Four Summer Assignments for AP Literature and Composition:

Note: Do not use outside sources for your essays.  If your work is plagiarized, you will face withdrawal from AP Literature and school disciplinary action. You should know that your teachers are far more interested in what you have to say than what anyone else has to say.

The summer homework is to help prepare you for the AP Literature and Composition class. AP Literature is a course that is geared towards helping you gain deeper insight into poetry and narrative literature in order to better appreciate how these works speak to the human heart. In doing so, the course will also discuss history and literary movements in which these works were created.

When you analyze poetry and narrative works, your main goal will be to find the message or human truth of the work, and then to explain how the artist uses writing techniques to make the work powerful.

Format your essays according to MLA standard guidelines. Please strive to properly format your poetry citations. You will be able to rewrite the essays for a better grade during marking period one.

1) College Essay: Due on first day of school. Essays should be at least 500 and no more than 650 words. See Common Application prompts for 2023-2024. Likely, you worked on these at the end of 11th grade, but if you need any help, check with Ms. Anderson. Check out this link, which provides advice from Yale University. Or, this article in the New York Times.

2) Poetry Essay: Essay and annotated poems due on the first day of school.  About 750 words. See the prompt, tips, and sample essay below. Read and annotate both poems, but only write ONE essay. Choose either Chicago by Carl Sandburg OR the rites for Cousin Vit, by Gwendolyn Brooks. (Link for poems with line numbers.)

3) Summer Reading and Study Guide Responses: Read Julius Caesar and The Handmaid's Tale.

Write responses to questions in the Study Guide for The Handmaid's Tale. These are due when you come to school. Essays for summer reading will be completed when you come back to school. See notes on readings, suggested prompts, and tips for writing these narrative essays below if you want to get a head start on these.

For your own enrichment, consider reading Geoffrey Chaucer's The Wife of Bath's Tale, one of the Canterbury Tales. This was published in 1387 and likely was an inspiration for Atwood's novel. *See note below.

Poetry Essay Prompt: Write a well-organized essay in which you explain how the poet portrays a complex picture of his or her subject (use adjectives that describe the "good" and the "bad") through the use of perspective, figurative language, sound, imagery, form, and other literary devices.

 

Poetry Essay Tips:

One of the goals of AP Literature and Composition is to guide you to see the art at work in poetry and literature. For poetry, begin with explaining the poem's purpose or meaning. Use your body paragraphs to explain how the poet uses poetic and literary devices to intensify the poem's message. Follow the poet's organization and see how the poem's ideas progress from the beginning to the end. See Sample Poetry Essay.

A good way to begin would be to thoroughly annotate the poem you choose. Be sure you clearly understand the meaning of each verse line and find literary devices that work to make the poem powerful. Be sure your claim (thesis statement) clearly states what you think this “complex picture” is. Use adjectives to precisely describe the positives and negatives. Do not simply repeat the vague phrasing of the prompt question.  

Your essay should strive to eloquently incorporate quotes into your text and explain how literary or poetic tools in these quotes heighten the emotional content of the poem.  Poems of course, especially narrative poems, can incorporate literary tools, or elements of narrative fiction, such as plot elements and character development.

Follow the link on how to eloquently blend poetry verse lines into your essay on the blog. Figurative language includes metaphor, simile, personification, apostrophe, symbol, irony, paradox, and hyperbole. Other devices are imagery, sound, syntax, form, perspective, meter, and more.

Be sure your essay has an introduction paragraph that includes the poet's name, the title of the poem, and a clear thesis statement. Your essay should have paragraphs with clear topic sentences. Always lead your paragraphs with ideas, not literary devices. Here is a reasonable list of terms to know, and a Quizlet with the definitions so you can practice.

Notes on Summer Readings:

The Handmaid's Tale, by Margaret Atwood. This novel was published in 1985, during the Reagan years, thirteen years after the Equal Rights Amendment failed to be ratified and women's rights experienced a backwash after the passing of Roe v. Wade.

When I (Ms. Sasso) read the novel, I was twenty-seven. I remember thinking how grateful I was because I lived in the United States and that this dystopian vision was just an exaggerated tale of caution against the Puritanical push at the time to put women back in the home. I never would have thought this book would still resound in 2023, let alone seem more like a prediction than fiction.

Please DO NOT FAIL to read the last chapter, the "Historical Notes" at the end of the novel. It is the key to understanding the work as a whole.

Shakespeare's Julius Caesar. For detailed background information about this play and definitions for Roman offices, see the link to another post on this blog. See this: Link to the awesome 1953 movie with Marlon Brando.

Narrative Essays Tips

The purpose of any story -- even personal ones -- is to illustrate a life lesson or "human truth":  What is honor? Can an individual act morally in an unjust society? When you begin your essay, you have to make a bold, opinionated, and provable statement that pins the blame on someone or something for what happens at the end of the story. This will be your thesis statement or claim.

Read carefully. The prompts ask you to think about the story around a hook, but the story’s main truth or message must be the center of your argument. Your essay should show how the author reveals a "human truth" or "meaning of the work as a whole" through the conflicts, choices, and development of the main characters in the story from the beginning to the end.

