Getting Started

Course Description and Expectations

Mock AP Exam

Discussion of Mock AP Exam, including scoring guidelines, sample responses and scoring summary

Mock Paideia Seminar – Lost in the Funhouse, Barth

The Elements of Fiction – Part One

Reading the Story

Richard Connell – The Most Dangerous Game

Tobias Wolff – Hunters in the Snow

Plot and Structure

Graham Greene – The Destructors

Alice Munro – How I Met My Husband

Characterization

Alice Walker – Everyday Use

Katherine Mansfield – Miss Brill

Mary Hood – How Far She Went

Theme

Toni Cade Bambara – The Lesson

Anton Chekhov – Gooseberries

Point of View

Shirley Jackson – The Lottery

Katherine Anne Porter – The Jilting of Granny Weatherall

Ernest Hemingway – Hills Like White Elephants

The Elements of Poetry – Part One

What is Poetry?

Alfred, Lord Tennyson – The Eagle

Robert Hayden – The Whipping

Emily Dickinson – The last Night that She lived

William Carlos Williams – The Red Wheelbarrow

Langston Hughes – Suicide’s Note

Adrienne Rich – Poetry: 101

Archibald MacLeish – Ars Poetica 102

Reading the Poem

A. E. Housman – Is my team plowing

John Donne – Break of Day

Emily Dickinson – There’s been a Death, in the Opposite

House

Mari Evans – When in Rome

Sylvia Plath – Mirror

William Blake – The Clod and the Pebble

                        Edwin Arlington Robinson – Eros Turannos

Denotation and Connotation

Emily Dickinson – There is no Frigate like a Book

Ellen Kay – Pathedy of Manners

Henry Reed – Naming of Parts

Langston Hughes – Cross

Robert Frost – Desert Places

John Donne – A Hymn to God the Father

Imagery

Gerard Manley Hopkins – Spring

William Carlos Williams – The Widow’s Lament

in Springtime

Adrienne Rich – Living in Sin

Seamus Heaney – The Forge

Robert Frost – After Apple-Picking

Jean Toomer – Reapers

John Keats – To Autumn

Figurative Language: Simile, Metaphor, Personification, Apostrophe, Metonymy,

Frances Cornford – The Guitarist Tunes Up

Robert Francis – The Hound

Emily Dickinson – It sifts from Leaden Sieves

John Keats – Bright Star

Sylvia Plath – Metaphors

John Donne – A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning

Andrew Marvell – To His Coy Mistress

Langston Hughes – Dream Deferred

Billy Collins – Introduction to Poetry

Writing About Literature

        Writing Interpretive Essays based on a careful observation of the work's textual details, considering such elements as the use of figurative language, imagery, symbolism, and tone.

Quarter Three Novels:
Beloved – Toni Morrison
The Crucible – Arthur Miller

Quarter Four Novels:
The Sun Also Rises – Ernest Hemingway

Outside Novels for Reading Groups
The Shipping News – Marshall Paule
Confederacy Of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
1984 – George Orwell
Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
Death of a Salesman – Arthur Miller
Franny and Zooey – J.D. Salinger
The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Invisible Man – Ralph Ellison
The Things They Carried – Tim O'Brian
Light in August – William Faulkner
Raisin In The Sun – Lorraine Hansberry
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man – James Joyce
Things Fall Apart – Chinua Achebe
All the Pretty Horses – Cormac McCarthy
The Bluest Eye – Toni Morrison

        The Elements of Poetry – Part Two

Symbol &  Allegory

Robert Frost – The Road Not Taken

Walt Whitman – A Noiseless Patient Spider

William Blake – The Sick Rose

Seamus Heaney – Digging

Robert Frost – Fire and Ice

Richard Wilbur – The Writer

Paradox, Overstatement, Understatement, Irony

Emily Dickinson – Much Madness is divinest Sense

Countee Cullen – Incident

Marge Piercy – Barbie Doll

William Blake – The Chimney Sweeper

Elisavietta Ritchie – Sorting Laundry

Billy Collins – The History Teacher

W. H. Auden – The Unknown Citizen

Robert Browning – My Last Duchess

Allusion

Robert Frost – “Out, Out—”

e. e. cummings – in Just—

Countee Cullen – Yet Do I Marvel

Edwin Arlington Robinson – Miniver Cheevy

T. S. Eliot – Journey of the Magi

Adrienne Rich – I Dream I’m the Death of Orpheus

Meaning and Idea

Robert Frost – Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening

Ralph Waldo Emerson – The Rhodora

Emily Dickinson – “Faith” is a fine invention

John Keats – On the Sonnet

Billy Collins – My Number 189

Tone

Richard Eberhart – For a Lamb

Michael Drayton – Since there’s no help

William Shakespeare – My mistress’ eyes

Adrienne Rich – Miracle Ice Cream

Thomas Hardy – The Oxen

John Donne The Apparition

John Donne – The Flea

Matthew Arnold – Dover Beach

Musical Devices

Ogden Nash – The Turtle

Theodore Roethke – The Waking

Gwendolyn Brooks – We Real Cool

Maya Angelou – Woman Work

William Stafford – Traveling through the dark

Marilyn Hacker – 1973

Robert Frost – Nothing Gold Can Stay

Rhythm and Meter

George Herbert – Virtue

Walt Whitman – Had I the Choice

Sylvia Plath – Old Ladies’ Home

Claude McKay – The Tropics in New York

Linda Pastan – To a Daughter Leaving Home

Judith Ortiz Cofer – Quinceañera

Lawrence Ferlinghetti – Constantly risking absurdity

Sound and Meaning

Alexander Pope – Sound and Sense

Emily Dickinson – I heard a Fly buzz—when I died

Margaret Atwood – Landcrab

John Updike – Recital

Galway Kinnell – Blackberry Eating

Richard Wilbur – A Fire-Truck

William Carlos Williams – The Dance

Pattern

John Keats – On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer

Dylan Thomas – Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night

John Donne – Death, be not proud

Martha Collins – The Story We Know

Wendy Cope – Lonely Hearts

Maxine Kumin – Woodchucks

Robert Herrick – Delight in Disorder

Michael McFee – In Medias Res

Evaluating Poetry: Sentimental, Rhetorical, Didactic Verse & Poetic Excellence

John Donne – The Canonization

John Keats – Ode on a Grecian Urn

Emily Dickinson – There’s a certain Slant of light

Robert Frost – Home Burial

T. S. Eliot – The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

Langston Hughes – The Weary Blues

Adrienne Rich – Diving into the Wreck

AP Test Prep