AP Literature and Composition/British Lit.

Amber Winter
2018-2019 622-3634, ext. 1234
awinter@eduhsd.k12.ca.us
winteredhs.weebly.com

Introduction to British Literature

Course description: This course is designed in liaison with California State University, Sacramento,
through their Accelerated College Entrance program. Consequently, I follow a curriculum closely
aligned with what is being taught at CSUS in English 40A and B (British Literature survey courses).
Students who enroll in the CSUS ACE program and successfully complete this course will earn CSUS
credits (and a transcript from CSUS).

This senior-level course is an introductory survey of British Literature that focuses on the role that
literature has played in the building of British (and Western) culture. We will look at the function of
British literature as a reflection of its culture, beginning with Beowulf and reading chronologically up
through the Moderns in the 20th century. We will look at major authors (primarily canonized), but will
also analyze and evaluate those authors’ positions in the canon with a view to questioning the use and
purpose of canon building. As an introductory course, we will also work to develop reading and writing
strategies that are transferable to upper division courses in literature.

Course objectives:
● To familiarize students with some significant and diverse examples of British Literature
written between the 8th century and the early 20th century.
● To introduce students to some of the major literary genres and modes employed by
writers of each period.
● To provide students with the opportunity to examine some recurring themes in the
literature of the various periods.
● To help students understand how literary movements react to and/or move forward from
the period(s) preceding them, and to see the relevance of the literature of past periods to
our modern world.
● To explore new vocabulary and grammatical techniques with the aim of helping students
broaden their working vocabularies and reservoirs of stylistic forms.
● To give students practice in analyzing, discussing, and writing about literature.

Texts:
Bronte, Charlotte. Jane Eyre. (Bantam Books, 1988)
Bronte, Emily. Wuthering Heights. (Signet Classic, 1959)
Chaucher, Geoffrey. The Canterbury Tales. (Bantam Books, 1981)
Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness, Norton Critical Edition. (W.W. Norton & Co. Inc., 1988)
Elements of Literature, 6th Course (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 2003)
From Beowulf to Modern British Writers (Odyssey Press, 1959)
Lawrence, D.H. Sons and Lovers. (Penguin Books, 1983)
Morgan, Fidelis, ed. The Female Tatler (J.M. Dent and Sons Ltd., 1992)
Shakespeare, William. Macbeth (any edition)
 Shaw, Don and Prudence Dyer. Working With Poetry (Educators Publishing Service, 1996)
Sophocles. Oedipus Rex (any edition)
Swift, Jonathan. Gulliver’s Travels (any edition)
Tuso, Joseph F., ed. Beowulf (Norton Critical, 1975)
Wilde, Oscar. The Picture of Dorian Gray (Norton Critical, 2007)
Woolf, Virginia. To the Lighthouse. (Harcourt Brace)

Requirements:

Attendance and Participation: Students are expected to be fully participatory and engaged in
dialogue; therefore, both attendance and participation are required. Absences (excused or
unexcused) will have a serious negative effect on your success in class. Arriving late and
leaving early are disruptive; please be prompt and try to schedule appointments outside of class
time. Last, but definitely not least, preparation is crucial; both mind and body need to be present
and ready to talk about the assigned readings.

Late Work:

As this is an AP class, late work is not accepted under any circumstance. If a student is unable to
attend class the day that an assignment is due, they must send a digital copy of the completed
assignment before the start of class and then bring a printed copy the day that they return to
school. They may also have a parent/sibling/friend drop it off the office and have it time
stamped so that I know that it was turned in before class began. If a student is absent because of
illness, they need to check my website or connect with a peer. If a student is going to miss class
due to a scheduled absence (i.e. sports or a college visit) they are required to get their work
before the absence. Students are required to schedule make-ups for tests or quizzes within one
day of their absence, and it must be complete within a calendar week. It is their responsibility to
make arrangements, I will not maintain their schedule for them.

Writing Conferences:

When composing papers, all students are required to meet for a conference with me to discuss
their paper. Students are responsible for arriving on time and prepared for their conference.
Each student must have a minimum of their introduction with a working thesis and two body
paragraphs when they meet with me. If a student is late, fails to arrive to their conference or
does not have the required introduction and two body paragraphs, they will receive up to a 10%
reduction in their paper grade. It is incredibly important that students honor their commitments
and respect my time.

