Literature & Composition: Reading - Writing - Thinking

1569 Pages·2010·10.53 MB·English

by  Carol Jago

Literature & Composition
Reading (cid:129) Writing (cid:129) Thinking
Carol Jago
Santa Monica High School, California
Renée H. Shea
Bowie State University, Maryland
Lawrence Scanlon
Brewster High School, New York
Robin Dissin Aufses
Lycée Français de New York
Bedford/St. Martin’s Boston (cid:129) New York
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For Bedford/St. Martin’s
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Copyright © 2011 by Bedford/St. Martin’s
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or
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ISBN-10: 0-312-38806-3
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Acknowledgments
Acknowledgments and copyrights appear at the back of the book on pages 1510–1517, which
constitute an extension of the copyright page.
It is a violation of the law to reproduce these selections by any means whatsoever without the
written permission of the copyright holder.
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To Michael and James Jago
Bertha Vogelsang Bahn
Kate and Michael Aufses
Alison, Lindsay, Maura, & Kaitlin, and to Mary-Grace
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About the Authors
Carol Jago taught AP Literature and was department chair at
Santa Monica High School for thirty-two years. She has served
on the AP Literature Development Committee and as a content
advisor on AP Central. She is the author of many books, includ-
ing With Rigor for All: Teaching the Classics to Contemporary
Students; Beyond Standards: Excellence in the High School Eng-
lish Classroom; and four titles in the NCTE High School Litera-
ture series. In 2010, Carol is the president of NCTE and an
advisor for the Common Core State Standards Initiative.
Renée H. Shea is professor of English and Modern Languages at
Bowie State University and former Director of Composition. She
is coauthor of The Language of Composition: Reading (cid:129) Writing
(cid:129) Rhetoric and two titles in the NCTE High School Literature series
on Amy Tan and Zora Neale Hurston. She has been a reader and
question leader for both AP Literature and Language readings.
Lawrence Scanlon taught at Brewster High School for more
than thirty years. Over the last fi fteen years he has been a reader
and question leader for the AP Language exam. As a College
Board consultant in the U.S. and abroad, he has conducted AP
workshops in both Language and Literature, as well as serving
on the AP Language Development Committee. Larry is coauthor
of The Language of Composition: Reading (cid:129) Writing (cid:129) Rhetoric
and has published articles for the College Board and elsewhere
on composition and curriculum.
Robin Dissin Aufses is director of English Studies at Lycée
Français de New York. She is coauthor of The Language of Com-
position: Reading (cid:129) Writing (cid:129) Rhetoric. Robin also has published
articles for the College Board on the novelist Chang Rae Lee
and the novel All the King’s Men.
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Preface
W
hy read literature? To many of us, that question seems as strange as ask-
ing “why breathe?” Literature has been part of our life, family, school,
and community for as long as we can remember. Of course, there are those who
argue that what today’s students need is preparation for the “real world,” but in the
push for practical university and workplace preparedness we sometimes overlook
the importance of educating students’ imaginations. Literature offers windows to
worlds outside students’ experience as well as mirrors onto the world they already
know. Literature also prepares students for the personal challenges and moral
dilemmas they are likely to face. How better to refl ect on the demands of contem-
porary life than to study William Wordsworth’s “The World Is Too Much with Us”
alongside Nathalie Handal’s “Caribe in Nueva York”? And does not the proffered
wisdom of William Shakespeare, Emily Dickinson, Seamus Heaney, and Rita Dove
provide important preparation for surviving and thriving in this complex world?
Literary analysis is an intellectual discipline that hones students’ thinking by
requiring them to probe a text deeply and analyze the means that writers employ
to achieve their effects. Along with preparing students for the rigors of an
*
Advanced Placement exam, learning how to analyze text and articulate a per-
spective prepares students for life, both in academia and in the workplace. This
preparation and exploration are what we hope to achieve in Literature & Compo-
sition by specifi cally targeting the skills and habits of mind that are the keys to
success in an Advanced Placement Literature course.
Features of the Book
The opening chapters introduce strategies and scaffolding that
guide students toward deep reading of diffi cult texts while fostering
an understanding of key literary terms and analytical techniques.
We understand that high school teachers are in the classroom every single day,
and with that in mind we designed these opening chapters to be highly instruc-
tional and activity-oriented.
*AP and Advanced Placement Program are registered trademarks of the College Entrance Exam-
ination Board, which was not involved in the publication of and does not endorse this product.
vii
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viii PREFACE
(cid:129) Chapter 1, “Thinking about Literature,” introduces the study of literature
