English

Students will learn how one starts a research project–including the use of libraries, web-based resources, bibliographies, and other finding guides–and how one actually writs a long paper. Each student will develop a research plan and a bibliography for work over the summer on the senior thesis. For 11s only.

In this course, we read books that high school girls love.  Most but not all of the literature we’ll read comes from female authors, and all of the protagonists will be girls and women.  You might reflect on the fact that the vast majority of the literature you’ve read so far in your education has been written by male authors and has usually focused on male protagonists, and you might want to think about the difference it would might make if this were not so.  Why do girls often especially adore the books that are written by and about girls?  Are female characters somehow different from the male characters you’ve known?  (We might usefully compare Jane Eyre’s story with Pip’s, as a starting point.)  Are the challenges facing female characters the same as those facing their male counterparts?  And, if we find issues that are specific to female characters, have they changed across time, or have they remained pretty much the same?   Are they the same issues you confront in your own lives?  We’ll engage these questions and themes, as well as many others (love, marriage, sexuality, reproduction, to name a few), as we delve into a number of big, fat wonderful novels.  We’ll start with Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre and Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles, then continue into the twentieth century with Virginia Woolf, and with the contemporary novel The Handmaid’s Tale, by Margaret Atwood.   We’ll also read a fourth modern novel tba, and if we have time, we’ll do some modern short stories, and/or poetry.  We’ll finish the term with the film Thelma and Louise.  For 12s only.

EN90:  The Short Story

In this course, we’ll immerse ourselves in one of the most powerful literary genres: the short story. We’ll examine the way the short story has developed from the 19th century to today, and we’ll also study the formal elements (setting, conflict, characterization, and more) that come into play in longer works of fiction as well. Thus, this course will not only familiarize you with the elements of the short story, but of fiction in general, and will therefore further prepare you for the kinds of literary analysis you’ll be doing in college next year. Another great advantage of this kind of class is that you’ll get to sample a smorgasbord of famous writers, some of whom won fame particularly for short stories but many of whom also wrote the world’s most important novels as well. We’ll read Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Kafka, Chekhov, Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Jack London, Joyce Carol Oates, Doris Lessing, among others. I plan to assign three stories each week (one for each class meeting), and students will write three short (circa 3-4 page) papers for the class. (There will be no exams.)  You may, if you wish, try your hand at writing your own story in lieu of one of the formal essays. For 12s only.

EN90:  Jane Austen in our Time

This course will focus on the artistry, intelligence, and imagination of Jane Austen, one of the great English writers of the early 19th century. We will closely read three of her novels, Sense and Sensibility  (1811; 1813), Emma (1816), and her masterpiece, Pride and Prejudice (1813). We’ll discuss Austen’s emphasis on female friendships, family life, small towns, gossip, decorum, marriage, money, and love. We’ll consider the ways in which Austen was a representative of her age and yet remains immediate in our own, and we’ll examine film versions of each work to see how they bring Austen into modern times. We will also learn a little about her life and times while we discuss the power and passion of her writing, and her peculiar way of capturing something universal in humanity. 

Existentialism is a philosophy that emphasizes the individual and his or her freedom to create meaning. By embracing this freedom, the individual takes ownership of his or her own life in the face of death and an absurd world. Doing this is called lucidity or authenticity or good faith. Existentialists are also aware, however, that such radical freedom creates anxiety and despair in the individual, who often would rather renounce freedom in order to live in bad faith. More troubling still, people often force others to conform to their values in ways which produce alienation, objectification, and oppression. Thus, existentialism, as we’ll see, has much to say about sexism and racism; indeed, this philosophy even today continues to make significant contributions to such social issues.

In this course, we will explore the philosophy of existentialism primarily through literature and film. Jean-Paul Sartre, one of the best known existentialists, claimed that art is often a better means for conveying philosophy than a treatise or essay. While the final reading list is not yet set, among the pieces we are likely to read and discuss are Kafka’s Metamorphasis, Melville’s “Bartleby the Scribner,” Tolstoy’s Death of Ivan Illych, several plays and stories by Sartre, Camus’ The Stranger, Percy’s The Moviegoer. Most of these pieces are short stories or novellas. We will also watch several films including My Life Without Me, Crimes and Misdemeanors, I Heart Huckabees, and/or Fight Club. Students will write a film review for the course on an existential movie of their choice, and two additional papers – one of which students may write as a short story of their own that incorporates the themes of the course. For 12s only. 

This class surveys many of the most important authors of 20th century literature.  Moreover, as the greatest masterpieces of the last century were virtually all written before 1950, the course actually provides an introduction to the literary period known as modernism, probably the most exciting and innovative artistic period in modern times.   In the aftermath of such thinkers as Marx, Darwin, Freud, and Einstein, these authors rethought everything from consciousness to narrative style to the meaning of time itself.  The literature, therefore, tends to experiment with narration and plot, and while often challenging, it’s also deeply rewarding and always fascinating.  These are the great books adult readers know, and ones you are likely to encounter at some point in college as well, so this course provides a gentle introduction to canonical books you will almost certainly see again in your future studies.  We’ll begin with Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, a psychological adventure tale set on the Congo River in Africa at the turn of the century.  We’ll then spend a good deal of time with James Joyce (whom many consider the greatest writer since Shakespeare), reading his wondrous short story collection Dubliners as well as his most accessible novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.  We’ll also study Ernest Hemingway’s greatest novel, The Sun Also Rises, as well as D. H. Lawrence’s magnificent Sons and Lovers.  Finally, if time allows, we’ll dip into some short stories from Lawrence, Hemingway, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, and from American Southern writer William Faulkner. For 12s only.