English and World Literature

List of 3 items.

• English 9: Fate and Folly

  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.

• English 10: Agency and Constraint in American Literature

  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.

• Grades 11-12: Elective Offerings

  African Literature

  Perhaps no other continent has produced such a rich body of literature, one that reflects its long, complex history as well as its ongoing struggles and conflict. We will examine chiefly writers and work from Nigeria, Kenya, Uganda, and the region known as "the Horn of Africa," studying a range of texts in various genres, including fiction, poetry, music, prose, and film. Attending to the complexities of gender and identity formation, we will explore such topics as the conflict between tradition and modernity, post-independence disillusionment, and the negotiation of African identities in a global setting. Students will write analytical essays in response to the reading. At the end of the course, students will craft and deliver an oral presentation. Frequent, in-class writing exercises will shape our daily discussions of the literature.

  
  

  Rebels and Fighters: Literature of the Jewish Experience

  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.

  
  

  Literatures of Indigenous Peoples: Historical Continuity and Decolonization

  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).

  
  

  Studies in Drama

  Studies in Drama will include a range of plays from all over the world. Classic tragedies and comedies from ancient Greece will teach us the abiding structures of the theater; more contemporary texts written by a geographically varied range of voices will teach us the inventive uses of those structures. We will also analyze filmed and, when possible, live productions of what we have read. Students will write in a variety of forms: essays, director’s notes to actors, and an imitative one act or scene of their own. In-class acting and short in-class writing will inform our daily discussions of the literature. 

  
  

  Freedom Writers: Black American Non-Fiction of the 19th, 20th, and 21st Centuries

  This course will begin with an examination of 19th century writers Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs, whose determination to live free or die changed the history of the nation. From there, we will explore the writing of three towering 20th century Black intellectuals: W.E.B. Du Bois, James Baldwin, and Audre Lorde. Finally, we will read the works of a number of contemporary Black writers whose prose responds to the past and imagines the future of Black lives in America. We will discuss the ways in which each writer speaks with power and acuity to their turbulent times and to our own. Their courageous visions, subtle arguments, and rich formulations are models for the power of language to effect meaningful change. Contemporary writers might include Claudia Rankine, Imani Perry, Kiese Laymon, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah, among others.

  
  

  Homer to Morrison: Epic Storytelling

  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.

  
  

  Studies in Poetry:  Contemporary Poetry and Poem Writing

  In Studies in Poetry, students learn to see, think, and feel in poetry. Students work on expanding their negative capability as they build an understanding of how poems speak. Types of poems we discuss, practice and write about include: identity, ekphrastic, shape, erasure, political, tritina, sestina, villanelle, pantoum, ars poetica, kasen renga, zuihitsu, odes, and poems which feature diverse linguistic worlds. Students themselves find additional poems we look at together. Students advance, edit and revise drafts of their analytical and poetic writings and video productions with the help of written feedback and one-on-one personal consultations. The class takes a field trip to Poets House or to the Dodge Poetry Festival and hosts the US Poetry Reading. Students end the course with a substantial personal series of linked poetry they can be proud of, and they send some of their poems out into the world.

  
  

  Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

  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.

  
  

  All in a Day’s Work

  Is work simply a means to an end or can it be a transcendent journey? In this course we will explore a variety of workplaces in order to see how work can define a life. We will read about doctors and nurses who facilitate a life giving heart transplant in the French novel The Heart, by Mayis de Kerangel. In Annie Baker’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play The Flick, we will follow the lives of three young American movie ushers as they navigate a world of dull routine and low pay while grappling with their longing for human connection. We will discover what it means when the family business is a funeral home in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home, a masterful graphic novel that explores not only work, but also Bechdel’s father’s struggle with his sexuality. We will also read writers who imagine otherworldly kinds of professions, including the Nobel prize-winning author Kazuo Ishiguro. His novel, Never Let Me Go, tells the unnerving, dystopian story of a group of young people who are cloned in order to extend the lives of others.

  
  

  Crossing Borders: Literature of Protest and Activism

  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 jihadists; 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.

  
  

  Caribbean Literature: Place, Inheritance, Loss, and Resistance 

  The Caribbean is the site of complex, overlapping diasporas: African, Asian, and European. Its multiplicity of races, languages and cultures has shaped the region's literature. This course will ask questions such as: How does the Caribbean acknowledge its past and present? 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 and dance created by Caribbean artists. Authors studied may include Danticat, Kincaid, Cliff, Walcott, Brathwaite and others.

  
  

  Latin American Literature

  This class, which features 20th-century Latin American novels, poems, and short stories, asks students to consider the multiple ways magical realism reflects and, simultaneously, distorts the cultural, social, and historical realities of Latin American writers. Students will wrestle with the formal eccentricities of Latin American narratives, whose fragmentary, non-linear structures complement these authors’ re-envisioning of what is “real” or “magical.” Authors may include Juan Rulfo, Gabriel García Márquez, Mario Vargas Llosa, Machado de Assis, Clarice Lispector, Jorge Luis Borges, Silvina Ocampo, and Samanta Schweblin. 

  
  

  East Asian Literature

  In this course, students will read a myriad of East Asian texts in relation to Buddhist, Daoist, and Confucian ideas. Some texts will be traditional (Journey to the West and Daodejing), while others will be contemporary (Convenience Store Woman and The Vegetarian or We Do Not Part) so that students consider the relationship between tradition and modernity in East Asian countries. By the course’s end, students will have encountered mind-bending perspectives about the nature and purpose of existence and will come to understand how these perspectives shape East Asian culture today.

  
  

  Eco-Literature

  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.

  
  

  Shakespeare

  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.

  
  

  Studies in the Novel

  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.

  
  

  Women and Fiction

  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." 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 detective story, and others. What work do these writers do as they adopt and adapt the genres usually associated with male writers telling stories about male protagonists? What is at stake when women writers reimagine these fictional worlds and place female characters at their center?

  
  

  Creative Writing

  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.

  
  

  Film Studies

  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.