Syllabus 2009-2010

“If the literature we are reading does not awaken us, why then do we read it? A literary work must be an ice-axe to break the frozen sea inside us.”— Franz Kafka, 1904

Course objectives:
This course is designed to engage students in close reading and critical analysis of literature. This course will build upon previous knowledge and literary experience while increasing their exposure to, and understanding of, various works of literature. This course will expose students to various texts drawn from multiple genres, periods, and cultures. The students will develop their close reading skills at three levels: experience, interpretation, and evaluation.
By this year, you have studied English as a subject for three years of high school and two years of junior high school. You’ve learned valuable skills. Like all of your previous courses in English, this one will build on what you’ve mastered in the subject. There are some very important points of emphasis in this course that make it unique and particularly challenging. To put it simply, the purpose of an AP English course is to teach you two major skills that are interrelated: close-textual analysis, and critical analysis.

Close textual analysis
Thoreau said, “Literature was meant to be read the way it was written.” Writers take a long time to create well-crafted sentences, paragraphs, and stories. Close-textual analysis is the practice of taking our time, as readers, to look in detail at what the author did (whether on purpose, or unintentionally). We will learn strategies to explain and analyze the methods that writers take.

Critical Analysis
By the end of this course, you will think critically about all the texts you encounter. You will have a stronger understanding of the various manners in which a text can be analyzed (Freudian, reader-response, archetypal, neo-classical, historical, etc.). You will create your own critical analysis of the texts as well as master the art of defending your own interpretation in a clear, cogent analytical essay.
Each week, our five class periods will include time for each of the following:• In-depth discussion of the literary works we are reading (the majority of our time)• Presentations and discussions on the reading led by you and your peers• Informal reader’s response writing• Vocabulary development• Lessons on writing conventions and strategies, based on the class’ developing needs • Time for one-on-one conferencing about your writing and revision of your writing• Introduction of new literary terminology and critical methodologies

Our Readings
For each text, we will examine:• Our own experiences and interpretations of the text• Literary elements within each text (character, tone, theme, setting, etc.), both those that are universal and those that are specific to each genre • The author’s writing style, use of figurative language, and rhetorical strategies• How culture, time period, the author’s background, and literary period influence the piece• Critical methodologies that can be used to analyze this text (feminist, Marxist, structuralist, etc.)

Your reading assignments will be the most important assignments you complete all year. The class is based upon our discussions of the reading, and it is imperative that you be prepared for each day’s discussion. We will focus on active reading strategies to help you read productively and in a sophisticated manner.For each novel-length text, each of you will be assigned one literary element to focus on in your reading (the elements will rotate throughout the year). For example, you might be in charge of tracking themes in A Streetcar Named Desire. You should be prepared to comment on how the author is using that literary element, have questions for the class based on the themes you see emerging, or have marked a significant passage for us to analyze in class. You will be called on at least once per week to share what you’ve noticed about your literary element in the text we’re working on (but you’re encouraged to volunteer to share much more often). You are expected to take notes on your literary element while you are reading at home so that you will be prepared to share in class.

Our main readings for the year Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoevsky
Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad
Emma, Jane Austen
As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner
The Tempest, William Shakespeare
Beloved, Toni Morrison
The Turn of the Screw, Henry James
A Streetcar Named Desire, Tennessee Williams
Lots of poetry by British and American writers, 16th century to the present, including Keats, Wordsworth, Stevens, Moore, Dove, Cummings, Eliot, Marvell, Donne, Nye, Neruda, CollinsShort stories and essays by Jorge Luis Borges, James Joyce, Sandra Cisneros, Barbara Kingsolver, Chinua Achebe, Ralph Ellison, Ernest Hemingway, Jhumpa Lahiri, Nathan Englander, James Baldwin, Edwidge DanticatMany of our short stories, poems, sample essays, and reference materials will come from
The Bedford Introduction to Literature, edited by Michael Meyer

Writing Assignments
Reader’s Response Journal, Blog, and Creative Writing Throughout the year, you will engage in informal writing during class time, focused mainly on journaling in your reader’s response journals. These assignments will frequently be shared with your peers to allow you to explore ideas together and develop your responses more fully. Informal writing assignments will also aid your fluency and help you practice the writing skills we are studying on a daily basis.We will be developing an internet-based conversation around our texts on our class blog, which will allow us to read and comment on each other’s responses. There will also be occasional creative writing exercises and journaling assignments done in class, usually in order to develop an understanding of a particular literary technique by using it ourselves.