and the approaches and habits of mind that lead to both insightful analysis
and enjoyment.
(cid:129) Chapter 2, “Close Reading: Analyzing Poetry and Passages of Fiction,” introduces
students to close reading strategies that reveal how the elements of style create
meaning in fi ction and poetry. Students are also introduced to the process of
writing a close analysis, and a comparison and contrast of two poems.
(cid:129) C hapter 3, “The Big Picture: Analyzing Fiction and Drama,” teaches stu-
dents to analyze the major elements of fi ction and drama and then discuss
them thoughtfully in an interpretive essay.
(cid:129) Chapter 4, “Entering the Conversation,” guides students through the process
of using multiple texts to write about literary, cultural, and historical issues.
These approaches to reading and writing are revisited repeatedly in the subse-
quent thematic chapters through the discussion and close reading questions that
follow each piece of literature, as well as in the Conversation, Student Writing,
and Writer’s Craft sections at the end of each thematic chapter.
The literature in this book is organized thematically to foster
classroom conversation and promote connections between
and among texts.
The themes in this book — Home and Family, Identity and Culture, Love and
Relationships, Conformity and Rebellion, Art and the Artist, Tradition and
Progress, and War and Peace — are those our students have found engaging, and
they can easily be adapted for use with longer works of literature. We know from
our own experience, as well as from research such as the National Endowment for
the Humanities “Reading at Risk” report, that many students today are not read-
ing poetry, fi ction, and drama with the same enthusiasm as previous generations;
however, students remain interested in big questions — social, political, eco-
nomic, aesthetic, and literary. The thematic arrangement of this book offers them
the opportunity to consider such questions through the eyes of William Shake-
speare and Naomi Shihab Nye, Homer and Walt Whitman, Franz Kafka and
Gwendolyn Brooks, whose literary texts offer compelling perspectives on com-
plex human issues. As students grapple with these issues, they read the literature
closely and even reread one text in light of another.
Each thematic chapter includes a wide variety of classic
and contemporary fi ction, poetry, drama, nonfi ction,
and visual texts that are rich, rigorous, and appealing
to sixteen- to eighteen-year-olds.
A Classic Text and a Modern Text of signifi cant literary merit begin and anchor
each thematic chapter. These works invite students to delve deeply into the theme,
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PREFACE ix
forming a foundation for interpreting the stories and poems in the rest of the
chapter. The Classic Texts challenge students to read literature from an earlier
time, written for a very different audience, with syntax and vocabulary that may
be unfamiliar. These Classic Texts, which include such works as Heart of Dark-
ness, Hamlet, and The Importance of Being Earnest, enlarge students’ background
knowledge by offering windows into other times and other worlds. The Modern
Texts range from selections written by late twentieth-century writers, such as
James Baldwin and Flannery O’Connor, to pieces written by celebrated contem-
porary authors such as Edwidge Danticat and Jhumpa Lahiri.
The Classic and Modern Texts are followed by a collection of short stories
and poems that span the ages, drawing from diverse authors who offer varying
interpretations of the chapter’s theme. Bridging the old and new emphasizes that
many questions and issues — about the nature of war, or the role of the artist, for
example — have captivated and puzzled humanity through the ages and across
cultures. Contemporary literary voices such as Billy Collins, Sandra Cisneros, and
Sherman Alexie are living proof that these issues continue to be vital.
Probing questions after each selection guide students’ reading
and scaffold their emerging interpretation of the works.
The Classic and Modern Texts are followed by these types of questions:
(cid:129) Questions for Discussion invite students to investigate the text, probing
the work for meaning, and direct students’ attention to important ideas in
the story, poem, or play.
(cid:129) Questions on Style and Structure get students to focus on the technical
and artistic aspects of the work. Responding to these questions will help
students begin to analyze the tools writers employ to achieve an effect and
prepare them for the kinds of essay and multiple-choice questions they will
face on exams.
(cid:129) Suggestions for Writing offer students multiple opportunities to use writ-
ing to explore their developing understanding of a text. In every set of writ-
ing suggestions, students are offered one or more questions resembling
those on the AP exam, and in some cases students are asked to try their
hand at the techniques the author has used.
Other selections in the book are accompanied by Exploring the Text questions
that call for close careful reading and ask students to discuss and interpret the
work. These questions allow students to practice what they have learned in the
opening chapters and to broaden their experience of literature. Suggestions
for Writing at the end of each chapter are prompts for longer writing projects.
Most require the use of multiple literary sources — an important skill in col-
lege classes.
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