Category Archives: AP Literature

February 14, 2018 · 7:02 am

Thug Notes: Lit Circles Novels

Sparky Sweets, Ph. D., is a big fan of messed up dystopias, y’all! Salty language and adult themes ahead. Proceed with caution.

And because Dr. Sweets hasn’t gotten around to it yet, here’s the Shmoop review of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest:

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January 8, 2018 · 7:00 am

Semester Reflection: AP

self reflectionNow that we have completed the first semester, it is time to reflect on your performance as a student of AP English. For this assignment, you will need to review the items in your portfolio and the scores you received on the semester mock exam.

SEMESTER WORK

1)    Review your written responses for commonalities. Is there a comment that keeps recurring? Record it. What are the most common problems on your papers? 

2)    What can you do to address and correct your writing problems? Is there a specific lesson I could give that would help? 

3)    Compare some earlier papers with papers written more recently. Where do you see that you have grown/improved? 

4)    Think about your reading habits for the class. Have you read all the works? If you haven’t read all of the assigned works, what is preventing you from finishing them on time? 

5)    What else do you need to do to be a successful student in the course and on the AP exam? Consider such things as distractions during class (phone/talking/other work you’re doing instead), scheduling, navigating Canvas, etc.

 

MOCK EXAM 

Review your mock exam and respond to the following questions.

1)    MULTIPLE CHOICE: Review your score. Did you earn at least half of the points (26+)? If so, how can you continue to score well? If not, what prevented you from scoring at least half?

2)    FREE RESPONSE: Skim each of your three essays. Then for each, respond to the following:
—Is your score for the question LOW (0-3), MIDRANGE (4-6), or HIGH (7-9)?
—What would you need to do to move this essay into the next score range?

3)    Overall, what would help you feel more confident on the exam? Consider such things as practice items, workshop, tutoring, etc.

When you have finished your reflection, please file your mock exam in your class portfolio. Take the time to weed out your portfolio. Remove any extraneous papers that do not relate directly one of the exam questions, i.e. old homework, classwork, etc. Keep the copies of your Six Pack Sheets and Window Notes from your play’s lit circle for review before the exam.

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November 29, 2017 · 7:00 am

Lit Circles: Play Choices

In preparation for Literature Circles, please review the following information about the plays. You will select a play of your choice and join in a circle with 3-5 members of your class. During class Wednesday, November 30, we will review lit circle procedures, deadlines, and assignments. You will receive a copy of your play at that time, so have your first and second choices in mind.

A Doll’s House by Henrik Ibsen

Norwegian-born Henrik Ibsen’s classic play about the struggle between independence and security still resonates with readers and audience members today. Often hailed as an early feminist work, the story of Nora and Torvald rises above simple gender issues to ask the bigger question: To what extent have we sacrificed our selves for the sake of social customs and to protect what we think is love? Nora’s struggle and ultimate realizations about her life invite all of us to examine our own lives and find the many ways we have made ourselves dolls and playthings in the hands of forces we believe to be beyond our control.

Equus by Peter Shaffer

EquusAn explosive play that took critics and audiences by storm, Equus is Peter Shaffer’s exploration of the way modern society has destroyed our ability to feel passion. Alan Strang is a disturbed youth whose dangerous obsession with horses leads him to commit an unspeakable act of violence. As psychiatrist Martin Dysart struggles to understand the motivation for Alan’s brutality, he is increasingly drawn into Alan’s web and eventually forced to question his own sanity. Equus is a timeless classic and a cornerstone of contemporary drama that delves into the darkest recesses of human existence.

Fences by August Wilson

From August Wilson, author of the ten-part “Pittsburgh Cycle” of plays dramatizing the African-American experience in the twentieth century, comes this powerful, stunning work that won the 1987 Tony Award for Best Play and the Pulitzer Prize. The protagonist of Fences, Troy Maxson, is a strong man, a hard man. He has had to be to survive. Troy has gone through life in an America where to be proud and black is to face pressures that could crush a man, body and soul. But the 1950s are yielding to the new spirit of liberation in the 1960s, a spirit that is changing the world Troy has learned to deal with the only way he can, a spirit that is making him a stranger, angry and afraid, in a world he never knew and to a wife and son he understands less and less.