Timed in-class essays and essays written outside of class: A Three-Week Cycle For most of the year, you will be writing on a three-week cycle. In the first week of the cycle, you will complete a timed, in-class writing response similar in form to the questions on the AP Exam. During the second week, you will write rough drafts for an essay relating to the literature we are reading. Based upon writing conferences with me, peer response, and your own careful revision, you will spend the third week revising and editing your paper to turn a final draft in at the end of that week. Final drafts of essays should be typed in 12-point Times New Roman font. You should turn in all rough drafts with your final draft so that you have a record of your writing process. Your essays will be collected into a writing portfolio which we will use for assessment and reflection on your progress. Take note: Before you turn in any draft—even a rough draft or a timed in-class essay—you must read over your draft for careless errors, awkward or unclear sentence structure, or omissions. A draft turned in to me with obvious careless errors will be handed right back to you.

Research Projects
In addition, you will be completing two research projects during the year. One will involve background research on the author, time period, and literary “school” of one of the texts we will be reading. You will write up the information in an essay and present it to the class. For the second research project, you will read at least two critical essays on a text and will write a paper responding to those critical essays. These will take the place of the out-of-class essays in two of the essay cycles (so don’t worry; you will not be writing two papers at the same time).
Evaluating Writing As a class, we will create a rubric for effective persuasive writing which will be used to grade your work. I will help you develop your writing in the following areas:• Developing a thesis • Logical organization (especially transitions, introductions, and conclusions)• Balancing generalizations with specific supportive detail and evaluating which examples and quotations best develop the thesis• Rhetorical strategies that can be used to persuade the reader (controlling tone, use of a consistent voice, creating emphasis through parallelism and antithesis)• Vocabulary use and word choice, including an awareness of denotative and connotative meanings and of register• Variety in sentence structure (including subordinate and coordinate constructions)• Writing conventions (grammar, punctuation, etc.) • Developing your own voice as a writer utilizing diction and tone
Reflection and Goal-SettingAfter you turn in each essay, you will save it in your portfolio and complete a reflection on it, evaluating it based on our rubric and writing a brief narrative about the strengths and weaknesses displayed in your piece. You will then set your own writing goals for the next essay cycle.

Schedule
Notes:1. For each major text, one student will be assigned to research the author, context, and literary period of the work and present that information to the class before we read.2. Every out of class essay will include class time for one-on-one conferencing, peer review, and revision in class.
Pre-Summer Institute Assignment: Read A Streetcar Named Desire and Crime and Punishment. Complete three reader’s response blog posts for each book (six total) and comment on four other students’ posts for each book (eight total).
Introduction to Close Reading—Summer Institute 1 week
A Streetcar Named Desire, Tennessee Williams
Introduction to the course and to active reading strategies (annotation, questioning, connections, predictions, strategies for encountering difficult texts) Supporting texts: Freud case studyThemes include: fantasy vs. reality, cleansing, light vs. dark, sexuality, dependence, the pastLiterary Elements in Focus: elements of drama, tone, symbolism Critical Lens: psychoanalytic, feministWriting Skills Minilessons: creating a rubric for assessing writing; the qualities of excellent writing; the thesisAssessment: baseline practice AP essay on the play
Theme 1: The Limits of the Human Experience 5 weeks
Essential Questions:What are the limits of empathy? Can one human being truly understand another? Can one human being judge another?What is the function of law/convention/societal standards? Do they encourage morality?To what extent are we or should we be bound by law or society’s standards?
Crime and Punishment, Fyodor DostoevskySupporting texts: poetry by Mark Strand, William Blake, Rita Dove Themes include: redemption, suffering, alienation, the Superman, guilt and innocenceLiterary Elements in Focus: character, plot, symbolism, suspenseCritical Lens: structuralist criticism/ archetypal criticismWriting Skills Minilessons: developing a thesis and selecting evidence to support itAssessment: out of class essay
Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad
Supporting texts: Chinua Achebe; “The Lottery” Shirley Jackson

