The Stuyvesant High School Online Course Guide

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American Literary History is first and foremost a college level writing course that engages students in becoming skilled writers who compose for a variety of purposes. You will become aware of the interactions among a writer's purpose, audience expectations, and subjects as well as the way resources of language contribute to the effectiveness in writing. The course requires students to write in several genres, such as expository, argumentative, analytical, editorial, movie review, compare and contrast, and the research paper. Conspicuously absent is creative fiction writing; this is not a creative fiction writing course! The primary purpose of the course is to enable students to write effectively and confidently in their college courses across the curriculum and in their professional and personal lives. Therefore, this course emphasizes the expository, analytical, and argumentative writing that forms the basis of academic and professional communication, as well as the personal and reflective writing that fosters the development of writing facility in any context.

This course will help students develop their writing skills beyond the basic five-paragraph essay that provides an introduction with a thesis and three reasons, body paragraphs on each reason, and a conclusion that restates the thesis. Instead, students will be encouraged to place their emphasis on content, purpose, and audience and to allow this focus to guide the organization of their writing. In addition, the writing process will be emphasized, specifically exploring ideas, reconsidering strategies, using grammatical conventions appropriately, and revising essays (aided by teacher and peers), leading to skilled writers who are more self-aware and flexible.

Yet, AP Language and Composition: American Literary History is also a literature course that focuses on the literary history of America, both fictional and non-fictional, from Early-Colonialism to the mid-20th Century. In addition to the chronological study of the social issues from a variety of periods that impelled American writers to compose famous and complex texts, students will also become skilled readers of prose written in a variety of disciplines and rhetorical contexts. Students will study language itself, specifically the differences between oral and written discourse, formal and informal language, and historical changes in speech and writing. More importantly, students will synthesize the various writing styles and become aware of how stylistic effects are achieved by writers' linguistic choices, thereby leading to an awareness of their own writing.

For more information on the objectives of the course, go to: http://apcentral.collegeboard.com/repository/05833apcoursdescengli_4309.pdf

Fall Semester

• Thomas Morton: New English Canaan (excerpts)
• William Bradford:Of Plymouth Plantation (excerpts)
• Nathaniel Hawthorne: The Scarlet Letter, "The Maypole of Merry-Mount," "The Minister's Black Veil," "Ann Hutchinson," "Endicott and the Red Cross," "Young Goodman Brown"
• Thomas Paine: Common Sense
• Edgar Allan Poe: "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," "Ligeia," "The Pit and the Pendulum," "The Masque of the Red Death," "The Black Cat," "The Tell-Tale Heart," "The Fall of the House of Usher," "The Cask of Amontillado," "The Raven," "The Bells," "Annabel Lee"
• Ralph Waldo Emerson: Selected Essays
• Henry David Thoreau: Walden(excerpts), "Resistance to Civil Government"
• Harriet Beecher Stowe: Uncle Tom's Cabin
• Frederick Douglass: Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
• Essays: "The Philosophy of Composition," by Edgar Allan Poe; "The Declaration of Independence," "Give Me Liberty, Or Give Me Death," by Patrick Henry; "I Have A Dream," by Martin Luther King; "Advice to Mississippi Youth," by Malcolm X; "Second Inaugural Address," by Abraham Lincoln; "Ebonics," by William Cosby; "African Slavery in America," by Thomas Paine.

Spring Semester

• Ambrose Bierce: "Chickamauga," "The Coup de Grace," "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge," The Devil's Dictionary (excerpts)
• Joel Chandler Harris: Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings
• Booker T. Washington: Up From Slavery
• Charles Chesnutt: The House behind the Cedars,"The Goophered Grapevine," The Sheriff's Children," "The Wife of His Youth," "A Matter of Principle," "The Passing of Grandison," "The Doll"
• Women's Voices: Stories by Rebecca Harding Davis, Sarah Orne Jewett, Mary Wilkins Freeman, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Kate Chopin, Susan Glaspell, Zora Neale Hurston, and Nella Larsen
• Stephen Crane: "The Open Boat," Maggie: A Girl of the Streets
• Frank Norris: McTeague
• Upton Sinclair: The Jungle
• F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Great Gatsby
• Richard Wright: Uncle Tom's Children
• Selected Essays: "Of Booker T. Washington and Others," by W.E.B. DuBois, "Letter from a Birmingham Jail," by Martin Luther King, Jr., "What is a White Man," by Charles Chesnutt, "The Disfranchisement of the Negro," by Charles Chesnutt, "The Declaration of Sentiments," by Elizabeth Cady Stanton, "The Ethics of Living Jim Crow," by Richard Wright.

Students are required to have a minimum average of 92%.