Yearlong C ourses

English Nine: Literary Foundations I introduces students to the pleasures and hard work of reading imaginative literature and also to the cultural and literary heritage that stems from classical mythology. Students become active readers and develop skills for textual analysis, studying the archetypal stories in classic works and the experiences of growing up in more contemporary writing. Students acquire an understanding of the major genres and literary devices which authors use to craft their imaginative visions. Primary texts include The Odyssey, Oedipus the King, Macbeth, Sound and Sense, Coming of Age in America : A Multicultural Anthology, and Bless Me, Ultima. This course enables students to experience writing as a process as they experiment with journal writing, autobiography, imaginative stories, and free responses as well as formal essays. This course also spends considerable time with the basic components of grammar and syntax, vocabulary building, and test-taking strategies.  At the end of the year, students assemble a personal portfolio of their best writing. [Full year. One credit.]

English Ten: Literary Foundations II enhances and expands reading and writing skills, moving toward more complex texts and a greater emphasis on textual analysis. Students resume an intensive study of literary genres and critical terminology, exploring 20th-century works from varied cultures and sharpening their interpretive recognitions by studying great foundation books. Major texts of this course, The Catcher in the Rye , The Bible, Antigone, Henry IV, Part I, and Their Eyes Were Watching God, help students continue to develop knowledge of forms, metaphors, and themes of traditional Western literature. Additional texts include Sound and Sense as well as selected plays, stories, and poems. This course also continues to stress all the stages of composition. Students study grammar and vocabulary, write short personal pieces and formal analytical essays, and complete the Sophomore Narrative, a lengthy personal and imaginative work. [Full year. One credit.]

English Eleven: American Literature provides an opportunity to read, discuss and write about American literature in the context of this nation’s changing society and history, focusing on personal struggles for self-realization and complex quests for national identity. Also, Shakespeare’s Hamlet is studied for the complexity of the psychological, familial, and dramatic aspects that it presents and for the ways the play anticipates major themes found in 19th- and 20th-century American literature. The core readings include novels, plays, and poetry by such authors as Hawthorne, Emerson, Thoreau, Twain, Dickinson, Frost, Eliot, Fitzgerald, Stevens, and Morrison. The principal texts are The Norton Anthology: American Literature, The Awakening, Winesburg , Ohio , The Great Gatsby, and Beloved. Throughout the year students refine their critical writing in preparation for the Junior Writing Exam which requires them to demonstrate their interpretive and stylistic skills by producing a timed, fully developed essay analyzing a short story. [Full year. One credit.]

AP Literature and Composition offers students the opportunity to experience the power and richness of great literature. Designed to cultivate the knowledge needed for advanced literary analysis, this course refines students’ understanding of the forms, styles, motifs, and themes which distinguish some of the most challenging literature in the Western tradition. Students reflect upon diverse expressions of recurring themes: the individual potential for self-realization or self-degradation, for sublimity or depravity; the nature of knowledge and love; and the value of social institutions and orthodox beliefs. Students consider how the dynamics of consciousness — meaning its revelations, delusions, reveries and anxieties — become the inclusive subject of much 19th- and 20th-century writing. In particular, this course examines how the imagination is the epistemological faculty that allows human beings to know and negotiate personal experience. Novels and plays forming the core of this course include Othello, King Lear, Pride and Prejudice, Frankenstein, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Waiting for Godot, Lolita, and The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Students also read selected poems from the Elizabethan period to the 20th century. Students respond to these readings with personal, creative, and analytical writing. Throughout the year, students also work on strategies for writing AP examination essays, part of a test all students take in the spring. 

Journalism teaches the requisite skills for newspaper reporting and production, and addresses such topics as news-writing styles, journalism ethics, and the scope of the First Amendment. Using the school’s desktop publishing system, students produce a monthly student newspaper and are responsible for all aspects of its creation — news, editorial and sports writing, headline and page composition, layout, story and photo editing — and distribution. [Full year. One credit.]

English Electives

NOTE: English elective courses are designed for seniors and extremely able juniors. The English Department encourages all interested juniors (current sophomores) to apply by obtaining a form from their current English teacher. For a junior, an elective would be a course in addition to the required English 11. A junior’s candidacy would be assessed according to the following criteria: his or her demonstration of the intellectual curiosity, the interpretive and expressive abilities, the imaginative thinking, and the work ethic to handle the demands of an elective course. Preference in course enrollment will be given to seniors.

