Advanced Placement Literature and Composition s1

Advanced Placement Literature and Composition:

Literary Merit Discussion Questions

*Assignment: Answer each question with good detail and explanation. Use specifics! Include the question as part of your response. Use complete sentences—no sentence fragments, incomplete thoughts, or run-on sentences. And, yes, quantity does often create quality, but only when it is meaningful—have meaningful quantity.

1. Read the prompt and then compose a list of as many novels or plays which might be used to address the prompt (do the best you can); also give a brief (bullet points okay) explanation as to why.

Often in literature a character’s success in achieving goals depends on keeping a secret and divulging it only at the right moment, if at all. Choose a novel or play of literary merit that requires a character to keep a secret. In a well-organized essay, briefly explain the necessity for secrecy and how the character’s choice to reveal or keep the secret affects the plot and contributes to the meaning of the work as a whole.

2. Respond to this quotation by Clifton Fadiman: “When you reread a classic you do not see more in the book than you did before; you see more in you than there was before.” [What is about the classic that makes it worth a second read?]

3. There are some who argue that learning about literary analysis and “reading between the lines” takes all the joy out of reading literature. What are your thoughts about this? Is there a difference between reading for pleasure and reading for analysis? In what ways are they similar? In what ways can readers find joy in reading between the lines?

4. LITERARY MERIT – The search for a common definition of literary merit is not a new one. An article in The English Journal (1928), for instance, described a survey conducted nationwide among librarians to determine literary merit based on a 100-point scale; in this case, 100 represented the quality of “Shakespeare’s writings” and zero represented the composition of an “average 6-year-old child just learning to read and write” (Graves 1928, 328). The small sample of around 60 librarians ranked The Scarlet Letter at 86.7 and The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes at 57.9. A 1992 article by Arthur N. Applebee in the same publication attacked the issue from a different angle: Applebee evaluated studies that “looked in turn at the book-length studies that students are asked to read” and “at the selections of all types that teachers actually report using” (Applebee 1992, 27).

So, what to you makes a novel or play a work of literary merit? Develop a minimum of 10 criterion to support a definition of literary merit (yes, you need 10 criterion). Use approximately 2-3 sentences to explain EACH criterion. Please DO NOT USE OUTSIDE SOURCES OR ONE ANOTHER TO ANSWER THIS QUESTION—I am interested in YOUR thoughts, NOT someone else’s regurgitated thoughts.