English Course Offerings

English Course Offerings

Yearlong Courses

English 1

For students in Form III.

What does it mean to be an active reader? What does it mean to communicate effectively and authentically? In English 1, students read a variety of genres and authors, with emphasis on American literature. Many of the texts explore the search for voice and the construction of a narrative, exploring questions about identity and agency. Through guided and independent daily reading, students hone close reading skills. They learn how to notice and interpret an author’s choices by attending closely to language, structure, and style; how to consider the questions a text raises; and how to use evidence to support claims and arguments.

Daily class centers on student-centered discussion; students learn how to contribute, build, and push their thinking in collaboration with their peers around the table. Writing assignments are frequent and primarily analytical in nature: students develop the ability to craft a written analysis of a text; they learn to explore diction, imagery, character, and meaning in their writing. Particular attention is placed on locating and analyzing relevant evidence from the text to substantiate well-articulated claims. Students work throughout the year on the important elements of clean and clear writing: paragraph structure, grammar, and punctuation. Assessments include in-class and independent essays, short paragraph responses, graded in-class discussions, and group presentations. Every student becomes a critical part of the class dialogue through frequent and thoughtful contributions.

Course texts have included:

• Kenneth Cadow, Gather
• Souvankham Thammavongsa, How to Pronounce Knife
• Julie Otsuka, When the Emperor Was Divine
• J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye
• American Primitive: Poetry by Mary Oliver
• William Shakespeare, Othello
• F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
• Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

English 2

For students in Form IV.

In this course, second-year students explore how literature from a variety of traditions illuminates and gives meaning to the human experience. In reading a diverse group of texts, students consider ways these texts present perspectives on place and culture, identity and belief. Through class discussions and writing assignments, students focus on the power of effective argument, and through the year learn how to craft their own.

Building on the habits of close textual analysis developed in English Literature I, this course examines linguistic patterns and choices an author makes in a text and introduces students to the language of argument. Students pursue questions such as:

• What does an argument look like?
• What is the difference between observation and a claim?

• What constitutes evidence?
• What makes certain arguments stronger than others?
• How do we adjudicate between positions or conflicting arguments presented in the text?
• How do we deal with ambiguity and do justice to the complexity of the text?
• Students also examine how a work of fiction, in and of itself, articulates an argument.

Discussions about argument translate directly into the teaching of writing, considered specifically as a process: in order to generate ideas and craft a logical and persuasive argument, students must commit to the process of developing, drafting, and revising their essays. Students write frequent journals and short exploratory essays and learn to develop these pieces into more polished papers of three to four pages. By the end of the year, students are expected to be able to write grammatically clean, clear, and effective prose. The culminating project of the year is an oral exhibition: students write a longer paper on Pride and Prejudice that they subsequently assess and critique in a 30-minute oral exhibition with a peer and their teacher.

Course texts have included:

• Jesmyn Ward, Salvage the Bones
• William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream
• Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice
• Short fiction and essays by Jhumpa Lahiri
• Sonnets by Spenser, Drayton, Shakespeare, Donne, Shelley, Rilke, Cummings, William Carlos Williams, Gwendolyn Brooks, Seamus Heaney, and Billy Collins.

Advanced Study English Literature 3

For students in Form V.

This course for third-year students canvasses a range of literary genres, including poetry, plays, novellas, and novels. Students continue to develop their skills of close textual analysis and build on their familiarity with the conventions of literary argument. They work on longer, more sustained and sophisticated analytical arguments in their writing assignments about literature and, in the latter half of the year, begin developing their own paper topics.

The culminating project of the year is the Junior Exhibition: students read an assigned novella on their own, devise a central question about the text that serves as their paper topic, and write a seven- to eight-page paper that they subsequently assess and critique in a 30-minute oral exhibition with their teacher. Course texts have included:

• Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried
• Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses
• Nella Larsen, Passing
• Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
• Selected poetry and personal essays

Advanced Study English Literature 4

For students in Form VI.