Themes include: Imperialism, the Other, honesty vs. hypocrisyLiterary Elements in Focus: frame tale, point of view, symbolism, irony, imageryCritical Lens: post-colonial criticismWriting
Minilessons: integrating quotations and evidence into a paragraphAssessment: out of class essay
Sample Essay Topics Interpretive Level: 1. Examine Kurtz’s last words: “The horror! The horror!” What horrifies Kurtz? What does Marlow learn from this encounter? 2. Many of the characters in Crime and Punishment are archetypes. Describe several of the characters that you see as archetypes and how they function within the novel’s world.Evaluative Level: 1. Based on our readings about postcolonial theory, how would you characterize Joseph Conrad’s attitude toward the Other? Is Conrad critical of imperialism?2. Many have criticized the ending of Crime and Punishment. Do you believe it is effective and fitting? Why or why not?
Theme 2: Varieties of Love 5 WeeksEssential Questions:What is love? Are there various identifiable categories of love?What is the relationship between the lover and the object of his or her affection?What does love require of us? / How do we express or demonstrate love?Do we see love as a part of nature or as transcendent?
Poetry:William Shakespeare, Andrew Marvell, John Donne, e.e. cummings, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Li-Young Lee, Naomi Shihab Nye, T.S. Eliot, Tim Siebels, Anais Nin, William Wordsworth, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Lewis Carroll, Grace Paley, Seamus Heaney, Sylvia Plath, Matthew Arnold, Ha Jin
Literary Elements in focus: Versification and meter, rhyme and other elements of sound, allusion, metaphor, figurative language, poetic forms, free verse, imageryCritical Lens: new criticismWriting Skills Minilessons: introductions and conclusionsAssessment: Timed in-class essay
Beloved, Toni MorrisonThemes include: identity, past vs. present, alienation, sacrifice, community, guilt, naming, loveLiterary Elements in Focus: point of view, plot structure, setting, themeCritical Lens: deconstructionistWriting Skills Minilessons: organization and transitions, crafting paragraph order for persuasive effectAssessment: out of class essay
Sample Essay TopicsInterpretive Level: 1. Do a close reading of one poem, focusing on how the poet utilizes sound, meter, rhyme, and structure to contribute to the overall meaning of the poem.2. What function do names play in Beloved? How do the characters assert identity (their own and others’) through naming?
Evaluative Level: 1. How do poets from distinct eras and literary schools present love differently? Select two love poems from different eras or schools and analyze how their contexts affect their presentation of love, both in form and content.2. Morrison is deliberately ambiguous about Beloved’s true nature. Why do you think she leaves this question open? How does it affect the reader’s understanding of the traumatic event at the novel’s center?3. Compare how the past shapes or informs the present in A Streetcar Named Desire and Beloved. Can these two visions of the Old South—the idealized and the horrifying—coexist?
Theme 3: Constructing Identity within Society 6 WeeksEssential Questions:How do we construct our identities?How is our identity a response to our context, society, and past?How do we negotiate the boundary between the inner, private self and the public self?How is our identity a response to our relationships?
The Tempest, William ShakespeareThemes include: magic, power, justice, art/ creativity, colonizer/colonized, “civilization,” loveLiterary Elements in Focus: setting, comedy as a genre, plot structure (3 unities), contrastCritical Lens: review of postcolonial,Writing Skills Minilessons: eliminating wordinessAssessment: scene performed in class
Emma, Jane AustenSupporting texts: poems by Emily Dickinson, Langston Hughes, Maya Angelou, Walt Whitman, Sherman AlexieThemes include: social structure and status, women’s roles, the imagination, language/ communicationLiterary Elements in Focus: subtext, puns, irony, character developmentCritical Lens: feminist criticismWriting Skills Minilessons: sentence structure/ sentence combiningAssessment: timed in-class essay
Sample Essay TopicsInterpretive Level:1. Compare the process of identity formation in Emma and one of the poems from this collection. How does society shape the individual in both?2. How do the comic scenes between Trinculo, Stefano, and Caliban parallel the events in other threads of the plot? How does Shakespeare use these scenes to highlight or parody other themes and problems?Evaluative Level:1. Is Emma a feminist novel? Why or why not?2. Many critics see Prospero as an embodiment of Shakespeare, and the magician’s renunciation of magic at the end of the play as Shakespeare’s announcement of his retirement (and indeed, The Tempest is one of Shakespeare’s last plays). Do you agree? Why or why not?
Theme 4: The Narrator/ Reader Relationship 6 WeeksEssential QuestionsWhat is the relationship between the narrator and the reader in a text? What happens to our reading of a text if the narrator is unstable or unreliable?How does ambiguity function in the reading process?What are the limits of interpretation?
