Per a Request

Here is a website that lists the books that have been used on the AP exam since 1971. I would encourage you to read as many as possible. I know it is a lot of work, but the better read you are the better you will do on the exam.

-Grudem

Assignment for Monday

Write a five paragraph essay about the meaning of the last three lines in "A Good Man is Hard to Find" by Flannery O'Connor. If you need it here is the text. http://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~surette/goodman.html

Romanticism

We are about to begin to learn about romanticism. William Wordsworth is the poet of romanticism. Read over these two poems and be prepared to discuss them in class on Thursday. You can read about his life and work here.
Have a good day off.
-Grudem

The Kitten and the Falling Leaves

See the kitten on the wall, sporting with the leaves that fall,
Withered leaves—one—two—and three, from the lofty elder-tree!
Through the calm and frosty air, of this morning bright and fair . . .
—But the kitten, how she starts; Crouches, stretches, paws, and darts!

First at one, and then its fellow, just as light and just as yellow;
There are many now—now one—now they stop and there are none;
What intenseness of desire, in her upward eye of fire!

With a tiger-leap half way, now she meets the coming prey,
Lets it go as fast, and then, has it in her power again:
Now she works with three or four, like an Indian Conjuror;
Quick as he in feats of art, far beyond in joy of heart.

Surprised by Joy

Surprised by joy—impatient as the Wind
I turned to share the transport—Oh! with whom
But Thee, deep buried in the silent tomb,
That spot which no vicissitude can find?
Love, faithful love, recalled thee to my mind—
But how could I forget thee? Through what power,
Even for the least division of an hour,
Have I been so beguiled as to be blind
To my most grievous loss?—That thought's return
Was the worst pang that sorrow ever bore,
Save one, one only, when I stood forlorn,
Knowing my heart's best treasure was no more;
That neither present time, nor years unborn
Could to my sight that heavenly face restore.

Incongruity of Nature? Huh?

I don't understand Grudem's essay! Help me. This is the worst assignment ever: How does "Bronte’s view of the incongruity of nature and culture reinforce her view of the instability of the aristocracy?"
Grudem stinks. Graaaahhhh!

Suggested Readings by Author

Poetry
W. H. Auden; Elizabeth Bishop; William Blake; Anne Bradstreet; Edward Kamau Brathwaite; Gwendolyn Brooks; Robert Browning; George Gordon, Lord Byron; Lorna Dee Cervantes; Geoffrey Chaucer; Samuel Taylor Coleridge; H. D. (Hilda Doolittle); Emily Dickinson; John Donne; Rita Dove; T. S. Eliot; Robert Frost; Joy Harjo; Seamus Heaney; George Herbert; Garrett Hongo; Gerard Manley Hopkins; Langston Hughes; Ben Jonson; John Keats; Philip Larkin; Robert Lowell; Andrew Marvell; John Milton; Marianne Moore; Sylvia Plath; Edgar Allan Poe; Alexander Pope; Adrienne Rich; Anne Sexton; William Shakespeare; Percy Bysshe Shelley; Leslie Marmon Silko; Cathy Song; Alfred, Lord Tennyson; Derek Walcott; Walt Whitman; Richard Wilbur; William Carlos Williams; William Wordsworth; William Butler Yeats

Drama
Aeschylus; Edward Albee; Amiri Baraka; Samuel Beckett; Anton Chekhov; William Congreve; Oliver Goldsmith; Lorraine Hansberry; Lillian Hellman; David Henry Hwang; Henrik Ibsen; Ben Jonson; David Mamet; Arthur Miller; Molière; Sean O'Casey; Eugene O'Neill; Harold Pinter; Luigi Pirandello; William Shakespeare; George Bernard Shaw; Sam Shepard; Richard Brinsley Sheridan; Sophocles; Tom Stoppard; Luis Valdez; Oscar Wilde; Tennessee Williams; August Wilson

Fiction (Novel and Short Story)
Chinua Achebe; Kingsley Amis; Rudolfo Anaya; Margaret Atwood; Jane Austen; James Baldwin; Saul Bellow; Charlotte Brontë; Emily Brontë; Raymond Carver; Willa Cather; Sandra Cisneros; John Cheever; Kate Chopin; Colette; Joseph Conrad; Stephen Crane; Anita Desai; Charles Dickens; George Eliot; Ralph Ellison; Louise Erdrich; William Faulkner; Henry Fielding; F. Scott Fitzgerald; Ford Madox Ford; E. M. Forster; Thomas Hardy; Nathaniel Hawthorne; Ernest Hemingway; Zora Neale Hurston; Kazuo Ishiguro; Henry James; James Joyce; Maxine Hong Kingston; Joy Kogawa; Margaret Laurence; D. H. Lawrence; Bernard Malamud; Katherine Mansfield; Gabriel García Márquez; Bobbie Ann Mason; Carson McCullers; Herman Melville; Toni Morrison; Bharati Mukherjee; Vladimir Nabokov; Flannery O'Connor; Cynthia Ozick; Katherine Anne Porter; Jean Rhys; Jonathan Swift; Leo Tolstoy; Mark Twain; John Updike; Luisa Valenzuela; Alice Walker; Evelyn Waugh; Eudora Welty; Edith Wharton; John Edgar Wideman; Virginia Woolf; Richard Wright

Expository Prose
Joseph Addison; Gloria Anzaldúa; Matthew Arnold; James Baldwin; James Boswell; Thomas Carlyle; Jesús Colón; Ralph Waldo Emerson; William Hazlitt; Samuel Johnson; Charles Lamb; Norman Mailer; Mary McCarthy; H. L. Mencken; John Stuart Mill; George Orwell; Richard Steele; Lewis Thomas; Henry David Thoreau; Barbara Tuchman; Virginia Woolf