“But as I stood on the hillside, I foresaw that in the blinding sunshine of that land I would become acquainted with a flabby, pretending, weak-eyed devil of a rapacious and pitiless folly.”
<-- Previous this week's assignments -->
Tuesday, September 2 (1) - TFA Revision Peer Review; By tomorrow, read pages 5-13 in your anthology, Literature as well as Millhauser, "The Ambition of the Short Story."
Wednesday, September 3 (2) - Set Creative Writing Assignment; Reading a Story; Types of Short Fiction; By tomorrow, read "Plot," "The Short Story," and Updike, "A&P" (Longman 13-20). As you read, consider the use of detail to describe the supermarket and the girls. What do the details contribute? What effect do they have on the reader? Mr. Ames and Mr (Liam) Chang, come with one discussion question each.
Thursday, September 4 (3) - Updike, "A&P"; By tomorrow, read "Point of View" and Poe, "The Tell-Tale Heart" (Longman 36-40).
Friday, September 5 (4) - Poe, "The Tell-Tale Heart"; By Tuesday, read Baldwin, "Sonny's Blues" (Longman 51-72). Also, read pages 2-10 in your Killgallon text. Complete practices 1 and 3, typed, to be handed in.
Monday, September 8 (5) - Vocabulary Units 1-2; Killgallon
Tuesday, September 9 (6) - Set Prose Analysis Writing Assignment; Baldwin, "Sonny's Blues"
Wednesday, September 10 (1) - Baldwin, "Sonny's Blues"; Sample Prose Analysis
Thursday, September 11 (2) - Baldwin, "Sonny's Blues"
Friday, September 12 (3) - Baldwin, "Sonny's Blues"; By Monday, read "Character" (Longman 77-79) and гогол, "Шинель" (Gogol, "The Overcoat").
Monday, September 15 (4) - Gogol, "The Overcoat"; By tomorrow, tackle this lecture by Nabokov.
Tuesday, September 16 (5) - Gogol, "The Overcoat"; By tomorrow, read section V of the introduction in your edition of Heart of Darkness (pages xvii-xxviii). Also, begin reading Part I of Heart of Darkness, pages 103-108 ("...The snake had charmed me.")). Follow along with the guided reading questions posted to the right.
Wednesday, September 17 (6) - Conrad, Heart of Darkness; Tonight, continue reading HoD through the final full paragraph on the bottom of 113.
Thursday, September 18 (1) - Conrad, Heart of Darkness; Reading is re-reading, so re-read what you've read so far; tomorrow we'll play a little catch-up.
Friday, September 19 (2) - Conrad, Heart of Darkness; Over the weekend, continue reading HoD through the first full paragraph on the top of 121. Mr. Cantu is in charge of defining any word he doesn't think we will know. Also, read this document provided by The College Board with examples of prose analyses. The unguided reading for the second quarter is Jane Austen's Persuasion. Be sure to get your hands on this edition sooner rather than later.
Monday, September 22 (3) - Conrad, Heart of Darkness; By tomorrow, finish part I.
Tuesday, September 23 (4) - Set Figure of Speech Assignment; Re-watch the video on metaphors. Conrad, Heart of Darkness; Read through the middle of page 147 tonight.
Wednesday, September 24 (5) - Conrad, Heart of Darkness; Finish Part II of Heart of Darkness. Mr Grothues and Mr Alavarez will be coming tomorrow with one passage each for the class to closely read. Please come with your thoughts about the passage as well as questions for the class.
Thursday, September 25 (6) - Conrad, Heart of Darkness
Friday, September 26 (1) - Conrad, Heart of Darkness; Continue reading Heart of Darkness through the bottom of page 172.
Monday, September 29 (2) - Sample Jane Eyre PA graphs; Finish Heart of Darkness tonight. There will be an in-class, AP-style essay over Austen's Persuasion on Monday, December 8. Have the novel read and re-read by then.
Tuesday, September 30 (3) - Conrad, Heart of Darkness; Read Achebe, "An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's 'Heart of Darkness.'" The essay can also be found in the back of your edition of Things Fall Apart. Okay, fine, tomorrow we'll talk about race.
Wednesday, October 1 (4) - Writing the in-class essay; Conrad, Heart of Darkness; By tomorrow, read Focus 6, Absolute Phrases (Killgallon 49-53).
