Advanced Placement English Language and Composition
Brian D. Sweeney

sweeney@lschs.org
La Salle College High School

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La Salle College High School

Villanova University

 

Readings

 

RELATED PAGES
Syllabus

Required Texts
Literary Terms

LA SALLE LINKS

English Department

English Resources

McShain Digital Library

Library Resources


LINKS
The Official AP English Site

The Thoreau Reader
Classic Reader

Academy of American Poets

The Elements of Style

American Heritage Dictionary

The Atlantic Online

The Onion

The New York Times

 

 

Summer Reading

Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Eric Schlosser, Fast-Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal

Writing Assignment: Re-writing Huck


First Semester

Ralph Waldo Emerson, "The American Scholar"

Benjamin Franklin, Autobiography (Part Two)

Satire

What is satire?

Selections from The Onion

Jonathan Swift, “A Modest Proposal” (here’s a link to the text, but I will provide an edition using 18th-century punctuation and spelling)

Voltaire, Candide

Writing Assignment: Satire

Group Project:  Contextualizing Candide

 

Man, Woman, Utopia

What is Utopia?

Nathaniel Hawthorne, "The Birthmark"

John Updike, "Metamorphosis"

Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Women and Economics and "The Yellow Wallpaper"

Henry David Thoreau, Slavery in Massachusetts, Civil Disobedience” and selections from Walden

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature and "Self Reliance"

Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Blithedale Romance, Earth’s Holocaust,” and Chapter One of The Scarlet Letter

David Mamet, Oleanna (film)

In 1845, a man named Henry David Thoreau, of Concord, Massachusetts, decided to retire from society, and live in a hut of his own manufacture on the banks of a small lake.  In 1841, a number of prominent New England writers and philosophers (among them Nathaniel Hawthorne and Margaret Fuller) took part in a joint

Walden Pond

Walden Pond in Concord (click to enlarge)

venture to create a utopian community known as Brook Farm.  (Emerson refused to participate.)  American utopianism should hardly surprise us, after the extensive Edenic imagery we have encountered in Huck Finn.  But what was it that made so many intelligent and influential Americans give up on the seventy-year old republic, and create utopias of their own?  How do their real-life experiments affect our opinion of the agrarian paradise at the close of Candide?  We’ll conclude with David Mamet's Oleanna, an unsettling play about sexual harassment that takes its title from a utopian community in 19th-century America.

Coined by Saint Thomas More, the word utopia means an ideally perfect place, but also an impractically ideal one; from the Greek ou (no) + topos (place).

Hawthorne’s grandfather, John Hathorne, presided over the Salem Witch Trials; Hawthorne added a “w” to his last name in order to dissociate himself from his ancestor

Writing Assignment:  Critical essays on both Walden and The Blithedale Romance

Second Semester

The Atlantic’s annotated State of the Union address.

William Faulkner

William Faulkner, “Dry September” and “A Rose for Emily

Billie Holiday sings “Strange Fruit

Expatriation and the Lost Generation

Ernest Hemingway, "Hills Like White Elephants"

Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby  & "Echoes of the Jazz Age"

Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep

Some questions we shall consider:  What were some of the causes of disillusionment with America in the Jazz Age? How do Hemingway and Fitzgerald differ, and how do they resemble one another, as stylists? (The two friends were very competitive with one another, and Hemingway wrote an unflattering portrait of Fitzgerald in his bitchy memoir, A Moveable Feast.) The Big Sleep is a popular detective novel of the 1930s. Does a work of popular fiction illuminate its period more or less effectively than a work of literary fiction? How does The Big Sleep, in its own way, dramatize the disillusionment of the Lost Generation?

Ways of Looking

Plato, “Allegory of the Cave” from The Republic

Herman Melville, “Bartleby” and “Benito Cereno

Charles Johnson, Middle Passage

Henry Louis Gates, Jr.,  Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man (selections)

Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

Charles Johnson’s National Book Award-winning Middle Passage is hard to categorize: it is a sea adventure, a slave narrative, a philosophical novel, a comic burlesque, a religious parable.  It is also a sly retelling of “Benito Cereno,” a suspenseful tale about a slave revolt by the author of Moby-Dick.  In a number of ways, then, Middle Passage illustrates the importance of perspectivism—of looking at a subject from a variety of angles before claiming to know the approximate truth about it.  We will also enjoy Henry Louis Gates’ collection, in which important black Americans are profiled in essays that stress the ambiguity and complexity of identity.  Charles Johnson will also compel us to explore a variety of ways of looking at the universe: we will touch (lightly) on the philosophy of Plato, René Descartes, and Bishop Berkeley, as well as on Eastern thought.

Here's a link to information about the middle passage of the slave trade route.

Gates’ collection of essays, each originally published in the New Yorker, takes its title from a poem by Wallace Stevens, "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird."

Jean Gris, Portrait of Picasso

Marcel Duchamp, Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2

 

Hawthorne, Emerson, and Thoreau are buried in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Concord

Thoreau's grave

Hawthorne's grave

Emerson's Grave

Emerson's grave