Introduction

The Class:

The AP English Language and Composition class at Salisbury School is the honors level of our 11^th grade American Literature course.  We study the traditional texts of an American Literature class, but we also up the ante with novels like Absalom, Absalom! and Beloved, by Toni Morrison.  In preparation for the AP exam in May we also explore the essay as a genre, moving outside of the traditional American texts.  Rhetoric, syntax, diction, and figurative language are some of the terms we explore, utilizing a knowledge of those terms in our analyses of speeches and essays.  Students who successfully complete this course become candidates for the 12^th grade AP English Literature and Composition course.

The Project:

This web page on Absalom, Absalom! was the final project of two sections of AP English Language and Composition class at Salisbury School.  In lieu of a final paper on the novel, the students were assigned individual storylines from within the novel.  Working in pairs, they evaluated the individual storylines (or strands) in order to analyze how information was revealed to the reader.  Faulkner's convoluted style made this task difficult, but through our in depth study of the novel, the students were able to come up with very impressive products.

  Heralded as perhaps Faulkner's greatest novel, the narrative does provide a tremendous challenge to high school age students of any ability level.  The goal in our class was to understand the strands of the story as layer upon layer was revealed to the reader.  We also wanted to be able to understand how those individual strands affected the whole novel.  It is obvious that Thomas Sutpen's grand design is at the center of the novel, but how each strand affects and is affected by that design is what makes the novel work as magnificently as it does.

Collaborative work was the key ingredient to the successful completion of this assignment.  Because we had two sections of this class, we needed the respective pairs to eventually collaborate as a group of four.  That process was challenging but rewarding. 

  While the timeline provided here clearly lays out when events occurred, how those events are revealed and why they are revealed in the order that they are is what the respective strands should explain.  There are links from character to character and strand to strand, because all of the parts do make up the whole, which is Absalom, Absalom! in its entirety.