Ap Eng Lang - Contemporaries Classics

Prerequisites

• - {'type': 'grade_level', 'allowed_grades': [11]}

Course Description

• This course is ultimately about the power of words in processing, shaping, and communicating ideas. We read literature because we love stories and characters and images and words, words, words, and we love writing because we get to enter into the literary conversation and try to move our own readers, to make them feel and think and understand, and to appreciate things that are meaningful and true. In this class, we read and write for those reasons, but we also layer on a rhetorical focus, zooming in on the moves writers make.Contemporaries and Classics ranges across the American Literary canon, including titles from the famous to the recent to the obscure. We read a mix of fiction and nonfiction, and books are chosen with an eye toward relevance, beauty, and diversity. Reading and writing assignments are sequenced so that we can trace threads of thinking across genres, styles, and time. Along the way, we will explore what makes American Literature… American. How can our reading help us figure out what America means, what America is or should be, and how we can understand contemporary America? In this class, students will add their own experiences and thinking to our dialogue through both daily discussion and rich writing assignments. These writing assignments are meant to improve students’ analytical rigor, as well as to develop their individual voices, perspectives and styles. If students end the year with portfolios of work they are intensely proud of, then they have succeeded in this class.Recent readings have included plays by Arthur Miller and Moises Kaufman; novels by Jennifer Egan and Julie Otsuka; multi-modal poetry by Claudia Rankine; and non-fiction by Frederick Douglass and Jon Krakauer.Guiding questions:• What do we mean by “American literature” in a country so big and geographically, racially, ethnically, politically, and socially diverse?• What new “voices” does American literature introduce into the national consciousness and conversation?• What is the meaning/significance of the American Dream, and in what ways has it changed/remained constant over time?• What archetypal images and stories animate American literature and why do they continue to resonate so powerfully?• In what ways is the American landscape – particularly the concepts/experience of “wilderness” and the frontier – central to American literature?• In what ways does American literature reflect – and shape – the country’s politics, social movements, and the larger zeitgeist?• In what ways does American literature reflect the tension between the community and the individual?• In what ways does American literature reflect the tension between assimilation and preserving cultural heritage?• What “ghosts” haunt America, and how is their presence reflected in our literature? In what ways do American writers grapple with American history?• In what ways are American writers engaged in a conversation with each other, and how can we best participate in the conversation?