The English Department is committed to the close and careful study of language. Every day, students hone their reading, writing, and comprehension skills through explorations of poetry, drama, fiction, and nonfiction texts, as well as a variety of creative and analytical writing assignments. By the time a student graduates, he is a confident reader and writer who is ready to embark on a lifelong love of language.

20th C. Japanese Literature

This course offers a brisk survey of selected twentieth-century Japanese novels, as well as an introduction to Japanese aesthetics and culture. We shall see how the Japanese novel responds to innovations in Western writing and to traditions of Japanese culture. We will also see that the Japanese sense of beauty, with its cultivation of suggestion, simplicity, irregularity, and evanescence, differs in essential respects from the Western sense of beauty. Among the novels we will read are Tanizaki'sNaomi and The Key, Kawabata's Snow Country, Mishima's The Sailor who Fell from Grace with the Sea and Confessions of a Mask, Abe's Woman in the Dunes, and Murakami's South of the Border, West of the Sun. Time permitting, in the second half of the term, we will watch a number of seminal Japanese films, among them Ozu's Tokyo Story, Mizoguchi's Sansho the Bailiff, and Kurosawa's High and Low.

Invisible Man

Using Ralph Ellison’s novel as our central work, we will consider what it means to be visible or invisible; to claim, lose, or construct an identity; to see and be seen; to lose and gain power. We will examine contemporary and canonical texts using several essential, guiding questions: How do race, class, and gender influence the construction of identity? How do writers depict and respond to the individual's struggle to construct a whole, unique identity? What makes individuals visible? Invisible? What gives them power? How do writers explore and explode ideas about the way identity is constructed? How do they deal with the phenomenon of “passing”? What are the readers’ expectations when considering these questions, and how do artists defy or meet those expectations through their work? Primary texts may also include novels by Morrison, Faulkner, Woolf, and Baldwin, as well as short stories by Toomer, Chestnutt, O’Connor, and Chopin. We will read scholarly and critical essays and contemporary writing (articles, blog posts, personal essays) about the gender, race, invisibility, vision, and power.

Latin American Literature 

In this course, students will examine some of the most significant artistic, social, and political debates preoccupying Latin American writers in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Through our reading of novels and short stories, we will reflect on the themes that have historically defined the Latin American literary tradition: colonialism & imperialism; modernity; revolution; race & ethnicity; dictatorship; and, of course, the region’s often ambivalent relationship to the United States. How have these and other concerns shaped the literary aesthetics of what we call Latin America? Our survey of the writerly landscape will close in on an overarching question: despite the vast geographical and cultural diversity of the nations that comprise it, to what extent does literature in Latin America give voice to a shared historical experience across the region? What, if anything, is “Latin” about Latin America? Finally, what is the relationship between Latin American literature and Latinx literature in the United States? Readings may include works by Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, Julio Cortázar, Edwidge Danticat, Roberto Bolaño, Cristina Rivera Garza, Mario Vargas Llosa, Yuri Herrera, Rosario Castellanos, Jorge Luis Borges, Juan Rulfo, Clarice Lispector, and Sandra Cisneros, among others.

Literature and Education

Education is a “leading out”—but from what, by whom, and where to? In this elective for seniors, we will study texts that turn, in one way or another, on the question of education. Our readings will span not only diverse genres (essays, novels, plays, poems, memoirs, films, theory), but also five centuries of thinking about learning and teaching: from Montaigne’s “On the Education of Children” (1575) to Tara Westover’s Educated (2018). Through it all, we will be considering the claims that literature makes for and against education, particularly its aspirations to universality and the contingencies of time, place, and person that have shaped those aspirations. Other authors will include George Bernard Shaw, Langston Hughes, Muriel Spark, Adrienne Rich, Paulo Freire, Pierre Bourdieu, Richard Rodriguez, Helen Dewitt, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Dominique Morisseau.

