Welcome to Advanced placement Literature!
Overview:
The Advanced Placement (AP) Literature and Composition course enables students to deepen their understanding of the way writers use language to provide both meaning and pleasure for their readers. Students will practice close reading, consider structure, style, and theme in a variety of works, as well as such smaller-scale elements as figurative language, imagery, symbolism, and tone. Students will write and revise analytical and argumentative essays throughout the course, which will examine the authors’ craft and methodology, including structure, style, tone, and rhetorical strategy. This AP Literature course require reading works from a variety of genres and periods—from the 16th to the 21st century. The AP Literature exam format is: three (3) hours total—60 minutes of multiple-choice questions, and 120 minutes to write three (3) essays—poetry analysis, prose analysis, and an open-ended/literary essay. Weight is a 45%/55% split.
The course will be arranged into four units, each encompassed by an Essential Question, and each centered around two-three major literary works with supplemental disciplinary texts.
- Unit I: How do our perceptions limit and strengthen us?
- Unit II: At what point does the pursuit of progress become harmful?
- Unit III: Why do we lie to ourselves and to each other?
- Unit IV: How should we act in the presence of injustice?
In addition, we will review and refresh previous years’ lessons on sentence and verb variety, on use of subordinating and coordinating elements, and on utilizing synthesizing techniques to create unity and cohesion in writing.