A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry

raisin2Set on Chicago’s South Side, the plot revolves around the divergent dreams and conflicts within three generations of the Younger family: son Walter Lee, his wife Ruth, his sister Beneatha, his son Travis and matriarch Lena, called Mama. When her deceased husband’s insurance money comes through, Mama dreams of moving to a new home and a better neighborhood in Chicago. Walter Lee, a chauffeur, has other plans, however: buying a liquor store and being his own man. Beneatha dreams of medical school. The tensions and prejudice they face form this seminal American drama. Sacrifice, trust and love among the Younger family and their heroic struggle to retain dignity in a harsh and changing world is a searing and timeless document of hope and inspiration.

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November 6, 2017 · 7:00 am

The Burden Family Tree

In Chapter 11, Joanna tells Christmas the story of her family. Abolitionists with New England roots, the Burdens are tolerated but never accepted in Jefferson. Joanna’s grandfather Calvin and his namesake, her half-brother also named Calvin, are shot to death by Colonel Sartoris “over a question of negro voting.” Joanna is the only surviving member of the Burden family in Jefferson when Christmas arrives.

Burden Family Tree

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November 3, 2017 · 7:00 am

Light in August Foldable Instructions

foldables2Foldables (as anyone who’s ever has Mrs. Parm for a class would know) can prove to be a very helpful study aid. We’ll be using a simple foldable to collect textual support for your seminar on Light in August.

First, consider some of the motifs Faulkner has been tracing throughout the novel. Obviously, race is a primary motif—how the races interact, what the common attitudes were at the time, how different characters react to questions of race, etc. Next, there is isolation. In what ways are the characters isolated from others? From the larger Jefferson community? Is this isolation self-selected or imposed upon them? Identity forms a core idea in the novel. How the characters identify themselves, or push against the identities placed on them by others, reveals much about their choices and actions. Finally, as in much of Faulkner, there is the role of religion. How does religion—the moral expectations of practitioners, the language, and its traditions—impact the morals, choices, and viewpoints of the characters?

The foldable will help you gather evidence about these motifs and help you create strong questions to use in our seminar when we conclude our study of Light in August. Create your foldable this way:

  1. Fold paper in half cross-wise (hamburger style).
  2. Draw a line down the center fold, both the front and the back.
  3. Label each section as follows:     1-5     6-10     11-15     16-21
  1. In each section, you will be recording two kinds of information:
  • Quotes, examples, and instances illustrating one or more of the major motifs of the novel: race, isolation, identity, and religion.
  • Connect each quote/example/instance to one or more of the characters.
  1. You will continue to add to your foldable as you read. This foldable will substitute for the character and scene pages of the Six Pack Sheet for Light in August.

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October 31, 2017 · 7:00 am

Entering Yoknapatawpha County

Former Orlando Sentinel Books Editor Nancy Pate described William Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County as “[a] fictional landscape…peopled by rogues and rednecks, farmers and townsfolk, descendants of soldiers, slaves and carpetbaggers. There are whites, blacks, mulattos, people of all ages. They have names like Snopes and Sutpen, Compson and Bundren, Sartoris and Varner, Benbow and McCaslin. They live on old plantations and tenant farms,  in small hamlets and crossroads smaller still. Their stories–many of them intertwining–make up what Faulkner called ‘the tragic fable of Southern history.'”

WF1946MapMuch like English novelist Thomas Hardy, whose “Wessex” is a fictional amalgam of real locations, Faulkner based Yoknapatawpha County on very real places. Faulkner lived for most of his life in Oxford, Mississippi. In Faulkner’s work, Oxford becomes the town of Jefferson, while the real Jefferson County is named “Yoknapatawpha” after the old Chickasaw word for the Yocona River south of town. The county is located in north central Mississippi not far from the Tennessee border. This 1947 map indicates the primary locations of several of Faulkner’s major works, including not only Light in August but also his masterworks Absalom, Absalom! and The Sound and the Fury.

mapwfThe second map, probably drawn in 1947 for Malcolm Cowley’s Portable Faulkner, is just one of a series that Faulkner created for each of his works. Characters, events, and locations in one work often make appearances in another. As such, many of the maps contain references not only to the current work, but other works that might have connections to it.

