English IV, AP English Literature: Summer Reading Assignment for 2015
I. First, read the following poem by Billy Collins.
Marginalia
Sometimes the notes are ferocious,
skirmishes against the author
raging along the borders of every page
in tiny black script.
If I could just get my hands on you,
Kierkegaard, or Conor Cruise O'Brien,
they seem to say,
I would bolt the door and beat some logic into your head.
Other comments are more offhand, dismissive—
“Nonsense.” “Please!” “HA! !”—
that kind of thing.
I remember once looking up from my reading,
my thumb as a bookmark,
trying to imagine what the person must look like
why wrote “Don't be a ninny”
alongside a paragraph in The Life of Emily Dickinson.
Students are more modest
needing to leave only their splayed footprints
along the shore of the page.
One scrawls “Metaphor” next to a stanza of Eliot's.
Another notes the presence of “Irony”
fifty times outside the paragraphs of A Modest Proposal.
Or they are fans who cheer from the empty bleachers,
Hands cupped around their mouths.
“Absolutely,” they shout
to Duns Scotus and James Baldwin.
“Yes.” “Bull's-eye.” “My man!”
Check marks, asterisks, and exclamation points
rain down along the sidelines.
And if you have managed to graduate from college
without ever having written “Man vs. Nature”
in a margin, perhaps now
is the time to take one step forward.
We have all seized the white perimeter as our own
and reached for a pen if only to show
we did not just laze in an armchair turning pages;
we pressed a thought into the wayside,
planted an impression along the verge.
Even Irish monks in their cold scriptoria
jotted along the borders of the Gospels
brief asides about the pains of copying,
a bird singing near their window,
or the sunlight that illuminated their page—
anonymous men catching a ride into the future
on a vessel more lasting than themselves.
And you have not read Joshua Reynolds,
they say, until you have read him
enwreathed with Blake's furious scribbling.
Yet the one I think of most often,
the one that dangles from me like a locket,
was written in the copy of Catcher in the Rye
I borrowed from the local library
one slow, hot summer.
I was just beginning high school then,
reading books on a davenport in my parents' living room,
and I cannot tell you
how vastly my loneliness was deepened,
how poignant and amplified the world before me seemed,
when I found on one page
A few greasy looking smears
and next to them, written in soft pencil—
by a beautiful girl, I could tell,
whom I would never meet—
“Pardon the egg salad stains, but I'm in love.”
II. Second, read these these overviews on marginalia.
III. Third, read and mark up any one major text (novel, drama, epic, book-length poem). This means that you will need a real paper book (that you purchase or own) or a .pdf copy of a book (so that you can make notes with your finger or stylus). Play with your marks: “[press your] thought into the wayside,/ [plant] an impression along the verge.” Work on a system that fits you. Doodle here and there as you meditate on an idea. Have fun. Enjoy it; don’t rush it. There is no summer essay or journal to complete. Relax...and read.
Please choose your text from the following:
1. That Hideous Strength by C. S. Lewis (1945): ND Wilson (an author who visited our school and lectured) believes it may be the most perfectly constructed modern novel, certainly Lewis’s most perfectly crafted novel. This is a challenging text; go big.
2. Tales of the Long Bow by G. K. Chesterton (1925): While Lewis (above) takes a serious, dark approach to modern concerns, Chesterton skips jovially through his narrative. This novel is strange but fairly easy to read and a great deal of fun.
- .Pdf edition you could open in Notability for easy reading, marking, and highlighting, digitally.
3. Or read any text from the list of books previously mentioned on the AP English Literature exam open response prompt. Just be sure it’s not a book you’ve previously read (such as in AP Language). Tip: Ask your parents about a book they enjoyed in high school or college that you have not read yet. It’s probably on the AP list. Check for it. If it’s there, read it. Mark it. Talk to your parents about it; share some common literary culture.
Note: I will give extra credit points to any student who reads and marks up three or more books this summer (Lewis, Chesterton, and at least one from the AP open response list). But you only need to read and mark up one to get full credit for this assignment.
Rationale: I want you to learn to love to read on your own. Not only is it an academic necessity for future scholarship, there is no way to cover every vocabulary word, every genre, every kind of text possible before the AP Exam. You must become, not merely proficient, but comfortable and confident with a great range of imaginative literature. The only path there is through a lot of interesting (and sometimes confusing) reading, and there are no shortcuts. By moving more slowly, considerately, with personal notes and marks of your journey left on the pages you digest, your mind will be developing creatively and critically (as opposed to the rather summary, cursory thinking quick access guides like Sparknotes will lead to).
Eventually, in this course, you have to (1.) recognize and appreciate the meaning of a challenging text, (2.) understand how that meaning is constructed in the text, and (3.) posit why that meaning is important today...all on your own. It’s a worthy aim, one that will serve you well in years to come. The good news is that this course will encourage you to grow richly in your personal literary enjoyment and analysis. The bad news is that there are no easy ways to get there (vocabulary notecards and online summaries and analyses will not suffice); you must read, read regularly, read intelligently, read quietly, read single-mindedly, read entirely, reread. No athlete expects to learn a few rules and suddenly become a star player. Lean into your reading.
If you have questions, please contact me: marcusschwager@mvcs.org.
Enjoy the summer!
Mr. Schwager
