster: “Words change meaning over time. The same is true
of novels: they change meaning over time. The words stay the same naturally, but their
meanings can change, although that’s not the major force. The world changes around
the novels.”
34. What is Foster’s opinion of a novel with a tidy ending? Why does he feel this way?
35. According to Foster, what sorts of tricks do writers use to keep their audience reading
until the end of the novel?
36. What is dialogic reading?