English 9 uses fruitful pairings of literary texts to explore driving questions about the human experience: the need for a suitable home; the desire to create; the desire for power; the experience of oppression; and, throughout, the redemptive power of love. Our units of study include poetry and the conventions of literary analysis; our texts include When the Emperor Was Divine, Genesis, Frankenstein, Macbeth, Things Fall Apart, and Purple Hibiscus. Through frequent and varied writing assignments, students develop their skills as critical thinkers, persuasive speakers, and powerful writers. Throughout the year, the work in English 9 builds on two, interrelated pursuits: the importance of careful, logical analysis of rich texts and the artful, controlled expression of precise insights.

In English 10, the literature helps students to understand the America we have inherited from previous generations. These works also inspire students to dream, articulate, and enact the America that they seek to create through their active, informed, and empowered citizenship. Central texts include: “Self-Reliance,” The Scarlet Letter, The Great Gatsby, and Beloved. Through personal and analytical writing, students explore pressing questions about American citizenship and identity. Students sharpen their ability to read deeply and to write with great precision as well as to develop their individual voices.

Perhaps no other continent has produced such a rich and heterogeneous body of literature, one that reflects its long history as well as its ongoing struggles and conflicts. Studying a range of texts in various genres, including the short story, the novel, poetry, song lyrics, and film, students learn about Nigeria and Ghana, and the region known as the Greater Horn of Africa (Somalia, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Djibouti, South Sudan, Sudan, Uganda and Kenya). While attending to the complexities of gender and identity formation, students will explore such topics as the colonial encounter, the conflict between tradition and modernity, post-independence disillusionment, post-colonial legacies, and the negotiation of African identities in a global setting. Authors studied include Chinua Achebe, Ngugi wa' Thiongo, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Doreen Baingana, Ayobami Adebayo, E.C. Osondu, Wole Soyinka, Ama Ata Aidoo, Mohammed Naseehu Ali, Christopher Okigbo, Warsan Shire, and Helon Habila.

This course considers the nature of citizenship and justice. What happens when a citizen of a country does not share the ideals of those with whom that citizen lives? What happens when a poor person lives amongst the rich and sees how democracy fails those at the bottom? What happens if an undocumented immigrant works hard to care for a family but is unwelcome by those in charge? Students will spend time in Algeria, England, Pakistan, India and the United States. Readings will include: Albert Camus’s sharp critique of colonialism, The Stranger; Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire, a gripping account of a Muslim man exploited by ISIS jihaddists; Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger, a bracing satire of corrupt democracy in India; and Karla Conejo Villavicencio's The Undocumented Americans, a moving portrait of immigrants in The United States.

The Carribean is the site of complex, overlapping diasporas: African, Asian, and European. Its multiplicity of races, languages, and cultures have shaped the region's literature. This course will ask questions such as: How does the Caribbean acknowledge its past and present selves? How are race, gender, and community constructed in this multicultural and multilingual setting? What traditions, values, and norms have Caribbean writers inherited from their predecessors? What new forms, languages, and ways of being emerged and continue to emerge in this transnational space? The course will include literature in several genres (poetry, short fiction, essays, and novels), and students will be exposed to many styles of music, film, and dance created by Caribbean artists. Authors studied may include Danticat, Kincaid, Cliff, Walcott, Dennis-Benn and Naipaul.

This course explores historical events that shed light on the troubling nature of anti-semitism and those that openly rebelled and fought against that prejudice. In Bernard Malmud’s novel The Fixer, we encounter the fictional retelling of the story of Mendel Bellis, a Russian Jew who is falsely accused of murdering a Christian boy in 1911. We then confront the Holocaust, the cataclysmic result of anti-semitism through the study of Art Spiegelman's graphic memoir, Maus, that tells the story of how his parents survived the Holocaust. Throughout the course we will explore the nature of Jewish identity and how it intersects or comes in conflict with religious and political beliefs. The plays The God of Vengeance by Sholem Asch and The Labor of Life by Hanoch Levin, essays by Adrienne Rich and Natalia Ginzburg, and the diary by Hungarian / Israeli author Hannah Sennesh round out the reading for this course.

Reading powerful works of literature for their commentaries on environmental thought and practice, we will consider how place, time, and the human brain can work together to produce effective new ideas and courses of action, so that our shared future and our legacy will be hopeful. Our course will consider the imperatives of the environmental justice and rights movements as well as the tools of persuasion and education that are emerging from not only traditional modes of discourse but also from comedy, satire, and speculative fiction. Students will work as a community of learners, attending carefully to each other’s perspectives and knowledge. Students will conduct independent research, offer written essays about our literary texts, and deliver an oral presentation.

The 20th century brought change to every country - two world wars, social movements, political upheavals, economic revolutions. China and Japan, in particular, experienced changes during the 20th century unlike any these countries had ever known in so short a period, and the writers who explore these changes, as they are happening or after the fact, created a literature that demands attention. In this course, our primary focus will be on 20th and 21st century text by such authors as Lu Xun, Yu Hua, Eileen Chang, and Yukio Mishima, Haruki Murakami, Yoko Agawa, among others.

