(For those who asked: the BOLDED titles are not by white males, the italicized titles are by living writers.)
The Miracle Worker by William Gibson
The Odyssey by Homer
Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare
The Good Earth by
Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare
Lord of the Flies by William Golding
A Separate Peace by John Knowles
Oedipus Rex by Sophocles
Our Town by
Maus I by Art Spiegelman
Maus II by Art Spiegelman
To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee
The Merchant of
Cry, the Beloved Country by Alan Paton
The Crucible by Arthur Miller
Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller
Albee Plays by Edward Albee
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Black Boy by Richard Wright
The Adventures of Huck Finn by Mark Twain
The Catcher in the
The Color Purple by Alice Walker
The Glass Menagerie by
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan
The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey
A Raisin in the Sun by
Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane
The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut
Snow Falling on Cedars by David Guterson
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1984 by George Orwell (novel)
Beloved by Toni Morrison (novel)
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley (novel)
Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton (novel)
Hamlet by William Shakespeare (drama)
The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde (drama)
M. Butterfly by David Henry Hwang (drama)
Mourning Becomes Electra by Eugene O'Neill (drama)
The Once and Future King by T. H. White (novel)
The Oresteia by Aeschylus (drama)
Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw (drama)
The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro (novel)
Six Degrees of Separation by John Guare (drama)
We Were the Mulvaneys by Joyce Carol Oates (novel)
Wit by Margaret Edson (drama)
Zoot Suit by Luis Valdez (drama)
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9 comments:
If we didn't read it we don't have to put it in there right?
Are we allowed to type the cram sheet or does it have to be handwritten?
I think people are kind of missing the point here.
This is not meant to be a punishment. This is supposed to HELP YOU DO BETTER ON THE OPEN-ENDED ESSAYS.
If you'd done it before, when I was only strongly recommending it, you really don't have to do anything...it's done, your essay scores would improve, and everyone would be happy.
If you've been putting it off, and scoring poorly on your essays, and now you're scrambling to get it done at the last minute (even though I assigned it last week), and you turn in a lame set of notes and STILL bomb the open-ended essay on May 1...well, I think that's punishment enough.
But just so we're clear, it's a 50 point assignment, if you don't have at least all the texts from this year (there are 16 on the list), plus 5-6 from each of the previous years, I'll know you've been slacking.
Typed or handwritten, I don't care. I care that you care enough about your own success in AP English to take these things seriously.
What about the texts from this year that we haven't read yet? (Or rather, will be reading over break.) It doesn't seem like cram notes on books we haven't read would be particularly good/useful?
There are only two books left, and the notes you take on them aren't going to change after you've read them. Some of you went a little overboard with the notes (50 points really scares the [bleep] out of people, huh?)...they should've been just a few lines each, really. Enough to trigger your recollections of reading the book.
Are we still doing Mulvaneys the week after break? Or did we switch it with M. Butterfly?
Mulvaneys and M. Butterfly were switched because of STAR testing.
If we haven't read the books, though, that means our notes aren't really ours, but SparkNotes, or some other similar site--and SparkNotes is occasionally wrong. Sometimes merely not at all the analysis you personally would have drawn (though if the notes were supposed to be as short as you said [oops] this wouldn't be a problem). Patrick Mulvaney's description (on Answers.Com; no SparkNotes for We Were the Mulvaneys), for instance, forgets to mention that he is [COMPLETELY awesome and] far more thematically relevant than simply existing to prove that Revenge is Bad. If the AP OE topic had to do with vengeance, it'd be character abuse to force him into providing the basis for that essay, no matter what the cram notes said.
Of course, since we'll have read/discussed that particular book right before the exam, I don't think we'll have trouble remembering who Patrick is.
But my point is, if they're not your own notes, even if they are just character names and taglines, the inferences you draw from them are going to be a little bit Not Yours, your analysis is going to be a little bit Not Yours, your essay a little bit Not Yours. Which may be the difference between that 6 and that 7 for the essay, that high 4 or low 5 for the exam--who knows?
And on a COMPLETLEY unrelated note--I thought this was neat. Alan Rickman reading Shakespeare's Sonnet 130 (from one of our poetry comparison essays): http://www.smartbitchestrashybooks.com/images/uploads1/Sonnet130.mp3
I think he should have read The Waste Land, too.
That is COOL! Snape reading Shakespeare.
Part of the point of the notes is to let YOU know what texts you're strong on. If you find that you can't remember crap about, oh, let's say, Huckleberry Finn, even though you DID read it last year, then you have a few options here:
A. Write what you DO remember and leave it at that, knowing you won't be using that particular text.
B. Write what you can remember, then go and look up SparkNotes or whatever, and hopefully, reviewing those notes will refresh your memory and allow you to add this text to your repertoire.
But if a sentence or two can't stimulate a solid recall of the text's themes and major plot points, I would avoid using it. If you find you have less than ten reliable texts in your mental file, you're kind of going into the test without a net.
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