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Blending AP English Language and American Literature
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by David Jolliffe
University of Arkansas
Fayetteville, Arkansas
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| | A Fortuitous Combination
Over half of the 175,000 students who take the AP English Language and Composition Exam are high school juniors. Since many school districts schedule American literature during the junior year, many AP English Language teachers face the challenge of blending the two courses. In one sense, this de facto linking of American literature and AP English Language is unfortunate. Certainly, the learning goals of the two classes must be different. Yet, in another sense, the combination can be extremely fortuitous. Rather than conflicting and diminishing each other, the two courses, when thoughtfully conceived, can energize each other in ways that make the course more engaging for students.
When I refer to "learning goals," I mean statements that explain how we hope our students will be different at the end of the course than they were at the beginning. In an American literature course, I imagine, the learning goals would be something like this:
- Students will understand how poetry, fiction, drama, and nonfiction prose written in America from the seventeenth century to the present represent the experiences of people who were native to American soil, people who emigrated to America, and people who were brought to America against their will as America was colonized and developed into the complex entity it is today.
- Students will understand how the American experience has influenced the development of the English language.
- Students will write clearly, correctly, and effectively about the aforementioned matters.
By contrast, the goals inherent in an AP English Language course call for students to be able to analyze how an author uses rhetorical techniques and strategies to achieve a specific purpose or effect, to use similar techniques and strategies in their own writing, to understand standard written English and use it effectively in their own work, and to write clear and convincing expository and argumentative compositions. In essence, American literature tends to be a course about the relation of cultures, ideas, and language, while the AP English Language Examination presupposes, ideally, that students have had a course in rhetorical theory, rhetorical analysis, exposition, and argumentation.
The way to meet both sets of goals -- and, I'd argue, to invigorate the teaching of American literature -- is to focus on a rhetorical analysis of American fiction, poetry, drama, and nonfiction prose. Achieving this goal requires teachers to take two specific steps, one pedagogical and one curricular. The pedagogical step is to see all pieces of literature as rhetorical transactions, written by real authors who deliberately crafted their texts to accomplish a specific purpose or achieve a particular effect with readers. Instructors who teach all literature -- fiction, poetry, drama, and nonfiction alike -- as rhetorical acts get their students attuned to what my colleague Bernie Phelan calls "the landscape of the text:" the shapes and contours of organization, structure, syntax, figurative language, diction, and imagery. It's not that the "great ideas" of American literature are unimportant in a junior-level course. What is important is that students are able to analyze how these great ideas are embodied and fleshed out in the texts.
The curricular action is to be a "supplementer." Because AP English Language and Composition so closely focuses on nonfiction prose, a conscientious American literature teacher should try to add as much of this genre as possible to his or her course. One particularly effective tactic is to add works of nonfiction prose written by authors whose fiction, poetry, and drama are already on the syllabus. For example, in the course of studying Edgar Allen Poe's poetry, students might read Poe's essay, "The Philosophy of Composition," and analyze the strategies he uses to make his points. Similarly, in addition to reading The Great Gatsby, students might delve into the essays and articles Fitzgerald was writing for the popular press during the 1920s, once again working to analyze the techniques the author uses to achieve purpose and effect. While reading the short fiction of Willa Cather, students might find and examine the journalistic pieces she wrote early in her career for Home Monthly magazine and The Pittsburgh Leader. Anyone studying the works of the modern American poets John Crowe Ransom and Allen Tate would benefit from reading and analyzing rhetorically the polemical, political essays they wrote as part of their Southern Agrarian movement. The canon of American nonfiction prose is an inviting terrain for innovative teachers and eager learners.
David Jolliffe is a professor of English at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville, where he also holds the Brown Chair in English Literacy at the Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences. He has been associated with the AP English Language and Composition course since 1992, and he has served as Chief Reader since 2004. He is the author of several books and articles on the theory and practice of rhetoric and the teaching of writing. His most recent book, written with Hephzibah Roskelly, is Everyday Use: Rhetoric at Work in Reading and Writing.
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