Advanced Placement Literature is a challenging, nutritious college-level course for hungry high school students—not only a test prep course. Critical thinking, rigorous writing, and joyful engagement with literature are our main goals. However, this one-year course will also prepare you for the AP English Literature and Composition exam through the intensive study of works of acknowledged literary merit in several genres—novels, plays, poems, and short stories from the sixteenth century to the present. Works that have earned a distinction of literary merit possess rich language, distinctive voice and style, and layered complexity and ambiguity. Works of literary merit deal with universal truths, raise social concerns, move from the particular to the universal, and invite multiple interpretations. The authors studied include novelists, playwrights, and poets, such as Cathy Park Hong, Claudia Rankine, Sophocles, Shakespeare, Albert Camus, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Oscar Wilde, William Faulkner, Langston Hughes, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Tennessee Williams, Sylvia Plath, Kate Chopin, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and others. Their literature invites and rewards re-reading and does not, like ephemeral works in such popular genres as detective or romance fiction, yield all their pleasure of thought and feeling the first time through. Through the close reading of selected texts, you will deepen your understanding of the ways writers use language to provide both meaning and pleasure for their readers. Both in-class and out-of- class essays, including a formal research paper, are assigned regularly. Prerequisite: Formal Assessment for placement