Literature and Judgement

From its earliest days, literature has been centrally concerned with judgment, both aesthetic and moral, as fiction has served as a vehicle for presenting and experiencing what is beautiful and ugly, what is just and unjust. In this course, we will look at works that focus on the problem of judgment, both in and out of the courts of law. We will read widely and will consider texts from ancient Greece, eighteenth-century Germany, nineteenth-century Russia, and twentieth-centaury Eastern Europe and America. Among the many works we will read will be Aeschylus' Oresteia, Kleist's Michael Kohlhaas, Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground, Kafka's "The Judgment," "In the Penal Colony," and The Trial, Grossman's Everything Flows, and Wright's Native Son.  

Postcolonial Literature

The course will explore literature from communities affected by European colonialism. Through the literature, we will focus on individuals who are outside of the hegemonic power structure and who seek to define themselves within a postcolonial context. Students will read novels, poetry, and articles, and will watch films that deal with the postcolonial experience. Authors may include: Frantz Fanon, Jamaica Kincaid, Assia Djebar, Ferdinand Oyono, Khushwant Singh, Tsitsi Dangarembga, and Khushwant Singh.

Quests

“Quests” will be an opportunity for students to draft and shape their own quest narratives and/or poems.  In that light, we will read and discuss a variety of quest stories and poems that, in some cases, evoke a quest haunted by images of damnation and hell; in others, a quest for liberty, identity, or endurance; in others, a quest for justice or revenge.  The quest narrative includes a departure—in some cases, a series of departures—from the familiar, the known, the home.  As Emily Dickinson wrote in one of her poems, “Parting is all we know of Heaven/And all we need of Hell.” In addition to writing their own narratives and/or poems, students will write analytical essays about the works we read.  We will read such authors as Dante (Inferno), Frederick Douglass (Narrative), Herman Melville (Benito Cereno), Emily Dickinson, Ernest Hemingway (Stories and Old Man and the Sea), James Baldwin (Going to Meet the Man), Seamus Heaney, and Louise Erdrich (Painted Drum or Round House).

The American Novel

In this elective, we will read three novels in which young Americans emerge and tell their stories: Ellison’s Invisible Man, Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, and Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing. What does it mean to grow up in America in the 20th and 21st centuries, and to imagine an adult self? How do these three authors re-imagine and re-define the idea of an American identity? Students enrolled in this course should re-familiarize themselves with Twain (Adventures of Huckleberry Finn) and Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby) over the summer. Assessment will be portfolio-based: students will write three 2-4 page responses during the semester which will provide material for an end-of-semester portfolio of analytical and/or creative writing.

The Marriage Plot: 19thCentury European Novel

This course offers a survey of several key works of nineteenth-century European fiction, each of which is centrally concerned with the problems of marriage and adultery. We shall read such writers as Jane Austen, George Eliot, Leo Tolstoy, and Edith Wharton.  In so doing, we will enter into three of the most brilliantly imagined worlds of European fiction and will get a sense of the evolution of the novel form during its classic realist period. We will read for plot and theme, and we will do our best to understand the ethical challenges posed by marriage and adultery, as well as the practical difficulties of coming to know oneself and achieving maturity.

The Personal Essay

From St. Augustine to David Foster Wallace, writers have explored essential questions about truth, knowledge, art, and human experience through the personal essay. More recently, journalists, memoirists, novelists, and poets have blurred genre boundaries, leaving readers and critics arguing afresh about the relationship between what is "true" and what is "art." In this course, we will study the subgenres of literary nonfiction and consider the shifting line between contemporary fiction and nonfiction. How do the best writers of nonfiction employ the techniques of great fiction writing to their advantage? How will ideas about sampling, appropriation, and collage change our expectations of the essay? Using the readings as models for their writing, students will draft, workshop, and revise shorter essays and then embark on a longer project drawing on their understanding of the many kinds of writing that can comprise a work of literary nonfiction. Readings will include work by such writers as E.B. White, George Orwell, Virginia Woolf, Joan Didion, Lauren Slater, Laura Hillenbrand, Scott Russell Sanders, Andre Aciman, Brent Staples, and David Foster Wallace. We will also read essays on craft by Vivian Gornick, Judith Barrington, William Stafford, David Shields, and others.