The Turn of the Screw, Henry JamesThemes include: hidden vs. revealed, innocence, heroism, the supernatural, past vs. presentLiterary Elements in Focus: use of ambiguity, foreshadowing, suspenseCritical Lens: psychoanalyticalWriting Skills Minilessons: vocabulary and word choiceAssessment: Research paper incorporating critical articles
As I Lay Dying, William FaulknerSupporting texts: poems by Dylan Thomas, William Wordsworth, William Butler Yeats, Billy Collins, Allen GinsburgThemes include: words vs. thoughts/ writing, heroism, impermanence, past vs. presentLiterary Elements in Focus: point of view, narrative structure, plot structureCritical Lens: deconstructionist criticismWriting Skills Minilessons: diction and tone/ developing voiceAssessment: comparison essay—address the use of one literary element or theme in two of the texts we’ve read thus far
Sample Essay TopicsInterpretive Level: 1. Are the ghosts real or imagined in The Turn of the Screw? Argue for one side or the other.2. Why does Faulkner use Addie’s voice in the middle of the novel? What do we learn from her perspective? Evaluative Level:1. Why did Faulkner select the multiple-narrator format for As I Lay Dying? Do you think it works effectively? Why or why not?2. How does the framing tale function in The Turn of the Screw? How does it influence our understanding of the narrator’s relationship to the reader?
Theme 5: Realism, Magical and Otherwise 5 WeeksEssential QuestionsWhat do we mean by “realism”? What do we expect from the relationship between a text and “reality”?What is the function of the imagination in literature?
Poetry—The Imagination and the TextWilliam Wordsworth, Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, Billy Collins, John Keats, Rita Dove, Pablo Neruda, Adrienne Rich, E.K. Braithwaite, W.H. Auden
Short Stories— The Imagination and the Text“Eveline” James Joyce“Soldier’s Home” Ernest Hemingway“The Funeral Singer” Edwidge Danticat“The Interpreter of Maladies” Jhumpa Lahiri“Woman Hollering Creek” Sandra Cisneros“Sonny’s Blues” James Baldwin“The Garden of the Forking Paths” Jorge Luis Borges “The Tumblers” Nathan Englander
Literary Elements in Focus: the short story as a genre, elements as appropriate to each individual short storyCritical Lens: cultural criticismWriting Skills Minilessons: moving past interpretation to evaluationAssessment: Research paper in which student will read one or two critical articles about one of the stories and evaluate those critical articles in light of his or her own reading of the text
Sample Essay TopicsInterpretive Level:1. How do poets represent the role of the imagination in the world? Select one poem we read and analyze how the poet describes the relationship between art and life.2. Many of our short stories present a main character at a crossroads or a point of decision. Select one story and analyze how the author engages the reader in that moment of choice and assess whether or not the ending fulfilled your expectations as a reader.Evaluative Level:1. Select one of the short stories and write about how the author’s cultural background or historical context affected his or her writing.2. How does the short story differ from the novel? Draw from the short stories and novels we’ve read to make some generalizations about how the genres function differently.
Portfolio Reflection and Practice for the AP Exam 1 week
After the AP Exam, we will explore “alternative” types of texts: graphic novels, films, and other arts to apply the techniques of experience, interpretation, and evaluation to them.
English Department Grading Policy
Participation 15% • Class discussion• Listening• Group work/process• Conferring• Book Talk• Sharing Work Aloud
Classwork / Homework 30% • Homework assignments and readings are completed• Independent work during class time is completed• Journals are up to date• Group work – process and product• Reflections • Student is prepared for class• Student’s work is organized
Assessment 55% • Essays• Quizzes• Tests• Projects• Presentations
Please note that points will be deducted for each day an assignment is late. In addition, late assignments will not be accepted after three days without a written doctor or parent note.
Our class is also online! We have a blog pertaining to our class. It will be a place where I post assignments, announcements, and where your child may write comments about our class discussions and the literature we will be studying. I will be updating the blog on a weekly basis. I encourage students to check the blog periodically, and hope that parents will enjoy reading about our class! The website is: http://www.tigerwriters.blogspot.com/
I have also started to use an online grading system through https://snapgrades.net/login/?20409. I will update scores on a weekly basis.


I am always available via e-mail should you ever have questions or concerns. I encourage parental involvement and hope to be in communication with you throughout the school year regarding your child's process. I will also accept assignments through e-mail as well. My address is Jdavid4@schools.nyc.gov