Stephen Railton of the University of Virginia has created a series of interactive Yoknapatawpha maps which provide commentary on places in selected Faulkner works. Those maps are available here.
Maps from the Faulkner Collection, Small Special Collections Library, University of Virginia.

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October 25, 2017 · 7:09 am

William Faulkner Intro

The past is never dead. It’s not even past.
–William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun

 

69eecb475a762e6c_largeNobel Prize-winning author William Faulkner is one of the best-known of Southern writers, if not the preeminent one. His rich and evocative writing style is unparalleled and very different from many of his contemporaries, most notably Ernest Hemingway. Where Hemingway is spare, direct, and laconic, Faulkner is lush, meandering, and protracted. One famous Faulkner sentence, located in the middle of Absalom, Absalom!, runs for 1,288 words. In that sense, Faulkner’s writing is much like the South he loved and sought to preserve on the page: a complicated, tangled mixture of the lyrical and the everyday.

Faulkner was born in Mississippi in 1897. He began writing as a young man. When World War I broke out, Faulkner attempted to enlist in the Army, but his age and height (he was only 5’5-1/2″) kept him out. Undaunted, Faulkner went to Canada to enlist in the British Royal Flying Corps. Despite never actually serving, he was fond of wearing his uniform and carrying the swagger stick he’d been issued. Soon after, he moved to New Orleans to begin his writing career. His first novel, Soldier’s Pay, was published in 1925. Apart from this brief period in New Orleans, occasional stints as a Hollywood screenwriter in the late 1930s and early 1940s, and as a writer in residence at the University of Virginia in the 1950s, he primarily lived and worked in his hometown of Oxford, Mississippi. He once remarked, “I discovered my own little postage stamp of native soil was worth writing about and that I would never live long enough to exhaust it.”

He was right. His interwoven collection of short stories and novels focused on his own back yard. Lafayette County became the fabled, fictional Yoknapatawpha County, whose families, history, and tales reflected both the high-minded ideals of the mythical South and the tangled, messy actualities of a region marked by pride, poverty, social status, and segregation.

Rowan OakRowan Oak, Faulkner’s home, is now owned and operated as a museum by the University of Mississippi. The house is preserved much as it was in Faulkner’s day. His Underwood typewriter sits ready on a desk, while riding boots rest on the floor next to a chair. A full outline and story notes for one of his last published works, A Fable, are penciled across the walls of his study. Faulkner’s connection to this house was legendary. One story goes that during one of Faulkner’s screenwriting jobs, the studio put him in an office and left him to work. After some time passed without much output, Faulkner said he thought he could write better from home, and the studio agreed. More time passed without any production, so the studio sent someone to Faulkner’s temporary California apartment—and he wasn’t there. When he asked to write from home, he meant Rowan Oak. They called and sure enough, Faulkner was in Mississippi, proving what he wrote for The Paris Review in 1956: “An artist is a creature driven by demons. He don’t know why they choose him and he’s usually too busy to wonder why. He is completely amoral in that he will rob, borrow, beg, or steal from anybody and everybody to get the work done.”

Faulkner’s life was marked by excesses—his concentration on his work, his home, his alcohol consumption (he did not drink while writing but often binged afterward). He won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in both 1955 and posthumously in 1963, and was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature for his body of work in 1949. In his acceptance speech he remarked, “I feel that this award was not made to me as a man, but to my work—a life’s work in the agony and sweat of the human spirit, not for glory and least of all for profit, but to create out of the materials of the human spirit something which did not exist before. So this award is only mine in trust.” Hear a clip of his acceptance speech here.

Faulkner’s techniques, including his exploration of stream-of-consciousness writing, his invented verbiage, and his convoluted timelines, have earned him a permanent place near the top of the Southern literary tradition. Flannery O’Connor, another celebrated Southern author, stated that “the presence alone of Faulkner in our midst makes a great difference in what the writer can and cannot permit himself to do. Nobody wants his mule and wagon stalled on the same track the Dixie Limited is roaring down.”

For all kinds of great Faulkner resources, visit William Faulkner on the Web, hosted by the University of Mississippi.

