AP® English Literature and Composition 2024 Free-Response Questions PDF

**Part Two Essays 60%** **Due: Friday, January 10, Before Noon** **AP® English Literature and Composition 2024 Free-Response Questions** **Question Two** **(Suggested time---40 minutes. This question counts as one-third of the total essay section score.)** **The following excerpt is from Jane U...

**Part Two Essays 60%** **Due: Friday, January 10, Before Noon** **AP® English Literature and Composition 2024 Free-Response Questions** **Question Two** **(Suggested time---40 minutes. This question counts as one-third of the total essay section score.)** **The following excerpt is from Jane Urquhart's novel *The Night Stages*, published in 2015. In this passage, an artist named Kenneth is finishing a mural for a new airline terminal using the long-established medium of egg tempera, a paint made of egg yolk, pigment, and water. He thinks about the influences on his work and how his mural may be received. Read the passage carefully. Then, in a well-written essay, analyze how Urquhart uses literary elements and techniques to convey Kenneth's complex perspective as he completes his mural.** **In your response you should do the following:** ** Respond to the prompt with a thesis that presents a defensible interpretation.** ** Select and use evidence to support your line of reasoning.** ** Explain how the evidence supports your line of reasoning.** ** Use appropriate grammar and punctuation in communicating your argument.** **It had taken him three months to complete the thirty-six four-by-six-foot panels that would join** **together, like a huge puzzle, to form the immense mural. The last thing he painted, on the final morning, was a third apple---airborne---tossed by a child juggler. The apples were like tiny planets, and the child, otherwise small and unexceptional, gained power through his manipulation of them. Kenneth had to break one last egg to paint this, and as he passed it from hand to hand, letting the white drain to the floor, and allowing the clean yolk to settle in his palm, he** **looked at this boy---his serene, confident expression, the three apples aloft, the face calm with the** **knowledge that they would be kept in the air indefinitely. While Kenneth mixed the yolk with the** **warm shades of ground pigment, he remembered the critic telling him to keep things on the picture plane flat, two-dimensional, and he smiled as the apple became spherical under his brush. When he could imagine the weight of it in his hand, he knew he was finished. Then he began to toss brushes, palettes, and pigments down to the floor below. There was a drill shrieking somewhere in the building. The clatter his tools made on landing must have been drowned out by its noise. Kenneth figured he had broken five thousand eggs, more or less, in the making of the mural, and each time he broke the shell, he thought of the critic's head, the smooth baldness of the top of it. Humpty-Dumpty,1 he thought, this wall, and the wall of cultural fashion that could keep you out, for a while, until the great fall. By now he knew that fashion always fell, it failed and fell. He was happy to be free of it. And as he used the shell to separate the white from the yolk, he thought about Harding,2 a man who had never made use of egg tempera. He wondered what had become of him. And the woman Harding had loved, whether she had ever painted again, and whether or not he himself would ever come across a painting by Gentleman. The girl in Germany, the couple in Italy, floated by, a sense of them here and there in the mural. These narratives fought for space in his mind. But the mural itself, he knew, was divorced from narrative. As it should be, he whispered to himself, as it should be. *Flight and Its Allegories*.** **Once he was on the ground, he rifled through a canvas sack until he found the camera he was looking for, a Brownie Starflex, with six exposures still available. He shot the mural from left to right. Then he walked across the full length of the half-tiled floor. This was the last exposure and it would make the mural look incredibly small, like a two-inch-long piece of ribbon with an unreadable pattern on it. But he wanted to show its proportions to a friend and, in any case, the more professional pictures would be taken later, after he was gone, when the mural had begun to live its own independent life in the presence of an audience. For months now there had been noise, the workmen's power tools and, in the odd moments when those were silent, the roar of the planes arriving and departing at the old, soon-to-be abandoned terminal. He had seen the passengers, through the plate glass of the windows, rivers of them, pouring down the steps that were pushed up to airliners, then flowing darkly across the tarmac. What would they make of *Flight and Its Allegories*? Would they be struck by it? Or would they simply pass it by, preoccupied by the mysteries of their individual lives as they walked forward or waited in the lounge? He was not unaware that public art could be---and often was---ignored. Still, what pleasure he had taken in the making of it.** 1 Humpty-Dumpty is a nursery-rhyme character, typically depicted as an egg. He falls from a wall, breaks, and cannot be put together again. 2 Kenneth's former art teacher, who cautioned Kenneth against appropriating the ideas, styles, and techniques of other artists 3 Alexander Gentleman, an obscure artist that Harding once knew; another artist later copied his style and gained fame as a result 4 "The girl in Germany" and "the couple in Italy" are people Kenneth met while backpacking through Europe. 5 Allegories are works of literature or art that express moral or political messages, often through the use of symbols. From THE NIGHT STAGES by Jane Urquhart. Copyright © 2015 by Jane Urquhart. **AP® English Literature and Composition 2024 Free-Response Questions** **Question One** **Explain the poem.** **A\] Its theme,** **B\] Its genre** **C\] Its location** **D\] and nuances.** In Flanders fields. \| Pritzker Military Museum & Library \| Chicago \| Pritzker Military Museum & Library \| Chicago