If you were to teach a senior level AP literature class what books would you teach? name 7

If you were to teach a senior level AP literature class what books would you teach? name 7

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Infinite Jest, In Search of Lost Time, Ulysses

I don't want to listen to AP kids bullshit about my favorites. I want them to want to read more, and I only want to assign books that are undoubtedly the best of the English language. And they can't be very long or we'd all lose our patience. So, in this order:


Hamlet / Macbeth
Selections from Dubliners -- Araby and the Dead, probably
Light in August
All the Pretty Horses - Cormac McCarthy
Beloved -- Toni Morrison
Brief and Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao - Junot Díaz

The essential high school books I'm hoping they're already covered (Odyssey Iliad Metamorphosis selections from the New Testament & the Inferno & Paradise Lost, skip forward to Lord of the Flies Heart of Darkness Catcher in the Rye Slaughterhouse V Catch-22 Great Gatsby Sun Also Rises / Farewell to Arms 100 Years of Solitude To kill a Mockingbird A Separate Peace fuck I'm forgetting a ton but you know what I mean, all the expected high school books)

havent read light in august or all the pretty horses, but that seems like a pretty good list honestly. what would you talk about with each book? im wondering specifically about oscar wao

I'm piggy backing on the AP English Literature class i took in 12th grade, which didn't include any notable American literature because that was studied the previous year.

>First quarter (Drama)
Ajax, Electra and the Theban plays
The Importance of Being Earnest - We view the 1952 film

>Second Quarter (Shakespeare)
- The sonnets and some excerpts from Richard III are discussed briefly.-
Macbeth
Julius Caeser - We view Cleopatra (1963)

>Third Quarter (Enlightenment and )
- Brief class or two on English history from Richard II until George I, which is carried throughout the quarter.-
Some poems of John Donne
The Rape of The Lock
Pamela / Virtue Rewarded
Some poems of Keats
Jane Eyre

>Fourth Quarter (Victorean and "fun end of year" Modern)
Bleak House
A Turn of The Screw - We view The Innocents (1961)
- Joyce is discussed, maybe we read a couple stories from Dubliners and try out a few excerpts from Ulysses.-
A Clockwork Orange - which isn't meant to be finished by the end of the class.

(Wow, good luck.)

I would start with The Art of Fiction by David Lodge. Then I would continue with The Oxford Essential Guide to Writing by Thomas Kane. I'm going to beat out 11 years of poor habits out of my students' systems or force them to drop the class. This will be a targeted approach of example after example of good works, countless exercises working on the nitty gritty and the big picture, until students understand what literature actually is, how to express insight in it, and how to unlock the power of appreciation. This would be most of the first semester, and if you don't like it, go to the lazy bitch's AP English & Language Comp. or God forbid stay in regular English with the niggers.

I don't really care about what else I would teach after that. Probably whatever is required to check off the curriculum boxes, given that novels of certain topics must be covered to answer the questions on the exam. To save time, I would have students read 1-2 novels over winter break. You only need ~3 novels to pass the exam, and I would make it clear to my students that they're free to write about any novel on a recommended list, especially if they contact me first.

AP literature is even worse nonsense than the norm. Also, there is no AP here.

AP lit just like all lower division college lit, is a joke. The only way to fail such a course is to never show up or turn in any work. The kind of asinine book reports they have you write in such classes are a waste of everyone's time. They might as well just pass out coloring books and crayons for all the good it does kids taking those classes, nothing they do there will help them if they want to seriously study literature in college.

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The point is to make students better writers. Are you literally retarded in some way? Who hurt you

What books do they usually teach in senior level college AP english classes?

Well well well if it isn't Thomas "Frosty" Bernhard

lolita
mein kampf
satanic bible
dhalgren
120 days of sodom
naked lunch
a christmas carol

My English classes in high school had us reading pretty good literature, and I still hated it. I'm talking about stuff like Homer, Stevenson, Twain, and even some Plato. I hated it just because we were forced to read it and write about it. Now that I can read these things of my own volition, I love them. Kids will never "enjoy" a literature class.

Ha dude I haven't prepared lectures already if that's what you're asking. Have you read Oscar Wao though? Besides being undoubtedly one of the best novels of the past century, it is definitely unlike any on that list and the discussion could be endless. We could chat about the realities of the diaspora and why ("Díaz thinks," one would say) fantasy and sci fi work better than history to explain it, what fictional footnotes do to a novel and why postmoderns like them so much, what is going on with pagínas en blanca, the faceless man, and the mongoose in the novel... I mean it's jammed pack man.