In this course, students read the literature of peoples indigenous to the North American continent. The course begins with stories whose roots lie in the pre-contact oral tradition of these peoples. The focus then shifts to works from the last fifty years, including literature from a range of genres - novels, tales, oratory, essays, poems, songs, and films. To avoid generalizations about indigenous peoples, course materials are based on tribal identities as well as specific geographic and cultural regions. Nevertheless, common themes of traditional ecological knowledge, sovereignty, resistance to colonization, revision of stereotypes, and recovery of identity are explored. Texts may include works by N. Scott Momaday (Kiowa), Velma Wallis (Gwich’in), Leslie Marmon Silko (Laguna Pueblo), and Layli Long Soldier (Oglala Lakota).

This course will examine the writings of Nobel-prize winning novelist and screenwriter Kazuo Ishiguro, who was born in Japan and raised in England. This genre-crossing transnational writer is known for his evocative, haunting portraits of children caught between cultures and generations (The Unconsoled) and of adults stifled by duty and obligation (The Remains of the Day). He has also written science fiction about artificial intelligence (Klara and the Sun) and cloning (Never Let Me Go) along with screenplays, most recently with Bill Nighy in Living (2022). Students will write analytical essays comparing the different genres of Ishiguro’s writing and his early and late themes, along with personal commentaries and journal entries focusing on his prescient and insightful treatment of late 20th and early 20th century life. The course will include at least two films.

This course explores the many powerful literary ways in which women of color have
shaped and continue to shape Black identity and Black consciousness, from SojournerTruth to the Civil Rights movement, and beyond. We study and discuss how in writing, activism and leadership--women have generated powerful art (including film,
painting, and music), expression, voice, and change. Students read fiction, non-
Fiction (including autobiography), and poetry. Artists, activists, and writers featured in the course may include Fannie Lou Hamer, Zora Neale Hurston, Ann Petry, Alice Walker, bell hooks, Assata Shakur, Sonia Sanchez, Audre Lorde, Nikki Giovanni, Toni Morrison, Angela Davis, Maya Angelou, Claudia Rankine, Roxane Gay, and Alicia Garza.

The name “Shakespeare” encompasses a family name, powerful dramatic language, fascinating implications, a trove of scholarship, a set of values, and a long and varied history of performance. Still, about Shakespeare there is more to be said and more to be considered. In our course, we will explore two of Shakespeare’s plays (a comedy and a tragedy) and a selection of his sonnets, taking care to read deeply and to write cogently in response to our studies. One scholar, Harold Bloom, has claimed that in Shakespeare’s works, he “invented the human.” Our investigations will engage this claim: in this class we will work from the idea that works of entertainment convey essential and enduring insights into our shared experience of life’s most meaningful events: love and loss. Students will write frequently in response to their reading of Shakespeare and will perform scene presentations in class.

A long, long time ago, 18th-century English author Henry Fielding famously wrote that the novel, just then emerging, was an epic poem in prose. By reading Homer’s The Odyssey and Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon, students will be able to test that theory themselves. Beyond making a literary argument about form, this course will come to terms with the privilege traditionally associated with epic poetry, personified by the character of Odysseus. By reading Morrison’s Song of Solomon in relation to the epic on which her novel was modeled, students will go on a literary odyssey themselves, uncovering the brilliant ways that Morrison reshapes the epic tradition to tell (or sing) the story of a Black man on his own journey to find his past and identity.

In Studies in Poetry students learn to see, think, and feel in poetry. Students work on expanding their negative capability. Some types of poems studied, practiced, and written about include: identity, ekphrastic, shape, erasure, political, tritina, sestina, villanelle, pantoum, ars poetica, kasen renga, zuihitsu, and linguistic world. Students will find many of the poems that we look at in the course. Students will revise and edit, and will get feedback on paper and via personal consultation. The class will take a field trip to Poets House or to the Dodge Poetry Festival and will host the US Poetry Reading. Students will end the course with a personal series of linked poetry that they can be proud of, and they will send some of their poems out into the world.

In Studies in Drama, students read plays with their full imaginations. What happens between the lines of dialogue? Students consider the merits of various productions for these texts: Medea, A Doll's House, Mother Courage and Her Children, Ruined, Hir, Dutchman, and Bondage. Students write comparative essays, notes to the actors, and an imitative scene of their own. Which specific strategies do these playwrights employ and what is their effect on the audience? What should the play look like if it were put on today?

Storytelling, of course, is as old as the first human civilizations. For all of its popularity today, however, the novel is a fairly new literary invention. What is it about the novel that seduces its readers and keeps them in its grip? In this course we will explore the ways in which the novel has been defined and redefined over time by authors around the world. Students will learn about formal elements of the novel, such as narrative irony, free indirect discourse and focalization. By reading Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary, along with other novels that may also include Their Eyes Were Watching God and Aura by Carlos Fuentes, we will learn how the novel makes its arguments and changes our perspectives.

