The Stuyvesant High School Online Course Guide

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In this senior Advanced Placement course in English Literature and Composition, students are engaged in the careful reading of literary works from ancient and modern times. Through such study, they sharpen their awareness of language and their understanding of the writer's craft. They develop critical standards for the independent appreciation of a literary work, and they increase their sensitivity to literature as shared experience. To achieve these goals, students study the individual work, its language, characters, action, and themes. They consider its structure, meaning, and value, and its relationship to contemporary experience, as well as to the times when it was written.

Students are involved in both the study and practice of writing, and the study of literature. They learn to recognize the assumptions underlying various rhetorical strategies; through speaking, listening, and reading, but chiefly through the experience of their own writing, they become more aware of the resources of language: connotation, metaphor, irony, syntax, and tone.

Writing assignments focus on the critical analysis of literature and include essays in exposition and argument. Although much of the writing in the course will be about literature, speaking and writing about different kinds of subjects should further develop the students' sense of how style, subject, and audience are related. The desired goals are the honest and effective use of language and the organization of ideas in a clear, coherent, and persuasive manner.

Students will intensively study several representative works from various genres and periods. They will concentrate on works of recognized literary merit, worthy of scrutiny because their richness of thought and language challenges the reader. Initially many of the works, especially some of the great epics, will be read in translation, but because the course stresses close attention to an author’s own language and style, after the study of Homer's epic, most of the assigned reading will be in texts originally in English. A more multi-cultural and interdisciplinary approach to the study of literature will be encouraged in connection with a senior thesis, as well as with the study of post-colonial literature in the Spring.

Although the actual choice of works is the responsibility of the AP teacher and will take into account previous courses in the school's curriculum, it is assumed that by the end of the AP course in senior year, students will have assiduously studied works from both the American and English traditions. Because of a strong emphasis on period consciousness in the AP course, students will have studied works from Homeric times through the Middle Ages, Renaissance, Romantic, Victorian and modern periods.

The course requires a full year commitment and the examination is administered in the school each May. It is strongly recommended that all AP students take this exam. In the Fall term we will read Anglo-Saxon riddle songs, The Iliad, Beowulf, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. We will spice these works with poems by Emily Dickinson, W.B. Yeats, W.H. Auden, Robert Frost, Amy Clampitt, Stephen Dobyns, and John Hollander. In the Spring term we will read Hamlet, Shakespeare's sonnets, and poems by Donne, Herbert, Blake, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, Robert Browning, Dylan Thomas, Elizabeth Bishop, Kamau Brathwaite, Adrienne Rich, Eavan Boland, Mark Ford, Seamus Heaney, and Kay Ryan. Our unit on post-colonial literature will include two works by Joseph Conrad.

Applicants for the class must have at least a 92% English average.