I'll go with seven novels.
>Daniel Defoe - Robinson Crusoe
>Mary Shelley - Frakenstein
>Charles Dickens - A Tale of Two Cities
>Joseph Conrad - Heart of Darkness
>Virginia Woolf - Orlando
>William S. Burroughs - Naked Lunch
>Cormac McCarthy - Blood Meridian

Based list

It's gonna take kids like half the year to read Tale of Two Cities alone, and I'm very skeptical about highschoolers trying to tackle Orlando or Blood Merridian. But I think at least I understand what you're going for.

You may very well make kids hate literature tho

In my class, we read 1984, Brave New World, Wuthering Heights, Hamlet, Oedipus the King, Invisible Man, a few short stories including Interpreter of Maladies, The Lottery, The Veldt; finished with a poetry unit where we researched a poet of our choice

Mine was Power of Myth, How to Read Literature Like a Professor, Heart of Darkness, Murder in the Cathedral, Beowulf, Grendel. The Canterbury Tales, The Taming of the Shrew, and Hamlet. There were a lot of choices for the summer reading, but I chose The Plague, All The King's Men, The Jungle, and we had to read some book about the Rwandan Genocide that seemed like the odd man out.

Looking back it was not a terrible lineup. Thanks Mrs. M

This. Focus on the ones with actual potential.

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why?
I would teach Bernhard

>first quarter drama
>literally just Sophocles
>what the fuck are the Theban plays?

user what the fuck your list sucks.

>AP literature is even worse nonsense than the norm. Also, there is no AP here.

What does AP even mean?

1. The purpose is to acquaint the student with certain periods which are in the curriculumn, not to learn drama. I suspect it's also for breaking in the student before they read Shakespeare.

2. Sophocles is good, and his plays can be read in a day each.

3. The Importance of Being Earnest is included, both as literature and visually.

4. The Theban plays are Oedipus Rex, Oedipus at Colonus, and Antigone.

For kiddos?
>Sir Gawain
>The Shepheardes Calender
>Frances Burney's diary/letters
>Persuasion
>North of Boston
>Goodbye Columbus
>The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven
I think that would be fun

... where have i seen this?
Who is this man that ive encountered before?

The Book of the City of Ladies
La Princesse de Clèves
Oroonoko
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
Orlando: A Biography
Against Sadomasochism: A Radical Feminist Analysis

alternatively:
>Virgil's Eclogues & Georgics
>Sir Gawain
>Shepheardes Calendar
>As You Like It
>North of Boston
>Goodbye Columbus
>Field Work by Heaney
spot the theme

Advanced Placement. That is irrelevant, though, because high school teachers really have too general of an education to teach literature in any 'advanced' way. In short, the teacher simply spews platitudes about literature and the work in question, regardless of if it's the Handmaid's Tale or Mrs. Dalloway. The exam-focused methodology is also at fault. In short, there's nothing 'advanced' about AP.

escuela americana ww@

this is a preternaturally beautiful list. i love /\you\/, user.

Even if it wouldn't make it past a lot of high school's I'd be interested to see how it'd take off in the schools that allowed it.

Could have added the other greek playwrights and I didn't know muricans called the Oedipus trilogy the Theban plays.

A few selected works of plato. I feel like this should count as one book because early dialogues are all short, along with symposium, and the republic still isn't too long
The Stranger
Notes from the underground
iliad
odyssey
schopenhauer's essays and aphorisms
then maybe some bukowski or Hunter S. Thompson to have some fun
Then I would kill myself because all I amounted to in life was a fucking high school teacher.

I wouldn't lower myself to a high school position. Only university professorship for me.

It depends on your approach. Is it thematic, critical, historical, chronological, based on a literary movement, etc

Books/texts:
How to Win Friends and Influence People
The Overcoat
Dialectics of Enlightenment
Molloy
A Singular Man (Bove)
Reveries of the Solitary Walker
Buddenbrooks

Movies:
Un Lac
To the Wonder

might as well whip out your cock and ask the students to write a short story based on it

Come back here and let me know how that works out for you man.

This is terrible.

Oedipus Rex
Fahrenheit 451
1984
Moby Dick
Julius Caeser
The Grapes of Wrath
Heart of Darkness

Genius*

Literally every educated person calls them that. You've outed yourself as a plebeian--embarrassing.

