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AP English

ATYP AP, the third year of the ATYP writing and literature program, requires all students to write the AP Language and Composition Exam at year's end; accordingly, the course seeks to nurture and elevate critical thinking, reading, and writing skills to the college level. Utilizing a seminar/workshop format, the course features extensive discussion and collective learning exercises, such as "round table" reading and interpretation, peer review, small group work and presentations, and collaborative writing. While placing its greatest emphasis on literary analysis and formal critical essays, the coursework also features assignments in creative writing, all of which aim to foster increasingly sophisticated reading and interpretive skills, and to cultivate the students' understanding of rhetorical and poetic strategies as well as their own authorial self-awareness. The course offers a broad range of readings in classic literature ranging from Homer and Dostoevsky, aiming to trace literary and multicultural currents and changes in both poetry and prose while focusing on genre, mythology, the impact of technology, and individual identity. During the first semester, our themes focused on rites of passage, such as transitions from innocence to experience, with readings from authors such as Blake, James Baldwin, and Rose Wilder Lane before moving to the mythical visions found in Gilgamesh and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Second semester readings included selections from King James ("The Trew Law of Free Monarchies," "News from Scotland," and "Daemonology") and Machiavelli's The Prince --in preparation for lengthy studies of Shakespeare's Macbeth and King Lear. We extended our analysis of the tragic mode through Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and concluded with an examination of utopian/dystopian visions as found in More's Utopia, Dostevsky's Notes from Underground, and Eugene Zamyatin's We.