2010 AP English Literature Summer Reading Assignment

Ms. Scanlon: shscanlon@aol.com
Phone: (808) 545-5023
www.scanlons.blogspot.com

CONGRATULATIONS on your acceptance into the AP English Literature and Composition class! I welcome you to a rewarding and challenging course for your senior year. If you have any questions please feel free to contact me by email or phone. If you have not been in a Gifted and Talented English class at Radford or the AP Language class and you want to find out how to get into the AP Literature class, come see me in room 266, call, or e-mail.

This class studies critical reading of and analytical writing about classic literature. Students learn to interpret poetry and prose from various literary periods. Perceptive reading and quality writing are the primary goals of the class.

During the school year we will read poems from several literary periods, along with a novel, Jane Eyre, and two plays, Macbeth and Pygmalion. You will need to be familiar with a variety of works to be able to write an essay about one of them that will fit the third essay question on the AP Exam in May. If you pass the exam with a score of 3 or above, some colleges will give you English credits.

This summer’s assignment is to read and understand one book from the list of 22 novels in this packet. Every book in this list is a work of art, and not the kind of book the average teenager would pick up to read for pleasure. But you are probably not the average teenager. Take the time to pick one you will enjoy reading. You can find more information on the books and even read a few pages by searching Amazon.com. Also, most of the older books have complete texts available online.

Since you will also be annotating your book, you may want to buy it instead of borrowing it. Most students will be glad they have read and own an annotated classic work when they get to college. If you have a novel you cannot write in, use a composition book or a small binder or folder with lined paper to take notes on important elements, as directed in the article below “How to Mark a Book.” Make notes by page numbers, then paragraph numbers, to note characters or anything else you like, and then be able to find it later when you need it for your essay.

• Your assignment for the summer:

(If you do not have a print copy of this assignment, copy the parts you need here, paste it into a document to print, and bring it on the first day of school. Please separate the Literary Terms Questions pages to be able to hand them in easily)

1. Select a novel from the list. See me in room 266 to borrow one of our copies or get your book from any library or bookstore.
2. Read and annotate your novel.
3. Read the Literary Terms Questions BEFORE reading your novel so you know what to look for.
4. Read “How to Mark a Book” and use it to do your annotations.
5. Answer the questions on literary terms related to your novel. Write in the space given. If you need more space, write on the back and connect with an arrow, or expand the box with your computer.

• Bring your book to school for the first few days' work and be prepared to:

1. Take an AR test by computer for your novel.
2. Take a quiz on “How to Mark a Book.”
3. Take a quiz on the literary terms below.
4. Write a literary analysis essay.
5. Make a Reading Record Card. (This will NOT be due on the first day.) If you want to see what this is, use the search function for this blog.


NOVELS:

TITLE/ AUTHOR/ COUNTRY/ PUBLISHING DATE/ BRIEF SUMMARY

Anna Karenina Leo Tolstoy Russian 1876
Tale of the married Anna and her love for Count Vronsky.

As I Lay Dying William Faulkner American 1930
The Bundren family must take the body of Addie, matriarch of the family, away to be buried. Along the way, we listen to each member of the macabre pilgrimage.

The Awakening Kate Chopin American 1899
The story of one woman's emotional journey from a stifled, miserable marriage to a spirited and lusty freedom.

Beloved Toni Morrison American 1987
Sethe was born a slave and escaped to Ohio, but eighteen years later she is still not free. She has borne the unthinkable and not gone mad.

Billy Budd Herman Melville American 1886
A handsome young sailor is unjustly accused of plotting mutiny in this timeless tale of the sea.

Catch-22 Joseph Heller American 1961
Yossarian, the wise-ass bombardier, was too smart to die but not smart enough to find a way out of his predicament.

Ceremony Leslie Marmon Silko American 1981
Tayo, a World War II veteran of mixed ancestry, returns to the Laguna Pueblo Reservation. He is deeply scarred by his experience as a prisoner of the Japanese and further wounded by the rejection he encounters from his people.

Crime and Punishment Fyodor Dostoevski Russian 1866
An impoverished St. Petersburg ex-student formulates a plan to kill a hated, unscrupulous pawnbroker for her money, thereby solving his financial problems and at the same time, he argues, ridding the world of an evil, worthless parasite.

A Doll's House Henrik Ibsen British play 1879
The story of Nora and Torvald rises above simple gender issues to ask the bigger question: "To what extent have we sacrificed our selves for the sake of social customs and to protect what we think is love?"

Heart of Darkness Joseph Conrad British 1899 Assigned by an ivory company to take command of a cargo boat stranded in the interior of Africa, Marlow makes his way, witnessing the brutalization of the natives by white traders.