Thursday, October 2 (5) - Vocabulary Units 3-4; Killgallon
Friday, October 3 (6) - AP-style, in-class essay on Heart of Darkness; Your essays from Friday
Monday, October 6 (1) - Sample free-response, timed essays
Tuesday, October 7 (2) - In-class, AP-style writing assignment on The Power and the Glory
Wednesday, October 8 (3) - Set P&G Detail Assignment; Read this chapter from James Wood's How Fiction Works (sections 44-58 only); Greene,The Power and the Glory
Thursday, October 9 (4) - Greene,The Power and the Glory
Friday, October 10 (5) - Greene,The Power and the Glory; Over the weekend read chapters 1-2 of Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilych (found in your anthology, 264-275).
Due Dates
Prose Analysis - Monday, September 15
Heart of Darkness Figure of Speech Assignment - Tuesday, September 30
In-class Essay on Heart of Darkness - Friday, October 3
Read The Power and the Glory by Monday, October 6 - There will be an in-class, AP-style essay (question 3).
P&G Detail Assignment - Wednesday, October 15
In-class Essay on Persuasion - Monday, December 8
Study Links
"6 reading habits from Harvard"
Achebe, "The Truth of Fiction"
Questions for analyzing novels
“In reading exam papers written by misled students, of both sexes, about this or that author, I have often come across such phrases — probably recollections from more tender years of schooling — as ‘his style is simple’ or ‘his style is clear and simple’ or ‘his style is beautiful and simple’ or ‘his style is quite beautiful and simple.’ But remember that ‘simplicity’ is buncombe. No major writer is simple. The Saturday Evening Post is simple. Journalese is simple. Upton Lewis is simple. Mom is simple. Digests are simple. Damnation is simple. But Tolstoys and Melvilles are not simple..."
-Nabokov, Lectures on Russian Literature
AP Jargon
General Literary Terms
allegory, allusion, anachronism, arete, bildungsroman, canon, characterization, chiasmus, close reading, conceit, diction, epiphany, epistolary novel, fable, fabliaux, frame narrative, genre, irony, leit-motif, metafiction, mood, motif, novel, novella, poetry, prose, satire, tone, verisimilitude, verse
Elements of Fiction
character, climax, conflict, denouement, dialogue, dynamic character, foil, narration, plot, point of view, suspense, tension, unity, unreliable narrator
Poetic Terms
alexandrine, alliteration, anapest, apostrophe, assonance, ballad, blank verse, caesura, canticle, canto, carpe diem, consonance, contrapasso, couplet, dactyll, elegy, end rhyme, english sonnet, enjambment, epic, epic simile, free verse, half rhyme, heroic couplet, imagery, in medias res, internal rhyme, lyric, metaphysical, meter, ode, pastoral, pathetic fallacy, personification, prosody, quatrain, rhyme, slant rhyme, sonnet, sprung rhythm, stanza, terza rima, verse
Drama Lingo
blank verse, catastrophe, catharsis, chorus, comedy, deus ex machina, dialogue, drama, hamartia, hubris, metadrama, miasma, mimesis, monologue, peripeteia, stasimon, strophe, tragedy, tragic flaw, tragic hero
Rhetorical Devices
a priori, anadiplosis, anaphora, antithesis, apophasis, asyndeton, hyperbole, parallelism, parataxis, pathos, polysyndeton, procatalepsis, stychomythia, synesthesia
Figures of Speech
catachresis, euphemism, idiom, metaphor, metonymy, oxymoron, paradox, personification, simile, synecdoche, synesthesia
Joseph Conrad
"The short story concentrates on its grain of sand, in the fierce belief that there — right there, in the palm of its hand — lies the universe. It seeks to know that grain of sand the way a lover seeks to know the face of the beloved. It looks for the moment when the grain of sand reveals its true nature. In that moment of mystic expansion, when the macrocosmic flower bursts from the microcosmic seed, the short story feels its power. It becomes bigger than itself. It becomes bigger than the novel. It becomes as big as the universe. Therein lies the immodesty of the short story, its secret aggression. Its method is revelation. Its littleness is the agency of its power. The ponderous mass of the novel strikes it as the laughable image of weakness. The short story apologizes for nothing. It exults in its shortness. It wants to be shorter still. It wants to be a single word. If it could find that word, if it could utter that syllable, the entire universe would blaze up out of it with a roar. That is the outrageous ambition of the short story, that is its deepest faith, that is the greatness of its smallness."
