"There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio,
than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
AP English Literature & Composition
AP English Lit is our capstone course for Brookewood’s English program. The course capitalizes on all of the work students have done since they were internalizing the forms of poems in lower school. AP Lit treats emotionally mature texts that are also stylistically sophisticated: Hamlet, (and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead by Tom Stoppard), Anna Karenina, James Joyce’s “The Dead,” a high modernist work such as David Jones’ In Parenthesis or TS Eliot’s The Waste Land, and Brideshead Revisited.
The course also features an advanced poetry unit, building upon the introduction in English 10 and touching on concepts and devices also taught in AP Lang. AP Lit prepares students to read closely and well, emphasizing analysis of prose passages and poems, even as it invites students to use texts they have formerly read in order to make an argument about literary craft. |
The course introduces its themes and benchmarks of complexity through the summer reading, the amazing Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky.
Over Winter Break, students enjoy synthesizing and finding reinforcement of the concepts of the course while thinking about the project of advanced reading in general through the delightful and pleasantly accessible How To Read Literature Like a Professor by Thomas C. Foster. In the run up to the AP exam, students may be asked to attend out-of-class reviews—but as this year the AP class is not nested within a grade-level class, reviews will be limited to the spring. Because AP Lit is very challenging, we allow ourselves literary luxuries, as in, for example, our tradition of Tea Party Tuesday. |