This course is an intensive, introduction to advanced forms of literary study. It challenges fourth-year students to become more independent, insightful readers and more forceful, artful writers with confident, critical voices. Through careful study of narrative structure, form, and style, students learn to discern and articulate authors’ methods of making meaning. In this course, all VI Formers study Toni Morrison’s Beloved as a central text, as well as one or two other texts, introducing students to the kind of focused analysis and comparative study that occurs in college literature courses.

The centerpiece of the course is the Senior Exhibition. Each student chooses a work of literature from a short list of exhibition books to study carefully. Through rereading, forming critical questions, and writing and rewriting, students develop a critical argument and work to clarify, complicate and polish the argument over the course of the project.

Although the drafting process involves frequent meetings with the instructor, the project is essentially independent and culminates in a 45-minute oral exhibition in which students assess, discuss, and refine their papers in a critique with at least two members of the English Department. The Senior Exhibition is a challenging and exciting project that prepares students to think and work independently, to refine and explore sophisticated concepts, to revise and rework thoughts into polished prose, and to self-assess in the interest of improvement.

In addition to Beloved, course texts for AS English Literature 4 have included:

• Junot Diaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
• Mariana Enriquez, Things We Lost in the Fire
• Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending
• Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot
• Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me

Exhibition texts for AS English Literature 4 recently have included:

• Isabel Allende, The House of the Spirits
• Colum McCann, Transatlantic
• James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room
• Roberto Bolano, By Night in Chile
• Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending
• Kate Chopin, The Awakening
• Nella Larsen, Quicksand
• Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

Advanced Study English: Humanities—History, Literature, and the Contested Past

Elective for students in Form VI, taken in lieu of English 4.

This interdisciplinary course examines how novelists, poets and historians have wrestled with and made sense of the past, and their own relation to it. Structured around a series of case studies at the intersection of literature, history and memory, Humanities explores the relationship between the documented past and the imagined one. We study novels and poems deeply shaped by the social and cultural moments from which they emerged and consider how an understanding of the historical circumstances that produced a work of literature can inform our reading of it. We also examine how writers of fiction have used history as source, inspiration and charge. Can the imaginative work of literature actually help us more fully understand the “real” past? What responsibility does the novelist have to history? In addition, we consider how the construction of a narrative—the storytelling—of a novelist differs from that of a historian. What might each learn from the other? In the first semester, we pursue these questions through Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987) and primary and secondary historical sources on slavery, race, and abolition; and either Tom Stoppard’s play, Arcadia (1993), examining the poetry and landscape architecture of the Romantic movement, chaos theory, and fractal mathematics, or another play that we have the opportunity to see in a theatre. Students take Humanities in place of Advanced Study English 4; it fulfills all of the requirements of English 4, and students complete the Senior Exhibition Project in Humanities, with an interdisciplinary component to the project.

Semester-long Electives

Creative Writing

Through class discussion of both contemporary examples and student work, students are introduced to strategies and techniques used in the composition of original verse and fiction. Students will explore tone, voice, diction, theme, and style in a given text, with the goal of becoming attuned to the nuances and rhythms of language. Writing assignments will allow students to develop both the confidence and the ability to write creatively and precisely in a variety of

forms and styles. The course is designed so that students may take Creative Writing more than once, if they want to continue to hone their craft.

Senior Tutorials

Senior tutorials are mini courses focused on critical thinking and writing; they replace Advanced Study English 4 for seniors in the fourth quarter. Created by faculty members from across our academic departments, tutorials explore a range of disciplines and topics, but the unifying elements of the tutorials include small class size (six or fewer students), student-led discussion and inquiry, and weekly writing assignments. The tutorial model of teaching centers on student writing; discussion of weekly student writing is a central component of the class. Similar to college seminars, tutorials meet just twice weekly and therefore emphasize student independence and a significant amount of reading, writing, and independent study outside of class.