In October 1928, Virginia Woolf gave a pair of lectures at Newnham and Girton Colleges which were meant to address the topic "women and fiction." After first thinking that the topic would be relatively simple, Woolf found herself wondering "what the words meant." Almost a century later, this course continues the ​work of Woolf's wondering: what​ do the words "women and fiction" mean? ​How and in what ways does gender shape how stories are told? How and in what ways does gender shape the stories that get told? In this course, we read literature written by women-identified writers in genres traditionally dominated by male-identified writers: the spy novel, the fairy tale, the science fiction novel, the western, the epic, and others. What work do these writers do as they adopt and adapt the genres usually associated with male-identified writers telling stories about male protagonists? What is at stake when women-identified writers reimagine these fictional worlds and place female characters at their center? 

What does it feel like to make things up that exist only because we imagine them? How does the act of writing alter how we understand ourselves and the world? How do we establish subtleties of character, choose expressive narrative framings, build worlds, play with pacing, enjoy and employ unexpected figurative language, use and break conventions of storytelling? We will read, discuss and emulate the craft of other writers as we try our own hand at creative fiction, creative nonfiction, and more. Flow prompts and shorter writing practices earlier in the course help us warm up for the more substantial final project. You will attend a public reading and will send some of your work out into the world.

Students study how narrative films combine images, words, sounds, music, and cinematography to tell rich and powerful stories. We also read short stories that are the basis for successful films and learn how a work of literature can be used as a foundation for a screenplay. Students not only write about films, but they also have the opportunity to write screenplays and use these screenplays as a basis for their own short movies. Films studied include: a moving coming of age tale, The 400 Blows by Francois Truffaut; Del Toro's haunting critique of tyranny, Pan's Labyrinth; Deniz Gamze Erguven's Mustang, a compelling story of sisterhood threatened by male power; and Do the Right Thing, Spike Lee's gripping examination of race conflict in the United States. Stories studied include fiction written by Raymond Carver, Andre Dubus, Mary Gaitskill, Jon Raymond and Daphne du Maurier.

Lucas Mann’s essay, “To Write A Good Essay, Think and Care Deeply,” is the first piece students will read in this course. Mann’s deceptively simple instructions articulate the ethos and guiding principle for our shared work in The Essay. This class asks students to think and care deeply about not only the works of writers like Rebecca Solnit, Kiese Laymon, Virginia Woolf, Alexander Chee, John McPhee, Stanley Fish, James Baldwin, Roxanne Gay, Yiyun Li, and others, but also about their own writing and topics of their own choosing. Students will learn how to find their subjects and write about them with honesty, specificity, precision, and integrity.

How do detective and mystery stories hold together, what desires and fears drive them, and what secrets do they tell—or try to hide? We will read detective fiction, mysteries, and thrillers to understand the structure of narrative, as it moves from riddle or puzzle, to logical investigation, to denouement. We will begin by scrutinizing the first half of an anonymous mystery story to see if we can guess whodunnit. Then, we investigate the proto-detective Greek tragedy Oedipus Rex, before turning to the odd case of Edgar Allan Poe—the inventor of the genre--in “Murders in the Rue Morgue” and “The Purloined Letter.” From there, we connect the dots to Poe’s “golden age” inheritors, Arthur Conan Doyle, and G.K. Chesterton, and the hard-boiled and suspense novelists Walter Mosley and Patricia Highsmith. The trail ends at neo-noir film, either Memento or Chinatown, and a postmodern parody by Jorge Luis Borges. Students will write analytical essays about narrative and story structure; creative pieces imitating golden-age and hard boiled style; and an optional detective story of their own.

The literature in this course will follow the cycle of life – from birth to death. How do people care for one another when they are unwell and vulnerable? How do we fare when we are tested by the difficulties of motherhood, war, parental and societal conflict, sickness and the threat of death? Our reading will explore birth and motherhood in Doris Lessing’s novella, The Fifth Child, the shock of war in Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five, family conflict and the sickness of a loved one in Akhil Sharma’s Family Life and Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, and the love and wisdom that can emerge when people face terminal illness in Sigrid Nunez’s recent philosophical novel, What are You Going Through?

Well, not us! In this course, we will immerse ourselves in the writing of 20th-century celebrated novelist and essayist Virginia Woolf. Known for her radical innovations in the expression of subjectivity, Woolf reinvented the novel by heightening its ability to capture the contingent and fleeting experiences that make up life. Her writing reveals how the personal, the poetic, and the political are inevitably intertwined, and in this course students will become comfortable with the way that her prose paints human experience as a confounding, multifaceted thing. While learning about the intellectual, artistic, and political concerns and innovations that took place between the two World Wars in Europe, we will read two of Woolf’s novels (one which will certainly be To the Lighthouse) and a handful of her essays and letters.