“William Faulkner’s Hollywood Odyssey,” by John Maroney about Faulkner’s screenwriting days, was published in Garden and Gun magazine in 2014. Read it here.

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October 17, 2017 · 2:00 am

World Café Discussion: The Glass Menagerie

unicorn

The following questions were considered during the World Café discussion in class today. Selected responses are recorded below.

The Glass Menagerie is a play about _____ because _____.

  • Confinement – Amanda trapped in the past, Tom in the city/apartment, Laura in her defect
  • Guilt/Regret – Tom goes back after everything that had happened; he regretted leaving his sister, Tom tries to leave but his memories catch up with him
  • Illusion – Amanda lives in the past and thinks too much of everything, Tom’s distorted perspective about everything that happened, Tom dreaming of adventure, Laura living in the glass menagerie, everyone has big dreams but doesn’t work at them
  • Deception – The facts we know from the play come from memory so they’re affected by Tom’s emotions, everything is altered/exaggerated so it’s deceptive, Amanda creates a reality for her children to adhere to
  • Escape – The father’s picture represents “family” to Amanda (she hasn’t moved on), Tom knows his father got out so it gives him hope/inspiration to escape as well, Amanda wants Laura to escape through marriage, Laura escapes into her menagerie, Jim escapes by taking night classes
  • Escaping reality – Tom wants adventure, Amanda is stuck in the past, Laura lives in her own world, Tom goes to the movies, Tom tries to escape his memories of Laura, Amanda in denial about her actual life
  • Abandonment – Tom leaves Amanda and Laura like their father did
  • Family hardship – Laura feels as though she’s crippled, Tom doesn’t want to work at the factory, Tom’s leaving makes it harder for Amanda, Tom always fighting with Amanda, Laura does not fulfill what Amanda wants
  • Obstacles – Laura is crippled, Amanda wants to find Laura a husband, Tom can’t get along with his mother
  • Isolation – Laura keeps herself isolated because of her disability, but Jim sees that and tries to bring her into the normal world when he kisses her

Who is the most important character in the play? Explain.

  • Amanda – she plays a bit part in every situation, she is the reason for the split, she pushes her children (Tom into escaping, Laura into anxiety), she keeps the family together, she wants Laura to succeed in life and for Tom to live up to his responsibilities, she’s manipulative and tries to get the family to do what she wants, tries to live a different life through Laura
  • Tom – the story itself is his memories, he had to do all the work for the family including finding the gentleman caller, his memories bring emphasis to certain characters and their feelings, he brings in the conflict and ends it
  • Laura – the play is Tom’s reflection and regret about how he treated her, she is the center of the play, she’s protected by her family because of her fragility, Tom does everything for her, she is always on Tom’s mind
  • Jim – he’s the catalyst for the destruction of the family, his actions create the final break between Amanda and Tom, he builds up and then “breaks” Laura, wake up call to reality, crushes dreams of family
  • the father – he’s the reason for their current situation, characters’ choices are viewed in comparison to his, he’s always watching (figuratively) the fallout his leaving created, his absence is the catalyst for both Amanda’s and Tom’s characters, he’s the first domino, the only realistic character

Name and discuss the significance of an important symbol in the play.

  • glass menagerie – Laura’s fragility and her hopes/dreams
  • father’s picture – constant reminder of his abandonment, foreshadowing of what Tom will become, represents memory of him and family’s situation because of his absence, what could have been
  • Victrola – Laura’s unwillingness to move and how her life is painfully repetitive, Laura clinging to her father’s memory
  • fire escape – Tom can leave anytime he wants and escape from his life, wish to escape current lifestyle, Laura tries to use the fire escape but stumbles every time (shows how she can’t escape Amanda’s expectations), freedom
  • unicorn – symbolizes Laura’s difference, Laura’s innocence breaks when Jim kisses her just like the horn of the unicorn breaks off, Tom and Laura’s relationship breaks after it does, it isn’t real–when Laura opens up to Jim, she becomes like everyone else
  • movies – Tom’s need for adventure and freedom
  • blue roses – roses mean love, but blue roses don’t exist; shows how Laura believes in a relationship that doesn’t exist, uniqueness
  • music and dancing – what they can’t be
  • candle – Laura blows out hope
  • Amanda’s dress – Amanda’s old life
  • typewriter – both Tom’s ambitions and Laura’s failed attempts at success

How does the setting function to reveal character and provide insight on theme?