Fall Electives

Contemporary Poetry several landmark poems by Eliot, Frost, Yeats and others which introduce certain fundamental trends in modern poetry concern us initially.  Armed with a better understanding of these trends, we undertake a survey of the important poets of this century, including Lowell, Roethke, Bishop, Nemerov, Levertov, Ginsberg, Swenson, Plath, Hayden, Sexton, and others. The great range of authors, styles, and themes allows us to form a more complete and coherent picture of contemporary poetry and the social milieu that informs it.  Students analyze and write about poems not only for theme, symbol, and the technical matters of meter, diction, and rhetorical devices, but also for elements of the poet’s craft, for an understanding of how the poems might have been created. This understanding becomes the inspiration for students to compose their own original poems. Classes often combine a discussion of assigned reading with brainstorming for original poems. The last two cycles of the course are taught completely by students who lead discussion on poems they have chosen and assigned to the class.  A portfolio of at least 10 original poems and several critical essays serves as a culmination of the semester’s effort. Students must also give a public reading of their work to the school community. [Half year. Half credit.]

Images of Race in American Literature, Art, and Film
Historian Shane White writes that "there is little doubt that 'race' is the American issue, the one that saturates the nation's past and continues to bedevil its present."  This elective examines the always complex, always significant ways in which images of race in American literature, art,  and film have been used to create stereotypes, to reinforce existing cultural attitudes, and to challenge our conscious and unconscious biases.  We will read excerpts from the literature of settlement, colonization, and independence (John Smith, Cotton Mather, Thomas Jefferson, Phyllis Wheatley), two immensely popular nineteenth-century novels (The Last of the Mohicans and Uncle Tom’s Cabin), and two candidates for “The Great American Novel” (The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Invisible Man).  We will study American art, particularly works depicting westward expansion and contact with Native Americans, and we will watch several films that enlist the issues of race and ethnicity in their commentary on the larger purpose of America (“Pocahontas,” “Birth of a Nation,” “Red River,” “Blazing Saddles,” “Song of the South”). We will constantly be attempting to connect our study of the American past with equivalent images or “texts” in modern culture – television shows, advertising images, political stances.  Students will be expected to write several interpretive and creative essays; the final project will be an independent analysis of the subtle and complex messages about race encoded in a modern film, television show, book, or other work of art. [Half year. Half credit.]

Love and Friendship in Literature and Philosophy
Students will read a variety of literary and philosophical texts that explore the concepts and practices of love, courtship, romance, friendship, recognition (in the philosophical sense of 'recognizing the other'), loyalty, and honor.  The texts will offer complementary and contradictory presentations of what it means to love and befriend another in ancient and modern times.  One of the key concerns of our discussions will be areas where thinkers disagree.  The course will juxtapose authors' works in a manner that encourages dialectical engagement.  In order to pursue our inquiries rigorously, students will write several analytical essays; moreover, for a final project, a philosophical dialogue, treatise, or short story exploring the themes of love and friendship will be required.  Texts will include Plato's Crito, Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics (excerpts), Shakespeare's “ Antony and Cleopatra,” Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility, Grace Paley's Wants, and if time permits, the film version of Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men. [Half year. Half credit.]

Literature and the Quest for the Self
Have you ever felt suffocated by your surroundings or stunned by the undeniable incongruity between your thoughts and the world around you? This course examines literary heroes who struggle for self-realization or self-determination in a world that requires their cooperation and conformity to social and familial expectations. Texts will span from the entrenched desperation of Dostoyevsky’s Notes From Underground to Sedaris’s hilariously self-deprecating Naked.  We will meet high school and college-aged protagonists in McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big >City and Krakauer’s Into the Wild and examine, finally, Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha and Cervante’s Don Quixote. Students will meet characters that choose to escape rather than sacrifice the life of the self and characters that turn toward family or love to help define and solidify their identity. We will consider characters who realize their potential to create a “self” and thereby embrace “truth.” Various forms of media will be explored and several genres of literature examined. Students will write critical essays as well as memoirs and creative pieces about their own lives. [Half year. Half credit.]

Mythology
In this class we examine some of the major myths of the Western World not only for their impact on the belief systems of the countries and epochs in which they were embraced but also for their influence on modern thought as reflected in various literary works of the European/American tradition. Among other things, we study the creation stories and associated legends of the Greco-Roman and the Norse worlds, although we will concentrate on the latter as the Freshman curriculum emphasizes the former and most students should already be aware of our Mediterranean heritage. We peruse modern versions or retellings of these stories in addition to those original works which, while they find their inspiration in what has moved humanity in the past, have provided a vibrant and vital mythology, or perhaps a number of mythologies, for our own age—the underpinnings for an operational philosophy in the here and now. We write a variety of compositions, including analytic essays and some pieces of a more original and creative nature. Certain assessment exercises (tests and quizzes) will take place in due course. There will be a final project or examination. Texts include Hamilton ’s Mythology, Crossley-Holland’s Norse Myths, Beowulf, and Tolkien’s The Fellowship of the Ring. [Half year. Half credit.]