-Steven Millhauser
In the news: the short story
The Irresistible Rise of the Short Story (with a short critique of the form)
Nikolai Gogol. Click the image to read an essay on "The Overcoat"'s enduring relevance.
Heart of Darkness Study Links
Professor Boyer's Guided Reading Questions
Chinua Achebe, "An Image of Africa"
The Power and the Glory Study Links
Walker, "A Mexico of the Mind"
Scott Turow: Feeling The Power and The Glory
Walking tour of the setting of the novel
Required Course Texts
The Little Brown Handbook, 11th edition
Vocabulary Workshop (Level H)
Literature: An Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, Drama, and Writing, 11th edition
Killgallon, Sentence Composing for College
Austen, Persuasion, Oxford World's Classics, ed. James Kinsley and Deidre Shauna Lynch
Conrad, Heart of Darkness, Oxford World's Classics, ed Cedric Watts
Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment: Pevear & Volokhonsky Translation (Vintage Classics)
Greene, The Power and the Glory
Wharton, The Age of Innocence (Norton Critical Edition)
Students should also expect to purchase a few paperback titles at my discretion.
Suggested Reading
Stanley Fish, How to Write a Sentence
E.M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel
David Mikics, Slow Reading in a Hurried Age
Francine Prose, Reading like a Writer
James Wood, How Fiction Works
“... one cannot read a book: one can only reread it. A good reader, a major reader, an active and creative reader is a rereader. And I shall tell you why. When we read a book for the first time the very process of laboriously moving our eyes from left to right, line after line, page after page, this complicated physical work upon the book, the very process of learning in terms of space and time what the book is about, this stands between us and artistic appreciation. When we look at a painting we do no have to move our eyes in a special way even if, as in a book, the picture contains elements of depth and development. The element of time does not really enter in a first contact with a painting. In reading a book, we must have time to acquaint ourselves with it. We have no physical organ (as we have the eye in regard to a painting) that takes in the whole picture and can enjoy its details. But at a second, or third, or fourth reading we do, in a sense, behave towards a book as we do towards a painting. However, let us not confuse the physical eye, that monstrous achievement of evolution, with the mind, an even more monstrous achievement. A book, no matter what it is - a work of fiction or a work of science (the boundary line between the two is not as clear as is generally believed) - a book of fiction appeals first of all to the mind. The mind, the brain, the top of the tingling spine, is, or should be, the only instrument used upon a book.”
- Nabokov, Lectures on Literature
Below are 5 of my annotated pages from various texts and 1 of David Foster Wallace's copy of DeLillo's Players. The pages of the texts that you will be working with most closely should look just like these.
The College Board's official course description:
An AP English Literature and Composition course engages 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 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.
Strake Jesuit's official course description:
In AP Lit & Comp. you will learn to read like an artist-critic, studying texts not only for their development of themes and cultural ideas but also for their technical mastery and innovations. How do writers employ language to create texts that engage their cultural moment and literary history in rich, often ambiguous ways? Why is first-person the right choice in A Farewell to Arms? Why so many disease images in Hamlet? What makes Joyce's sentences so terribly beautiful? You will read literature from a variety of genres and periods, always with an eye to unlocking its deeper mysteries. To read well you will first unlearn bad habits. No longer will quick reading, that nervous skim before class, do. No. You will learn to read slowly, to savor each sentence, each line, each paragraph or stanza for its multiple meanings, its suggestions, its silences. In time, you will learn the wisdom of Nabokov's remark that you can only re-read a book. Your writing assignments will be frequent and varied, from one-page response essays due the day of a reading, to longer, more formal essays of evaluation and analysis, to expository and creative pieces. Always, you will learn to sharpen your thinking and hone your writing, to give both an edge gained only by rethinking and rewriting. You will have conferences with me before and after essays are due. You will edit each other's essays for argument and style. And you will revise, revise, revise. This class offers an intensive reading experience and a full-on writing workshop.
If you do not mind (even if you do mind) bring in the Killgallon text on each day 5.