Assignments:
 ● Quick-writes and quizzes: Students will frequently be asked to write for five to ten minutes on
a given topic relative to the readings and specific literary devices; e.g., students might be asked
to discuss the nature imagery in a specific Romantic poem, or the tone of a satirical essay.
● Vocabulary and grammar/style exercises: Weekly vocabulary to be taken from the literature.
Grammar and style exercises (individually based on student need, and class instruction in
organization, rhetoric, style, voice, etc.) weekly and on an as-needed basis.
● Personal Response Papers: Each one-two page (typed) response paper is meant to give the
student practice in particular writing strategies and rhetorical modes (e.g., analytical,
argumentative, expository, descriptive, etc.) and to encourage the student to explore topics that
may lead to the formal essay.
● Individual and/or Collaborative Group Presentations: Periodically, students will prepare
brief (5-10 minute) presentations on assigned readings. No written work will be collected for
these assignments. The instructor will assess each individual’s presentation according to a rubric
provided by the instructor.
● Short-Answer Unit Tests (consider these as you would mid-terms): These exams will focus
on a particular period and will test your knowledge of the readings, the authors, the historical
significance of both, etc.
● Formal Essays: (3-5 typed pages; research 8-12 typed pages) Formal essay topics should arise
out of our class discussions and/or from topics that you find particularly intriguing in a certain
work or works. These essays will go through several drafts, and will be submitted for my
evaluation and comments both during and after revisions, as well as for peer evaluation and
comments during the writing and revising stages.
(Quick-writes, vocabulary and grammar exercises, personal responses, presentations, unit
exams and formal essays will, collectively, be worth 75% of your final grade.)
● Final Exam: This will be a comprehensive essay test requiring you to write at length on several
provided exam topics. Your essays should show careful analysis and integration of ideas relative
to the texts, their historical periods, and their relation to one another.
(The final exam will be worth 25% of your final grade.)

NOTE: Plagiarism will result in a zero on the assignment; a second incident will result in a drop/fail
from the class. If in reading a formal essay I suspect the writer did not read the material he or she
discusses in the paper, I will privately quiz the student on the assigned text. If the student clearly did
not read the assigned material, the paper will earn a zero, and there will be no opportunity to make up
that score. Successfully passing the class after such an incident is extremely difficult.
 AP Literature and Composition/British Literature – 2018-2019
Week of: Readings:

Aug. 6-12 and 13-19 Tests on summer reading: Jane Eyre, Pride and Prejudice, Moll Flanders
and The Turn of the Screw
Elements of Literature – readings on Old English
Beowulf – text and critical materials (Malone, Wren, Klaeber, Donaldson and
Baum)
Monday August 13th: AP Prompt #1
WWP #1 Homework for Monday, August 20th.

Aug. 20-26 EL - the Middle Ages

“Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” Handout
Begin reading The Picture of Dorian Gray – due by Sept. 27th with Personal
Response. (This is out of order chronologically, but makes a nice
compare/contrast essay when paired with Dr. Faustus.)

Aug.27-Sept. 2 AP Prompt #2
WTAL – How to: the Compare/Contrast essay
EL – The English Language and Chaucer
The Canterbury Tales – “Prologue,” “Knight’s Tale,” “Pardoner’s Tale,” “Nun’s
Priest’s Tale”
(Each student will read one of the other tales as well, and report on its
significance and/or salient details and characters at the next class
meeting.)
WWP #2 Homework for Tuesday, September 4th

Sept. 3-9 No school Monday, Sept. 3

Continue Canterbury Tales
Presentations of extra tales

Sept. 10-16 AP Prompt #3

Unit test: Beowulf through Chaucer
EL – Renaissance and Christopher Marlowe
FBTMBW – The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus
WWP #3 Homework for Monday, September 17th
Sept. 17-23 Continue Dr. Faustus
Dorian Gray/Faustus compare/contrast expository essay comparing each author’s
treatment of the theme they have in common – essay due October 11th.