Invisible Man Ralph Ellison American 1953
Invisible Man is narrated in the first person by the protagonist, an unnamed African American man who considers himself socially invisible.

Lord Jim Joseph Conrad British 1899
A young, idealistic Englishman is disgraced by cowardice while serving as an officer on a merchant-ship. His life is ruined, but then his courage is put to the test once more. This book about courage and cowardice, self-knowledge and personal growth is one of the most profound and rewarding psychological novels in English.

Madame Bovary Gustave Flaubert French 1856
Emma Bovary, a bored country housewife, abandons her husband to pursue the libertine Rodolphe in a desperate love affair. Written in a modern style, this powerful novel was a scandal in its day.

The Mayor of Casterbridge Thomas Hardy British 1886
Michael Henchard, having sold his wife and baby early in the novel for five guineas while in a drunken rage, gets what he deserves despite his valiant efforts at atonement years later.

Medea Euripides Greek 341 BCE
Medea tells the story of the jealousy and revenge of a woman betrayed by her husband. She leaves home and father for Jason's sake, and after she has borne him children, he forsakes her.

Middlemarch George Eliot British 1871
This "Study of Provincial Life" has a multiple plot with a large cast of characters, and it pursues a number of underlying themes, including the status of women, the nature of marriage, idealism and self-interest, religion and hypocrisy, and education.

Moby Dick Herman Melville American 1851
This story tells the adventures of the wandering sailor Ishmael and his voyage on the whaleship Pequod, commanded by Captain Ahab. Ishmael soon learns that Ahab seeks one specific whale, Moby Dick, a white whale of tremendous size and ferocity.

Obasan Joy Kogawa Canadian 1981
Obasan uses a combination of personal narrative, lyrical outpourings, official letters, and dreams to protest the treatment of Japanese-Canadians during World War II. The voices clash and mesh until they reach the ending, which both stuns and reveals truth.

Tess of the D'Urbervilles Thomas Hardy British 1891
Tess of the d'Urbervilles describes the experiences of a woman who, through no fault of her own, falls outside of the moral code of the Victorian era in which she lives and suffers long-reaching consequences as a social outcast.

Their Eyes Were Watching God Zora Neale Hurston American 1937
An African American woman, Janie Crawford, tells the story of her life in Florida in the early 1900s and her marriages to three very different men.

Wuthering Heights Emily Bronte British 1847
This swirling tale of largely unlikeable people caught up in obsessive love that turns to dark madness is cruel, violent, dark and brooding. And yet it possesses a grandeur of language and design, a sense of pity and great loss that sets it apart.

Literary Terms Questions

Any work taken from a study guide is PLAGIARISM and receives a FAILING GRADE. Answer questions honestly. You will not lose points for your personal view or thoughts. This is a learning experience, not a test. Answering the questions to the best of your ability will receive a 100% score. However, "I don't know" is not an acceptable answer. If you have read the book, at least guess at an answer.

Answer questions below about LITERARY ELEMENTS of your novel.
TERMS: Definitions to learn for the quiz are in BOLD print.

1. THEME: The central message or dominant meaning of a work as a whole. It is often a universal idea. In a well-written story, all other elements support the theme. What do you see as the theme of the book you read?

 
2. PLOT: The sequence of events, including
Exposition: background facts,
Conflict: problems, struggles, rising action
Climax: point of greatest tension, the turning point
Resolution: conflicts resolved. Denouement
Write a précis, a concise summary, of the plot in one sentence, around 25 words. Do not go over 30! Your challenge is to simplify something as complex as a novel.
 

3. Describe the three parts of the SETTING:
(1) Place:
(2) Historical time:
(3) Social environment:

(4)How does the setting affect the meaning of the work as a whole?


4. CHARACTERIZATION: The means by which an author describes and develops characters.
FLAT characters are types, defined primarily by a single quality.
ROUND characters are complex, like real people.
STATIC characters stay the same.
DYNAMIC characters change.
DIRECT characterization TELLS what a character is like.
INDIRECT characterization SHOWS what the character is like by other means, such as actions or words of the characters.

Describe two characters.

Character 1: __________________________________________
Circle one: Flat or Round?
Static or Dynamic?
Explain:



How does the characterization fit into the meaning of the work as a whole?




Character 2: __________________________________________ Circle one: Flat or Round?
Static or Dynamic?
Explain:



How does the characterization fit into the meaning of the work as a whole?



5. POINT OF VIEW: The vantage point from which a narrative is told.
FIRST PERSON: The story is told through a character that refers to himself or herself as “I.”
THIRD PERSON: The narrator is omniscient (all knowing) or limited primarily to one character and is not a character in the story.

What is the narrative point of view of your book?


How does the point of view fit with the meaning of the work as a whole?



