Course Outline
This course is a twelfth-grade course of study. Traditionally, the ninth-grade English course has been an introductory course; the tenth-grade course a world literature (and composition) course (foreign works are usually translated into English at about the ninth-grade vocabulary level); the eleventh-grade course an American literature course; and the twelfth-grade course a British literature course, since British literature uses the highest-level vocabulary taught in the public high schools: It includes Shakespeare, Chaucer, Milton, and college-level works (if you can read Shakespeare and understand what you are reading, you can read just about anything!); therefore, because the students theoretically have already studied a wide variety of American and international literature, this course shall focus primarily on British writers--though the AP students have had less American literature, and so will read more American works this year.
Unit One shall cover, during the first five weeks of the school year, literature of the ancient world: We shall study The Epic of Gilgamesh, The Iliad by Homer, and lyric poetry by King David, Li Bo and Tu Fu at that time; we shall also review the Odyssey. AP classes shall also study Oedipus the King by Sophocles, Virgil's Aeneid, Metamorphoses by Ovid, lyric poetry by King Solomon, Sappho, and Horace, and excerpts from the works of Plato and Aristotle.
Unit Two (the second five weeks of the school year) shall cover the literature of the Middle Ages. We shall study Beowulf, The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer, Morte d'Arthur by Sir Thomas Malory, and the lyric poetry of Petrarch and Matsuo Basho at that time. AP students shall also study The Song of Roland, The Nibelungenlied, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight by "The Pearl Poet," Perceval by Chretien de Troyes, and excerpts from The Divine Comedy Dante Alighieri.
Unit Three (the first five weeks of the second quarter) shall cover the Renaissance and the Reformation, including works by Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, Miguel de Cervantes, John Donne, John Milton, and John Bunyan. AP students shall also study works by Edmund Spenser and George Herbert.
Unit Four (the last five weeks of the fall semester) shall cover the Age of Reason and the Pre-Romantics, including works by Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope, Voltaire, and William Blake. AP students shall also study works by Molière and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.
Unit Five (the first five weeks of the spring semester) shall cover Romanticism and Victorian England, including works by William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lord Byron, the Shelleys, John Keats, Heinrich Heine, the Brontë sisters, Alfred Tennyson, and the Brownings. AP students shall also study works by Aleksandr Pushkin, Victor Hugo, Herman Melville, and Walt Whitman.
Unit Six (the last five weeks of the third quarter) shall cover Late 19th-century Realism and Impressionism, including works by Anton Chekhov, Thomas Hardy, Leo Tolstoy, Arthur Rimbaud, William Butler Yeats, and Guy de Maupassant. AP students shall also study the works of Nikolai Gogol, Stephen Crane, Emily Dickinson, and Joseph Conrad.
Unit Seven (the first five weeks of the fourth quarter) shall cover Modernism, including works by T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Primo Levi, Dylan Thomas, Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriela Mistral, and Pablo Neruda. AP students shall also study works by Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Mann, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Franz Kafka, William Faulkner, John Steinbeck, Bertolt Brecht, Albert Camus, Gunther Grass, Hermann Hesse, Heinrich Böll, and Samuel Beckett.
Unit Eight (the last five weeks of the school year) shall cover Contemporary Authors, including works by V. S. Naipaul, Wole Soyinka, Naguib Mahfouz, Wislawa Szymborska, Harold Pinter, and Seamus Heaney. AP students shall also study works by Czeslaw Milosz, Tim O'Brien, Octavio Paz, Leslie Marmon Silko, Gunter Grass, Gabriel García Márquez, and Cormac McCarthy.
At regular intervals throughout the year, students shall write persuasive, reflective, and expository essays; timed writings on literature; one major research project; and at least one multi-media presentation. Peer editing, collaborative review, and instruction in grammar and mechanics shall take place regularly. All seniors receive their cumulative four-year writing portfolios in October and have afterwards unlimited opportunity to expunge or add to them as they desire: Portfolios shall be assessed by the students' classmates at the end of every quarter. AP review sessions shall take place Tuesday and Friday afternoons from 2:55 (fifteen minutes after the end of 6th period) until 4:15 from March until the AP Test the second Thursday in May; for those who cannot attend afternoon sessions, evening review sessions shall also be offered Wednesday evenings from 6:00 until 8:10.