EL – Renaissance poetry: Marlowe’s “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love”;

Raleigh’s “The Nymph’s Reply to the Shepherd”; Herrick’s “To the
Virgins, to Make Much of Time”; Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress”;
Jonson’s “On My First Son,” and “Song: To Celia”

Sept.24-Sept. 30 AP Prompt #4
WTAL – imagery, symbolism, and allegory
WWP – pp. 1-16: #2, 5, 6, 8, 10 and pp. 41-51: #23, 24, 25
EL – William Shakespeare’s sonnets (29, 73, 116, 130) and Spenser’s (30 or 75)
Essay on imagery, tone and theme in a sonnet – Essay due: October 29th
WWP#4 Homework for Monday, October 1st

Oct. 1-7 Oedipus Rex (for Aristotle’s notion of tragedy vs. Shakespeare’s)
Macbeth
instructor’s comments on Dorian/Faustus essay draft
EL – “The Renaissance Theatre” and writings on Macbeth
British Author Research Paper: analytical/argumentative; authors chosen by
students individually; read a novel or a selection of poetry by the author,
research critical material relevant to a thesis you have put forward, and
write an 8-10 page paper that cites at least four critical sources – Proposal
due November 29th; Annotated bibliography due January 17th;
Research paper due in February (date to be announced)

Oct. 8-14 AP Prompt #5

Peer evaluation of Dorian/Faustus essay draft & final due 11th
Continue Macbeth
Group presentations: How imagery is used to enhance theme in Macbeth
Harold Bloom’s “Macbeth” (handout)
Peer evaluation and instructor’s comments on sonnet essay draft
WWP #5 Homework for Monday, October 15th

Oct. 15-21 More presentations

Macbeth in-class essay test
(Begin reading Gulliver’s Travels – due Nov. 13)

Oct. 22-28 AP Prompt #6

EL – John Donne’s “Song,” “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning,” “Meditation
17,” and “Death Be Not Proud”
Oct. 29-Nov. 4 EL – George Herbert’s “The Collar”; from John Milton’s Paradise Lost: “The
Fall of Satan,” “On His Blindness,” and “On Shakespeare”
Personal Response on Milton
Renaissance Authors Unit Test

Nov. 5-11 Battle Royale #1

EL – the Restoration and the Eighteenth Century
FBTMBW – John Dryden’s “A Song for St. Cecilia’s Day,” and “MacFlecknoe”;
Alexander Pope’s “Heroic Couplets” and “Essay on Man”

Nov. 12-18 Battle Royale #2

EL – Jonathan Swift, satire, “A Modest Proposal”
Students read and present one critical essay on Gulliver’s Travels
Discussion of Gulliver’s Travels and in-class précis

Nov. 19-25 ***Thanksgiving Break***

Nov. 26-Dec. 2 AP Prompt #8

WTAL – analyzing tone
Essay: tone in a Restoration author’s work, including social/cultural importance
and style – Dec. 7.
FBTMBW – Alexander Pope’s “The Rape of the Lock”; Gray’s “Elegy in a
Country Churchyard”; Steele, Addison, Johnson (The Spectator No. 1 and
No. 377; The Rambler No. 59)

Dec. 3-9 Peer evaluation and comments/instructor evaluation and comments on Tone essay
The Female Tatler: Introduction and #1, 2, 55, 87 and 88

Dec. 10-16 Final Exams

WINTER BREAK

Jan. 7-13 AP Prompt #9

Research note cards due now -- British author research paper working draft due
January 17
 The Romantic Period
EL: William Blake’s “The Tyger,” “The Lamb,” “The Chimney Sweeper” (both
innocence and experience), and “The Poison Tree”
FBTMBW: William Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey,” “Strange Fits of Passion,”
“She Dwelt Among the Untrodden Ways,” “London,” “My Heart Leaps
Up,” “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud”
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein due Jan. 31st

Jan. 14-20 More Wordsworth

Personal Response paper on Wordsworth
EL: Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” and “The Rime of the Ancient
Mariner”
Annotated Bibliography/Research Proposal Due: January 17th.

Jan. 21-27 AP Prompt #10

More Coleridge
EL: Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Ozymandias,” “Ode to the West Wind,” and “To a
Skylark”

Jan. 28-Feb. 3
FBTMBW: John Keats’ “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer,” “When I
Have Fears,” “La Belle Dame sans Merci,” “Ode to a Nightingale” and
“Ode on a Grecian Urn”
George Gordon, Lord Byron’s “She Walks in Beauty,” “The Destruction of
Sennacherib,” “Don Juan” Canto II, and “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage”
Canto IV

Feb. 4-10 AP Prompt #11

More Shelley, Keats, Byron
Romanticism Unit Test
Romantic Poetry Essay: in-class writing and discussion of style and voice using
student writing as models; focus on poet’s use of devices and style
(imagery, allusion, tone, figurative language, etc.) that firmly plant this
poem in the period socially and culturally – Essay due February 14th.