6. SYMBOL: Something that stands for itself and also suggests something larger, more complex, and often abstract. An object can be a symbol if a characteristic of the object is also a characteristic of the idea it may stand for.

Choose an object from your novel that might work as a symbol:________________________
(1) List the chapter and page number where it is mentioned: Chpt ___ Page___
(2) What might the symbol represent?


(3) How is the symbol related to the meaning of the work as a whole?


7. ALLUSION: An indirect reference to something (a person, event, statement, or theme) found in literature, the other arts, history, myths, religion, or popular culture. The title of William Faulkner's novel The Sound and the Fury is an allusion to a line from Shakespeare's play Macbeth. “Life is...a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

(1) Find an allusion_________________ and list the page and chapter where it is mentioned. Chpt ___ Page___
(2) How does the use of the allusion add to the meaning of the work as a whole?


Essay: How to Mark a Book
By Mortimer J. Adler, Ph.D.

You know you have to read "between the lines" to get the most out of anything. I want to persuade you to do something equally important in the course of your reading. I want to persuade you to write between the lines. Unless you do, you are not likely to do the most efficient kind of reading.

I contend, quite bluntly, that marking up a book is not an act of mutilation but of love. You shouldn't mark up a book which isn't yours.

Librarians (or your friends) who lend you books expect you to keep them clean, and you should. If you decide that I am right about the usefulness of marking books, you will have to buy them. Most of the world's great books are available today, in reprint editions.

There are two ways in which one can own a book. The first is the property right you establish by paying for it, just as you pay for clothes and furniture. But this act of purchase is only the prelude to possession. Full ownership comes only when you have made it a part of yourself, and the best way to make yourself a part of it is by writing in it. An illustration may make the point clear. You buy a beefsteak and transfer it from the butcher's icebox to your own. But you do not own the beefsteak in the most important sense until you consume it and get it into your bloodstream. I am arguing that books, too, must be absorbed in your blood stream to do you any good.

Confusion about what it means to "own" a book leads people to a false reverence for paper, binding, and type -- a respect for the physical thing -- the craft of the printer rather than the genius of the author. They forget that it is possible for a man to acquire the idea, to possess the beauty, which a great book contains, without staking his claim by pasting his bookplate inside the cover. Having a fine library doesn't prove that its owner has a mind enriched by books; it proves nothing more than that he, his father, or his wife, was rich enough to buy them.

There are three kinds of book owners. The first has all the standard sets and best sellers -- unread, untouched. (This deluded individual owns woodpulp and ink, not books.) The second has a great many books -- a few of them read through, most of them dipped into, but all of them as clean and shiny as the day they were bought. (This person would probably like to make books his own, but is restrained by a false respect for their physical appearance.) The third has a few books or many -- every one of them dog-eared and dilapidated, shaken and loosened by continual use, marked and scribbled in from front to back. (This man owns books.)

Is it false respect, you may ask, to preserve intact and unblemished a beautifully printed book, an elegantly bound edition? Of course not. I'd no more scribble all over a first edition of 'Paradise Lost' than I'd give my baby a set of crayons and an original Rembrandt. I wouldn't mark up a painting or a statue. Its soul, so to speak, is inseparable from its body. And the beauty of a rare edition or of a richly manufactured volume is like that of a painting or a statue.

But the soul of a book "can" be separate from its body. A book is more like the score of a piece of music than it is like a painting. No great musician confuses a symphony with the printed sheets of music. Arturo Toscanini reveres Brahms, but Toscanini's score of the G minor Symphony is so thoroughly marked up that no one but the maestro himself can read it. The reason why a great conductor makes notations on his musical scores -- marks them up again and again each time he returns to study them--is the reason why you should mark your books. If your respect for magnificent binding or typography gets in the way, buy yourself a cheap edition and pay your respects to the author.

Why is marking up a book indispensable to reading? First, it keeps you awake. (And I don't mean merely conscious; I mean awake.) In the second place; reading, if it is active, is thinking, and thinking tends to express itself in words, spoken or written. The marked book is usually the thought-through book. Finally, writing helps you remember the thoughts you had, or the thoughts the author expressed. Let me develop these three points.

If reading is to accomplish anything more than passing time, it must be active. You can't let your eyes glide across the lines of a book and come up with an understanding of what you have read. Now an ordinary piece of light fiction, like, say, "Gone With the Wind," doesn't require the most active kind of reading. The books you read for pleasure can be read in a state of relaxation, and nothing is lost. But a great book, rich in ideas and beauty, a book that raises and tries to answer great fundamental questions, demands the most active reading of which you are capable. You don't absorb the ideas of John Dewey the way you absorb the crooning of Mr. Vallee. You have to reach for them. That you cannot do while you're asleep.