Be sure your introduction paragraph includes your thesis statement, the author's name, and the title of the work, in italics. You must analyze the story to the end. What happens in the end is usually where you find "the meaning of the work as a whole".

Follow the link to this character assessment exercise to help you formulate an idea for your thesis statement. Since one novel might have many perspectives, different characters might find different truths. The main character, however, is your best bet for a thorough response.

Narrative Essay Prompts: Consider the following prompts for your essays when you get to class in the fall. 

2022: Many works of fiction feature characters who accept or reject a hierarchical structure. This hierarchy may be social, economic, political, or familial, or it may apply to some other kind of structure. Choose a work of fiction in which a character responds to a hierarchy in some significant way. Then, in a well-written essay, analyze how that character’s response to the hierarchy contributes to an interpretation of the work as a whole. Don’t summarize the plot.

2007B: Works of literature often depict acts of betrayal. Friends and even family may betray a protagonist; main characters may likewise be guilty of treachery or may betray their own values. Select a novel or play that includes such a betrayal.  Then, in a well-written essay, analyze the nature of the betrayal and show how it contributes to the meaning of the work as a whole.

2010: Select a novel, play, or epic in which a character experiences a rift and becomes cut off from “home,” whether that home is the character’s birthplace, family, homeland, or other special places. Then write an essay in which you analyze how the character’s experience with exile is both alienating and enriching, and how this experience illuminates the meaning of the work as a whole.

*The Canterbury Tales is a series of stories told by a haphazard, motley crew of pilgrims heading from London to Canterbury Cathedral, who engage in a storytelling contest. The Wife of Bath's prologue, or introduction to her tale, is perhaps more fascinating than the actual story. Just as Atwood's novel seems, horrifically, to resonate today, Chaucer's Wife of Bath seems to be screaming her fight from the 14th century to future women. Her story is funny, sad, and inspirational. (What really, do women want? The answer was the same in 1387. It is a fight to be continued.)

Comedy and Poetry

Winter is “The darkest evening of the year” as Robert Frost famously describes it, however, is also the moment that the light begins to return. There is always hope on the horizon and the seasons of humanity wax and wane. The winter solstice is a wonderful reminder of our own renewal, even as we grow older.

Both comedy and poetry are literary genres that are famous for getting us through dark times, enlightening us, soothing us, and making us laugh to encourage us. In the waxing and waning of our lives, there will always be peace. Assuredly, in the end, we will find peace.  

Comedy has the power to neutralize our fears and terrors. It gives us the ability to critically view what might be uncomfortable -- or unbearable -- and find solutions, comfort, or solace in situations that could otherwise be either humiliating or agonizing. Opposing forces and culturally different enemies can find common ground in laughter.

And mostly, comedy gives us the uncanny ability to see fault humbly within ourselves and to change accordingly.

Aristophanes’ famous comedy, Lysistrata, was written in 411 BCE, and staged in Athens during the Peloponnesian Wars, where the conflict between Athenian and Spartan coalitions threatened to destroy the Greek Empire, and as most historians see it, does contribute to the eventual fall of this mighty culture. The play confronts this war directly and outrageously: a union of women from all of Greece, led by the Athenian Lysistrata, decides that the only way to get the men to stop fighting -- is to stage a sex strike.  As Spike Lee’s new film, “Chi-Raq” shades it, “No peace, no piece.”  Spike Lee’s 2015 update on Lysistrata, set among the gang wars and violence in modern Chicago, isn’t the only time in history this play has been used to wage war against war. The anti-war slogan from the Vietnam era, “Make Love, Not War” was taken from Lysistrata. In 2003, actors staged a global reading of this play to protest the United States' invasion of Iraq. And in the late 20th century, women staged sex strikes throughout the world to end localized violence. Also, see my curriculum unit on plagues and the power of women.

It should not be surprising that sexual politics and the politics of government are related, and that a sexual farce could be a strong instrument of peace. Perhaps in a dangerous world, our only hope of defusing the weapons on both sides is laughter. What we all have in common, is love.    

Along the winter road, the AP Literature class will also be studying poetry, including epic poetry. Right now we are examining the powerful poem, “Death Be Not Proud” by the metaphysical 17th-century poet, John Donne. His poetry was featured in a brilliant play by Margaret Edson, called Wit. Please watch this stunning HBO version, directed by Mike Nichols. Donne’s sonnet uses elements of comedy and poetic conceit to take the wind out of death itself -- and give us all the courage to look at winter, and life, from a more powerful perspective.  


Students are also be reading Voltaire's satire, Candide. While we all can agree that this is NOT the "best of all possible worlds", unless we see the flaws, we cannot begin to correct them.


Check out also, Jan Svankmajer's fantastic live and stop-action film of Alice in Wonderland. It is the truest version of this satirical work to be found.

From the college essay of Mike, a blind student at Old Lyme High School, 2013:

I do not let my blindness stop me from doing anything.  My family treats me like I am sighted.  This has made me feel very comfortable with my blindness, and I have a very good sense of humor about it.  I make some of my favorite jokes when sighted people use the word “see”.  I like to make sighted people feel comfortable with my blindness.  I find that sighted people often do not know how to react to my blindness, and making jokes helps them to feel more comfortable.