We would start with the Greeks. I'd get them through all of Greek history, theatre, epic poetry, and philosophy by the end of the year.

Q1 (the conversation between poetry and philosophy begins)
Iliad
Odyssey
Plato's Ion and Meno

Q2 (Plato elaborates, Aristophanes responds)
Oresteia
Republic book X
The Clouds

Q3 (Sophocles vs Euripides according to Aristophanes)
Theban plays
Euripides' Bacchae
The Frogs

Q4 (Aristotle comments, plus the Shakespeare question: can the same man write comedy and tragedy?)
Euripides' Medea
Aristotle's Poetics
Troilus and Cressida

bump.

How can I teach these kids?!?!? ... the thread.

>toni morrison
what kind of kids are you trying to raise

If my students are white males I will just let them read Hemingway and they will be happy.

I think my senior AP lit course was very well done, borrowing from that, accounting for time, and replacing the few rotten ones, I'd say -

Crime and Punishment
Hamlet
Heart of Darkness
The Old Man and the Sea
A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
The Stranger (Not the best existentialist literature, but 7 solid works is a lot to get through in a year while also paying sufficient attention to each, and this is better than trying to get high school students to dissect Kierkegaard)
As many of Plato's dialogues as time allows

It's a real list, a preparative list that shows alot of respect for the ability of the brightest older kids to read and to think, to evaluate and to make decisions in an honest simulation of the world it pleases many to believe they know little if nothing about-- the real one.
Both an imaginative and a challenging selection. And CC deserves its place there. Sadly, many Veeky Forumssters think it's schlock when in fact it's an ingeniously wrought, wonderfully manipulative work of the highest art.

What's wrong with that plan?

It treats high school students like college students.
Even the brightest high school students will just unplug from the class completely with that approach.

If you want to be a high school student, take a different class. AP Literature, especially when situated senior year, is meant to be at a college level. You're only going to setup people for failure later on if you don't help them with the transition. At worst, kids will hate you that year, but will be thankful when they get their 5s and place out of English or when they became top students within the English department.

Madden NFL 1992
Fnial Fnatasy XVI
BACON and EGGS
Historical Anecdotes, Part CVN
Take Me Out to the Crowd
Mimetic Architecture in the Cyclopean Age
Meme Wars
Anarcho-Nazi Dialectics
Plane and Simplified
Harry Potter 8
F sharps and A flats
Effigy of My Country
Looney Tunes Take Over Germany
All Crosswalks and No Parking Signs
Goat Shit

a constant barrage of novellas and short stories, followed by AP essays on the work. You can get a way bigger workload while reducing the strain on attention span.

Not sure if bait or just retarded.

>BACON and EGGS
If you consider this to be bait then you are the one who is retarded.

except that doesn't work, AP kids have such generic and unremarkable writing that it's astonishing how they're considered anything other than above average (from what I've seen in the past)

Your Third Quarter makes me want to blow my brainns out

Beowulf - Heaney Translation
The Complete Canterbury Tales in ME
The Tempest & Hamlet
Paradise Lost
Tristram Shandy
Moby Dick
Dubliners

+short poems

I love this list, but if one of your students got an essay prompt about feminism on the AP exam, they'd be fucked.

>If you want to be a high school student, take a different class.
It's a class offered in high school. They're high school students, whether you want to face that or not, and to force them into college level work will only backfire and make them hate the material and you.
> You're only going to setup people for failure later on if you don't help them with the transition.
There is a huge difference between a transition and dumping them into the deep end, which is what you're arguing for.
>At worst, kids will hate you that year, but will be thankful when they get their 5s and place out of English or when they became top students within the English department.
Only a small minority will feel this way, most will just turn away from English and literature completely and have a permanent hatred for it. College level coursework is for those who have chosen to study that field at that level of intensity, and it can only be appreciated if accepted and not forced.

would pick:

odyseey
don quijote
ulysees
shakespare

>It's a class offered in high school. They're high school students, whether you want to face that or not, and to force them into college level work will only backfire and make them hate the material and you.
And? Only serious students will take AP Literature, which is explicitly a college-level course. Students would hate me if I gave them bullshit when they could have been learning and getting college credit. If you're not cut out for college work, don't join the class, and hang out with the niggers in regular English. Kids are entitled brats nowadays.

