AP ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND COMPOSITION
Fourth Quarter
TECHNOLOGY AND POLITICS

UNIT OF STUDY

UNIT OBJECTIVES

Language of Composition

CHAPTERS

OTHER SOURCES

MEDIA

Thematic Study of Technology and Politics

A. Science and Technology

1.       The internet

2.       Relationship between economics, morality, and technology

3. Technology and politics

 

B. Politics-Imperialism

1. Kincaid Essay

2. Orwell Essay

 

 

 

 

 

1.    Recognize, analyze, and utilize satire as a rhetorical tool

2.  Compare the arguments made by two dystopian novels in a research paper utilizing at least three secondary sources.

3. Compare and analyze multiple authors’ investigations of politics and technology.

4. Synthesize sources to support, challenge, or qualify an argument on the influence of television on elections.

 

CHAPTER 10

Science and Technology

How are advances in science and technology affecting the way we define our humanity?

  

CHAPTER 13

Politics

What is the nature of the relationship between the citizen and the state?

ADDITIONAL LITERATURE 

Cat’s Cradle         

Leaving Microsoft to Change the World

 

 

 

Central Essay Loren Eiseley, The Bird and the Machine

Classic Essay Thomas Henry Huxley, The Method of Scientific Investigation

Jacob Bronowski, The Reach of Imagination

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, The Future of Happiness

Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate

Steven Pinker on Writing

Ursula Franklin, Silence and the Notion of the Commons

Sven Birkerts, Into the Electronic Millennium

Elizabeth Royte, Transsexual Frogs

Edgar Allan Poe, Sonnet – to Science (poetry)

Walt Whitman, When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer (poetry)

Brian Aldiss, Supertoys Last All Summer (fiction)

Visual Text Carl Sagan, The Cosmic Calendar (tables)

Visual Text Gahan Wilson, Food Fight (cartoon)

Conversation Focus on The Ethics of Applied Genetics

Lewis Thomas, On Cloning a Human Being

Philip M. Boffey, Fearing the Worst Should Anyone Produce a Cloned Baby

David Ewing Duncan, DNA as Destiny

Rick Weiss, Pet Clones Spur Call for Limits

Marilynn Marchione and Lindsey Tanner, More Couples Screening Embryos for Gender


Central Essay Rachel Carson, from Silent Spring

Classic Essay Ralph Waldo Emerson, from Nature

Terry Tempest Williams, The Clan of One-Breasted Women

Chief Seattle, Message to President Franklin Pierce

Wendell Berry, An Entrance to the Woods

Wangari Muta Maathai, 2004 Nobel Peace Prize Speech

Joyce Carol Oates, Against Nature

William Wordsworth, The Tables Turned (poetry)

Visual Text Asher B. Durand, Kindred Spirits (painting)

Visual Text Royal Dutch Shell, Cloud the Issue or Clear the Air (advertisement)

Conversation Focus on Climate Change

Bill McKibben, It’s Easy Being Green

Richard Conniff, from Counting Carbons (includes visual)

E.O. Wilson, from The Future of Life

Daniel Glick, GeoSigns: The Big Thaw

Central Essay Jamaica Kincaid, On Seeing England for the First Time

Classic Essay Jonathan Swift, A Modest Proposal

Chris Hedges, from The Destruction of Culture

Oliver Goldsmith, National Prejudices

Virginia Woolf, Thoughts on Peace during an Air Raid

Henry David Thoreau, On the Duty of Civil Disobedience

Wole Soyinka, Every Dictator’s Nightmare

Tim O’Brien, On the Rainy River (fiction)

Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Conversation with an American Writer (poetry)

Visual Text Pablo Picasso, Guernica (painting)

Visual Text The New Yorker, March 17, 2003 (cover)

Visual Text Harper’s, April, 2003 (cover)

Conversation Focus on the politics of imperialism

George Orwell, Shooting an Elephant

Chinua Achebe, The Empire Fights Back

National Park Service, Christiansted: Official Map and Guide (travel brochure)

Eavan Boland, In Which the Ancient History I Learn Is Not My Own (poetry)

Bombay Furniture Co., What Part of You Lives in Bombay? (advertisement)

 

Orwell Rolls in his Grave

Vonnegut Documentary