Feb. 11-17 More Shelley, Keats, Byron

Writing and instruction/discussion on essay style and voice; peer and instructor
evaluation and comments
View video of Austen’s Persuasion or Sense and Sensibility

Feb. 18-24 Battle Royale #3

Romantic Poets – final thoughts and closure
Romantics Unit test
Feb. 25 -Mar. 3 The Victorian Period
EL and FBTMBW: Tennyson -- “Tears, Idle Tears,” “The Eagle: A Fragment,”
“Flower in the Crannied Wall,” “The Lady of Shallot,” “Ulysses,” “Crossing the
Bar”
Arnold -- “Dover Beach”

Mar. 4-10 AP Prompt #12

Emily Bronte -- Wuthering Heights
Personal Response on first half of Wuthering Heights (explore the connection
between characters and setting)

Mar. 11-17 Group presentations (symbols, themes, motifs): Wuthering Heights

Solo presentations on critical material: Wuthering Heights
Closing Personal Response on Wuthering Heights due 3/16
Essay on WH: student may choose to write an expository or an argumentative
essay on a thesis of his or her design, but with some focus on Bronte’s
interest in gothic setting; essay due March 21
EL: Browning -- “My Last Duchess,” “Porphyria’s Lover”
E.B. Browning -- “Sonnet 43”

Mar. 18-24 AP Prompt #13

More on the Brownings, Tennyson, Arnold
View video of Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest
Wuthering Heights essay peer evaluation and comments; instructor evaluation and
comments; class discussion and instruction on rhetorical style and voice
Discussion of Picture of Dorian Gray (already written on first semester)

Mar. 25-31 Bronte’s Jane Eyre

Short presentations on Jane Eyre: elements of romance, elements of the Victorian
Age
In-class Essay on a Victorian poem of student’s choice: focus on poet’s use of
poetic devices, style, tone, etc., as they place the poem socially and
culturally in the Victorian period

Apr. 1-7 Battle Royale #4

Victorian Era Unit Test
The Twentieth Century: Conrad’s Heart of Darkness
Apr. 8-14 Heart of Darkness – discussion, critics, and individual close-read presentations
FBTMBW: T.S. Eliot “The Hollow Men,” “The Waste Land,” The Love Song of
J.Alfred Prufrock”
Apr. 15-21 ***Spring Break***

Apr. 22-28 Battle Royale #5

In-class essay on Heart of Darkness: timed essay to focus on socio-political issues
of imperialism and racism

May 1-5 Battle Royale #6

Woolf’s To the Lighthouse

Apr. 29- May 4 Essay on student’s choice of 20th century novelists we’ve read together – essay
due May 12th.
Peer and teacher evaluation of working draft of 20th c. novel
View video of Forster’s Howards End

May 6-12 AP test practice and review: Test is May 8th at 8am

May 13-19 Review and Final Exam

May 22-26 Senior Activites Week / Junior Finals

(This schedule is an approximation and not exhastive; we will be flexible as we go along.)

August 6, 2018

Dear Parents/Guardians:

Welcome back to El Dorado High School! I am excited to begin this school year and I hope you are too.
It is my goal to make this year successful for your child. In order to do so, I will need help from you. I
believe that it is imperative that teachers work closely with the parents/guardians of their students. I will
do my best to keep you informed and would like to welcome you to contact me if you have any
questions or concerns. The best way to contact me is by email. My email address is
awinter@eduhsd.k12.ca.us . I check my email frequently Monday-Friday.

We will be covering a lot of material relatively fast, as this is a college course. I understand that it will
be a challenge, but it will pay off tenfold in the end. Please make sure that you take the time to read and
discuss the course policies with your son/daughter. Once you have, please sign the syllabus below,
acknowledging that you have read the syllabus and reviewed it with your child and have him/her bring
the signed page back to class no later than August 13th.

Once again, I am looking forward to getting to know your child and working with you to ensure their
success this academic school year!

Sincerely,

Ms. Amber Winter

Syllabus Contract
To be detached from syllabus, signed and returned to Ms. W by August 13th for 10 points!

By signing this contract, I acknowledge that I read, understand, and agree to all of the above course policies
and guidelines.
Student’s Name: ___________________________ Student’s Signature: ___________________________

Parent/Guardian’s Name: _____________________ Parent/Guardian’s Signature: _____________________

Parents/Guardians: What is the best way to reach you throughout the school year?:

email:

phone:

Is there anything special that you believe I need to know about your child or family in order to make this year as
successful as possible?