Spring Electives

Detective Fiction 
Popular literature can be viewed as a mirror held up to society, one which supplies deeper understanding of the values and goals of modern men and women. In this course we will examine representative works of some of the world’s greatest writers of mystery for what we can learn about ourselves, especially regarding survival in a world often violent and many times confusing and/or disturbing. We will focus particularly on the person of the detective, a combination of natural and social scientist, and the skills he/she develops and applies to contribute to the eradication of crime, the amelioration of social ills, and the establishment of order where chaos once prevailed or, at least, threatened. We will read short stories and novels by such authors as Poe, Conan Doyle, Christie, Hammett, Stout, Parker, Barr, and James. Some tests will be required, but the analytical essay will predominate, with a culminating project of a creative nature: an original short story in the mystery genre. [Half year. Half credit.]

Philosophical Questions, Literary Answers?
In the interest of reading for life, i.e., in the spirit of an inquiry that could potentially alter one's existence, students will pursue philosophical questions as they arise in literary works. 'Simple' questions such as "what is happiness?"; "what is a purposeful life?"; "what is freedom?"; or "what is a good regime?", will be raised and examined.  Our aim will be to actually answer these questions to the extent that that is possible; however, initially we will investigate how our authors have attempted to raise, complicate, answer, and defy answering them. Debates and heated discussions should be at the center of the course experience.  Students will more than likely disagree as much as our writers do. In addition to serious participation and regular journal writing, students will be required to write several analytical essays and give a final seminar-style presentation at the end of the course. Texts will include Plato's Euthyphron and Ion, Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, Sartre's No Exit, Cunningham's The Hours, and James's Wings of a Dove. [Half year. Half credit.]

In Shakespeare and the Play of the Self we will carefully study four major plays by William Shakespeare: “King Lear,” “Macbeth,” “Richard III,” and “Henry IV, Part 1.” The course will focus on characters in each play who, willingly or unwillingly, come to see themselves as dramatic actors and the core of their world as a stage.  We will explore the different reactions of key characters to this realization and ask what these characters and their reactions can teach us about what it means to be, to know and to live well. What effects does it have upon one’s ethical character when one comes to understand one’s self as a dramatic character?  Is Macbeth correct that if the core of being is a stage, then human life is essentially nihilistic? Does Prince Hal’s awareness of his powers to direct the drama around him to great effect lead him to a life of real virtue?  If the world is essentially understood as an unfolding drama, who or what is the author, director, and audience?  Students will be required to engage in close readings of the text and write four significant analytic essays as well as a creative final project. [Half year. Half credit.]

Society and Morality in Popular Children’s Literature reexamines some of the most popular and enduring works of literature and film aimed partially or primarily at children: fairy tales, Disney movies, Alice in Wonderland, The Hobbit, The Wizard of Oz, Star Wars, and the Harry Potter series.  We will investigate the images, values, behaviors, and beliefs that these works promote and/or discourage and that register particularly powerfully with a young audience, including (but not limited to) issues of historical context, morality, culture, gender, and race.  We will supplement our primary readings and viewings with a healthy dose of psychological and cultural criticism.  Students will write several analytical essays, produce a film treatment of an as yet unadapted fairy tale (complete with adorable animal sidekicks and catchy songs), and, as a final project, produce an original children’s short story or the first chapter of a novel for children. [Half year. Half credit.]

Writing Short Fiction  Students in this course read not so much as critics looking for themes, symbols, and character development, but more as apprentice writers searching for elements of craft and structure, searching for the most fundamental yet most elusive components of the author’s creative effort. The discovery of these components yields a gold mine of instructional material to be used by students to generate original stories. Classes combine careful discussion of assigned readings with brainstorming and writing exercises. Students present new fiction to the class each cycle for critique, and they write short critical responses to the readings regularly. Students read a great variety of recent and not-so-recent authors, including Anderson, Atwood, Babel, Barth, Carver, Cheever, Faulkner, Gogol, Welty, Porter, and others to gain a better appreciation for the amazing wealth to be found in the heritage of our short fiction, and to learn from as many masters as possible. The course culminates with a public reading for the school community and a portfolio of original fiction. [Half year. Half credit.]