  • Cramped apartment – reinforces ideas of entrapment (Tom escapes through movies, Amanda through memories, Laura through her glass menagerie), small set forces us to focus on the events at hand, this house is their whole world, maintain decency of setting to feign order/normality of family, interior as nice as Amanda can make it to show what they used to be, reinforces that they are living in the past
  • Dark surrounding apartment – nothing really out there for the Wingfields, apartment is their only common place to go, isolates the family
  • Great Depression – everyone is poor and wants a form of escape, women dependent on men for financial support, women expected to be pretty and good homemakers to attract a good husband
  • Living room – Laura sleeps here/keeps focus of play on her, everything Laura cares about (Victrola, glass menagerie) is here
  • Fire escape – Tom escaping the family, Tom can leave whenever he wants but Laura can’t, reality outside the apartment
  • Music – Laura winds Victrola to calm herself down, enhances the drama
  • Light – provides intensity/focus (Amanda nagging Tom, Laura’s state of mind when the gentleman caller arrives, lights going out shows Tom’s irresponsibility and selfishness
  • Screen images – emphasizes dreamlike state of play, keeps things foggy/unclear, reminders that this is a memory
  • Southern setting – gives Amanda strong family values which makes her pressure her children to succeed

For a previous discussion, see the post here.

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May 31, 2017 · 8:00 am

Summer Reading Assignment

summer-reading

Students are always asking what they can do to prepare for success in AP Literature. Here, stolen word for word from the fabulous Kylene Beers, who is an expert in adolescent reading and has an amazing website here, is what you should be reading this summer.

  • All the books (and I mean all the books) you really want to read.
  • Any of the books that your friend wants you to read and once you start you actually like.
  • One (or more if you choose) of the books your mom/dad/grandparent/teacher/or any other person who looks a lot older than you promises you will love if once you start it you do indeed discover you do love it.
  • Something you think looks hard. You’ll discover if you really want to read it, it won’t actually be that hard.
  • An author or topic you haven’t read before. You might discover a new topic or author you really like!
  • Joke books. They will keep you laughing (and make your parents nuts). Be sure to tell the corniest jokes during dinner.
  • And then you simply must finish the summer with more of what you want to read.

If you’re looking for a more focused way to prepare for AP Literature, fetch yourself a copy of Thomas Foster’s fabulous book How to Read Literature Like a Professor. Choose a favorite novel—preferably a classic one, since they have the most “meat” to work with—and read it along with Foster’s guide. You’d be surprised how much is hiding in the straw alongside Wilbur in Charlotte’s Web, walking the streets of Maycomb with Scout Finch, fizzing with the champagne at one of Gatsby’s parties, or even pacing the battlements of Macbeth’s castle. Attentive, careful reading always reveals more than the plot and characters do at your first encounter. Foster’s book can help you spot those gems more readily.

Stuck on what to read? Check out the links to the right for the Rory Gilmore Reading Challenge or the 100 Books to Read in a Lifetime for suggestions. Have a great summer, and happy reading!

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April 9, 2017 · 10:10 am

Poetry Focus: Singing America

Langston Hughes’ 1925 poem “I, Too, Sing America” is one of the best-known of all poems of the Harlem Renaissance. Its message of inclusive hope reverberated across the twentieth century and continues to be a touchstone for people seeking a place at the table. Here are several interpretations of the poem to consider as you review the text.

First, Langston Hughes reading his own poem:

The political advocacy group Emerging US made the poem the focal point for this video focusing on the Mexican-American experience in Los Angeles:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Z2r721Vzls#action=share

YouTube user IndianaTheGreat juxtaposed images from the Civil Rights Era to audio of Denzel Washington reading the poem in the film The Great Debaters and clips from Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech during the March on Washington.

Hughes’s poem was written as a response to Walt Whitman’s famous free-verse poem “I Hear America Singing.” This visual representation of the poem by YouTube user Dustin Rowland illustrates the breadth of the American experience Whitman intended to celebrate.

Finally, this is Whitman himself, reading his poem “America.” 

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