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Honors Prompts

SENIORS
Like the essay at the end of the last nine weeks, the AP independent reading essay will be a critical book review. Your thesis should determine the relative value of reading the book for your AP course. Of course, you must cite (and include) specific examples from the text.

SOPHOMORES

For each of the following assignments, please focus on critical issues rather than summary, and use specific examples from the text, citing them by page number. You should write around 500 words in response to the prompt you choose.

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
Read some excerpts from Henry David Thoreau's Walden; or, Life in the Woods, especially one or two passages in which he gives detailed accounts of his observations of nature. In terms of the amount of precise detail, how do his accounts compare with Dillard's? How would you compare the conclusions Thoreau and Dillard draw from their observations?

Billy Budd (choose one)
o       What role does irony play in Billy Budd?
o       In what ways does Melville dramatize the conflict between a person’s inner self and that person’s role in society?
o       Analyze why Melville follows his three characters to their deaths.
o       Explain why Melville might be included in a study of great transcendentalists.

Edgar Allan Poe - Short Stories
Trace the conventions of either detective fiction or gothic fiction in at least four of Poe’s stories.

Nathanial Hawthorne - Short Stories
Define at least three characteristics of American Romantic fiction, providing examples from at least four of Hawthorne’s short stories.

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