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Friday, November 21 (4) - Set Research Essay, Part 1; Enjoy your Thanksgiving Break by finishing the novel, Part Six and Epilogue.
PRIORITIES FOR THE IMPENDING, PERENNIAL, PROTRACTED PAUSE:
1. Finish Crime and Punishment.
Monday, December 1 (5) -Murphy, Wagner; Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment
Tuesday, December 2 (6) - Zaghrini; Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment
Wednesday, December 3 (1) - Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment
Thursday, December 4 (2) - Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment Long Quiz (Part Six and Epilogue)
Friday, December 5 (3) - Interlude: Following the verse-argument
Monday, December 8 (4) - Shakespeare, Sonnet 20
Tuesday, December 9 (5) - Vocabulary Quiz (Units 10-11); Killgallon
Wednesday, December 10 (6) - Sample Poetry Analysis and some more
Thursday, December 11 (1) - Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment
Friday, December 12 (2) - DEAD DAY - NO CLASS
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SEMESTER 1 EXAM - WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 17, 8:15AM
Note the final exam format: 3 essays (1 verse analysis, 1 prose analysis, 1 open ended)
OVER CHRISTMAS BREAK:
Come back having completely finished reading (perhaps re-reading) your research text.
Also, read page 632 in your anthology ("Reading a Poem"). Then tackle some poems: Browning, "My Last Duchess," Bradstreet, "The Author to Her Book," and Whitman, "To a Locomotive in Winter" (640-1, 647, 648).
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
Crime and Punishment Study Links
Virtual Tour of Raskolnikov's Journey
Map of the places mentioned in Petersburg
Historical and Political Context
Crime and Punishment in Prison
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.