If, when you've finished reading a book, the pages are filled with your notes, you know that you read actively. The most famous "active" reader of great books I know is President Hutchins, of the University of Chicago. He also has the hardest schedule of business activities of any man I know. He invariably reads with a pencil, and sometimes, when he picks up a book and pencil in the evening, he finds himself, instead of making intelligent notes, drawing what he calls 'caviar factories' on the margins. When that happens, he puts the book down. He knows he's too tired to read, and he's just wasting time.

But, you may ask, why is writing necessary? Well, the physical act of writing, with your own hand, brings words and sentences more sharply before your mind and preserves them better in your memory. To set down your reaction to important words and sentences you have read, and the questions they have raised in your mind, is to preserve those reactions and sharpen those questions.

Even if you wrote on a scratch pad, and threw the paper away when you had finished writing, your grasp of the book would be surer. But you don't have to throw the paper away. The margins (top as bottom, and well as side), the end-papers, the very space between the lines, are all available. They aren't sacred. And, best of all, your marks and notes become an integral part of the book and stay there forever. You can pick up the book the following week or year, and there are all your points of agreement, disagreement, doubt, and inquiry. It's like resuming an interrupted conversation with the advantage of being able to pick up where you left off.

And that is exactly what reading a book should be: a conversation between you and the author. Presumably he knows more about the subject than you do; naturally, you'll have the proper humility as you approach him. But don't let anybody tell you that a reader is supposed to be solely on the receiving end. Understanding is a two-way operation; learning doesn't consist in being an empty receptacle. The learner has to question himself and question the teacher. He even has to argue with the teacher, once he understands what the teacher is saying. And marking a book is literally an expression of differences, or agreements of opinion, with the author.

There are all kinds of devices for marking a book intelligently and fruitfully. Here's the way I do it:
-1. Underlining (or highlighting): of major points, of important or forceful statements.
-2. Vertical lines at the margin: to emphasize a statement already underlined.
-3. Star, asterisk, or other doo-dad at the margin: to be used sparingly, to emphasize the ten or twenty most important statements in the book. (You may want to fold the bottom comer of each page on which you use such marks. It won't hurt the sturdy paper on which most modern books are printed, and you will be able take the book off the shelf at any time and, by opening it at the folded-corner page, refresh your recollection of the book.)
-4. Numbers in the margin: to indicate the sequence of points the author makes in developing a single argument.
-5. Numbers of other pages in the margin: to indicate where else in the book the author made points relevant to the point marked; to tie up the ideas in a book, which, though they may be separated by many pages, belong together.
-6. Circling or highlighting of key words or phrases.
-7. Writing in the margin, or at the top or bottom of the page, for the sake of: recording questions (and perhaps answers) which a passage raised in your mind; reducing a complicated discussion to a simple statement; recording the sequence of major points right through the books. I use the end-papers at the back of the book to make a personal index of the author's points in the order of their appearance.

The front end-papers are to me the most important. Some people reserve them for a fancy bookplate. I reserve them for fancy thinking. After I have finished reading the book and making my personal index on the back end-papers, I turn to the front and try to outline the book, not page by page or point by point (I've already done that at the back), but as an integrated structure, with a basic unity and an order of parts. This outline is, to me, the measure of my understanding of the work.

If you're a die-hard anti-book-marker, you may object that the margins, the space between the lines, and the end-papers don't give you room enough. All right. How about using a scratch pad slightly smaller than the page-size of the book -- so that the edges of the sheets won't protrude? Make your index, outlines and even your notes on the pad, and then insert these sheets permanently inside the front and back covers of the book.

Or, you may say that this business of marking books is going to slow up your reading. It probably will. That's one of the reasons for doing it. Most of us have been taken in by the notion that speed of reading is a measure of our intelligence. There is no such thing as the right speed for intelligent reading. Some things should be read quickly and effortlessly and some should be read slowly and even laboriously. The sign of intelligence in reading is the ability to read different things differently according to their worth. In the case of good books, the point is not to see how many of them you can get through, but rather how many can get through you -- how many you can make your own. A few friends are better than a thousand acquaintances. If this be your aim, as it should be, you will not be impatient if it takes more time and effort to read a great book than it does a newspaper.

You may have one final objection to marking books. You can't lend them to your friends because nobody else can read them without being distracted by your notes. Furthermore, you won't want to lend them because a marked copy is kind of an intellectual diary, and lending it is almost like giving your mind away.

If your friend wishes to read your Plutarch's Lives, Shakespeare, or The Federalist Papers, tell him gently but firmly, to buy a copy. You will lend him your car or your coat -- but your books are as much a part of you as your head or your heart.
Essay taken from The Radical Academy