AP Lit Final Texts

Hedda Gabler. Ibsen's great social drama of a caged woman in the late nineteenth century explores her tormented desire for escape and her yearning for individual and spiritual freedom.

Hairy Ape. The play tells the story of a brutish, unthinking laborer known as Yank, as he searches for a sense of belonging in a world controlled by the rich. At first Yank feels secure as he stokes the engines of an oceanliner, and is highly confident in his physical power over the ship's engines. However, when the weak but rich daughter of an industrialist in the steel business refers to him as a "filthy beast," Yank undergoes a crisis of identity.
Plays by Bernard Shaw

The Adding Machine - Elmer L. Rice. This constantly interesting play shows in outline the life history and, in its later scenes, the death history of Mr. Zero, a cog in the vast machine of modern business.

Our Town - Thornton Wilder. Described by Edward Albee as “…the greatest American play ever written,” the story follows the small town of Grover’s Corners through three acts: “Daily Life,” “Love and Marriage,” and “Death and Eternity.” Narrated by a stage manager and performed with minimal props and sets, audiences follow the Webb and Gibbs families as their children fall in love, marry, and eventually—in one of the most famous scenes in American theatre—die.

Streetcar Named Desire - T. Williams. Widely considered a landmark play, A Streetcar Named Desire deals with a culture clash between two iconic characters, Blanche DuBois, a relic of the Old South,[5] and Stanley Kowalski,[6] a rising member of the industrial, urban working class. The play presents Blanche DuBois, a fading but still-attractive Southern belle whose pretensions to virtue and culture only thinly mask alcoholism and delusions of grandeur. Her poise is an illusion she presents to shield others (but most of all, herself) from her reality, and an attempt to make herself still attractive to new male suitors.

Glass Menagerie – Tennessee Williams. The Glass Menagerie is a memory play, and its action is drawn from the memories of the narrator, Tom Wingfield. Tom is a character in the play, which is set in St. Louis in 1937. He is an aspiring poet who toils in a shoe warehouse to support his mother, Amanda, and sister, Laura. Mr. Wingfield, Tom and Laura’s father, ran off years ago and, except for one postcard, has not been heard from since.

Death of a Salesman – A. Miller. Death of a Salesman made both Arthur Miller and the character Willy Loman household names. The play endeavors to raise a counterexample to Aristotle's characterization of tragedy as the downfall of a great man: though Loman certainly has Hamartia, a tragic flaw or error, his downfall is that of an ordinary man (a "low man"). Like Sophocles' Oedipus in Oedipus the King, Loman's flaw comes down to a lack of self-knowledge; unlike Oedipus, Loman's downfall threatens not the city but only a single household.

Oresteia Trilogy (only need to read one play)
Desire under the Elms – O’Neill. A fiercely energetic drama of Oedipal lust and yearning involving a rebellious farm boy, his tyrannical father, and the father's slatternly new wife.
Strange Interlude – O’Neill. O'Neill forges a theatrical vehicle for the discoveries of modern psychology, giving outward form to his characters' inexpressible thoughts and feelings.
Mourning Becomes Electra – O’Neill. The Nobel and Pulitzer Prize-winning dramatist transplants the themes of Aeschylus's ORESTEIA into Civil War-era New England.

Guest Blogger: Lauren W.

In class we have just finished reading Oedipus Rex, the story of a man whose prophecy from the oracles as a child was that he would kill his father and marry his mother. The boy was chained on the mountain and rescued be a sheep herder who gave the child to a couple who raised him as their own. Oedipus tries the best that he can to avoid making the prophecy come true. I think that the more you try to avoid your fate, the faster it comes after you. I don't blame Oedipus for what happens in the story, because for all he knew his parents were the Corinthians and he did not want to hurt them which is why he left. Although he had good reason to leave, it may have been possible for him to avoid the prophecy if he would have not left, for he may not have ever come into contact with his real parents.
Throughout everything that happens, I respect Oedipus. He says that the man who is responsible for Laius' murder will be exiled. When Oedipus starts to connect the dots about the murder, instead of hiding from the truth and blaming it on somebody else Oedipus continues to investigate his involvement in the murder. When the truth is out not only does Oedipus gouge out his eyes, he orders to be sent to exile and begs for his children/siblings to be taken care of and not be punished for the situation that he and his mother put them in. Oedipus proves to be a man of his words and is truly sorry for all of the trouble he has caused and he really cannot be blamed for marrying his mother because he honestly had no idea, nobody had any idea who he was.

Guest Blogger: Jessica S.

So in class we have just finished the play Hamlet by William Shakespeare. Throughout the work, Shakespeare touches on many different themes that can further deepen the meaning of the play. One of the themes explored is death. Hamlet ponders the act of killing himself for the entire play and eventually takes action on his plan at the end of the play, taking his life and the life of the king/ his uncle as well as the life of Polonius; the father of his girlfriend.
Shakespeare also incorporates the theme of insanity. In the begging of the play Hamlet tells his friend Horatio that he may act strangely. He was not kidding. By the end of the play Hamlet has almost everyone convinced that he has truly lost his mind. He speaks nonsense and eventually ends up killing two people by the end of the novel. Although Hamlet planned on only acting crazy, I believe that by the end of the novel he had truly lost his mind but Horatio did not realize it because he still believed he was acting.
The third motif explored in Hamlet is that of revenge. The ghost tells Hamlet that he needs to avenge him. Hamlet wholeheartly agrees, thus showing his respect for his dead father. Although when Hamlet does have the perfect opportunity he chooses not to kill his uncle because he was praying and Hamlet did not want him to go to heaven because he had confessed his sins. This act also adds suspense to the play because the audience later finds out that Claudius finds that he cannot pray, so Hamlet could of killed him, thus saving himself ALOT of trouble in the final scenes of the play