>There is a huge difference between a transition and dumping them into the deep end, which is what you're arguing for.
How is the courseload suggested earlier anywhere close to "the deep end"? Two complete anthologies with accompanying exercises, perhaps a "transition" book to accompany the exercise as well but read at a slower pace than normal in order to serve as training wheels, etc. There was a suggestion of a "trial by fire", but only in the sense that focus and improvement would be required, and not that people would be thrown to Pynchon straight off the bat.

>Only a small minority will feel this way, most will just turn away from English and literature completely and have a permanent hatred for it. College level coursework is for those who have chosen to study that field at that level of intensity, and it can only be appreciated if accepted and not forced.
Nobody said they were being forced into literature. They chose the class, which isn't particularly onerous or memeworthy, just focused on efficient but comprehensive practice during the first 6 months. If they hate literature after undergoing a serious study, then it was never for them. Once again, THIS IS AN AP CLASS. IT IS MEANT TO BE COLLEGE-LEVEL WORK.

came for the rare bernhard, stayed for the topic. I'd focus on english language modernism & postmodernism.

1. imagist poets
2. the wasteland
3. as i lay dying
4. mrs dalloway
5. invisible man
6. waiting for godot
7. crying of lot 49

there you go. decent survey of poetry, prose & drama with important works from both movements. one woman writer and one non-white writer for muh diversity.

a lot of these other works are too skewed towards older literature (ie boring to most hs students) and not likely to engage the class. sad but true.

lol

interesting

all safe and classic. solid list.

I make 'em read Ready Player One and kick any of them that like immediately off the course

then, we start, with the greeks,

Hey this list is pretty good

WH Auden actually did this. Sort of. When he was teaching middle school he struggled to get the students' attention. So one day he went to the butcher and got the most penis-like sausage. He went to class and demanded they shut their fucking mouths. He said if they didn't shut up he'd chop his penis off. When they persisted in being 12 year olds, he whipped the sausage out of his pants and chopped it in half.

>Selected Bible Books, something like Genesis, 1 Samuel, Ecclesiastes, and Matthew)
>Hamlet
>Crime and Punishment
>Fathers and Sons
>Kafka's Metamorphosis
>Stoner
>3 short stories: Bartleby, Ivan Ilyich, The Dead

>And? Only serious students will take AP Literature
The fact that you think this, and everything that follows from this premise, shows you have no experience in AP courses. The kids in there are as lazy as the rest, they just happen to be smarter.

I've taken over 16 AP courses with mostly 5s in all of them, including literature, earning myself a comfortable National AP Scholar award by the end of junior year. Just because your nigger-ridden school with average scores of 2.2 didn't take AP classes seriously doesn't mean other schools followed suit. THE. COURSE. IS. FOR. INTRO. COLLEGE. LEVEL. MATERIAL. End of story.

>Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
>The Lord of the Rings
>Dune
>The First Chronicles of Thomas Covenant
>A collection of short stories by Mark Twain
>Macbeth
>Harry Potter (First Book)

I dare you to find a flaw.

wat

>implying 2nd book of HP is not the best

I would probably agree, but I believe in starting at the beginning. And not doing more than one book in a series (LOTR doesn't count). Otherwise, I'd just pick Sir Gawain and the first six Thomas Covenant novels.

not the user you're replying to but I got 5's on all my ap tests including lit and I literally didn't read any of the assigned works and plagiarized all my homework. Had a 2.6 GPA by the time I graduated because I was such an awful student. Just cause someone is in AP classes doesn't mean they take it seriously

>genesis
To give them some basis for different theories of mans essence
>platos allegory of the cave
Gets them into philosophy, also gets them to idealize being 'woke'
>Frankenstien
more exploration of mans essence/limits
>The Oresteia
I would probably have them just read Agamemnon. To learn about family and viewiing onself in history.
>brave new world
Just for a general criticism of our society/politics
>Le Nausee
More criticism of our society, mainly the social side
>stoner
finally stoner just so they can know how a college runs beyond what they show you in college leaflets.

1984
Gatsby
BNW
Lolita
Stoner
Steppenwolfe
A Portrait

Nobody said every fucking kid is going to be motivated. If they are, they are. If they're not, they're not. But the motivated kids will be taking AP, and it's stupid to dumb the class down so they're unprepared for the future.

It's written "The Waste Land."

Get out of here, berenstain

(((Berenstein)))