The Writer’s Life

In this literature-based creative writing course, we will study texts in which the writer or artist is a central figure, using those texts to consider essential questions about the lives of artists and their roles in society: Who is the artist? How do we characterize the artistic urge or impulse? What is “imagination”—and how does it drive the artist to make art? What leads an individual to the writer’s life? What sacrifices are required? What sacrifices are made? We will also engage in the writing process, using Lynda Barry’s What It Is to develop our daily practice. Students will keep a daily writer’s notebook throughout the course. For the final portfolio, students will submit an 8-10 page manuscript comprised of original poems, fiction, nonfiction, and/or analytical writing. Texts may include Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, Chopin’s The Awakening, Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Johnson’s Jesus’s Son, as well as short stories, poems, and personal essays.

Freshman English 

English 9 is a study of literature about identity. We begin in the fall with a study of short fiction: we review the elements of fiction as we compare and contrast characters in stories by writers including Updike, O’Connor, Welty, Faulkner, Garcia Marquez, and Chopin. We ask questions about how age, race, social class, and gender influence characters’ understanding of themselves in the world. We consider the ways in which individuals define themselves, the conditions under which they find autonomy, and the ways in which they may be prevented from achieving the freedom or happiness they desire. We then move into a year-long study of major American novels, all of which focus on the intersection of race, class, and gender, and explore the complexities of realizing identity in our country. The core texts we use are Butler’s Kindred, Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Larsen’s Passing, Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. We bring this conversation about the identity to a close with our study of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night in the spring.
 

As writers, English 9 students focus on developing original, arguable claims as they respond to each text. Time is built into the schedule for students to engage in the drafting, revision, and editing process. Grammar and style lessons are part of ongoing conversations about how best to engage and sustain the reader’s interest. Throughout the year, we focus on helping students to convey their increasingly sophisticated ideas with clarity and precision. Students also respond more personally to the texts, both in writing and in other multimedia formats. All of our projects aim to help students develop their ability to read and to respond clearly, persuasively, and eloquently.

Sophmore English

An introduction to the formal study of epic, tragedy, comedy, and the novel, the sophomore year in English offers a bridge from English 9 to English 11 and to the Upper School electives.  Over the course of the year, students compose critical essays, personal essays, and stories that respond to the literature covered in class. 

At the end of the fall semester, all sophomores take the Grammar Proficiency Test, which identifies those students in need of further skills work in Grammar Review during the sophomore year.

In the fall, we begin with a unit on epic, during which we read Homer’s Odyssey and Shakespeare’s epic history, Henry IV, Part One.  We then read parts of Milton’s Paradise Lost, Sophocles’ Oedipus, and Shakespeare’s Hamlet.  How do pity and fear function in the work of tragedy?  To what extent does introspection aid us in life?  What is the nature of evil, and why does it come into the world?

In the spring, we turn to the genre of comedy and explore a range of comic types, from the romantic ironies of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice to the macabre humor of Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon.  What role does laughter play as writers hold a mirror to our faces?  We end the year with Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, as we take up the question of the relationship between comedy and aggression.

Junior English

This course aims to accomplish three things: 1) students read a variety of essays and short stories; 2) students will concentrate on gaining control of the essay form by way of an intensive writing curriculum; and 3) students will write a formal research essay, usually about one of the major works of literature they read during English 9 or English 10.  The course will begin with a discussion of, and writing about, Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad, our required summer reading.  The assignments will be numerous and various, as students will compose expository, personal, argumentative, and creative pieces, as well as the formal research essay. 

A student who is away for the fall semester of his junior year or for the entire junior year will need to write the research essay while completing the equivalent of English 11 in the fall semester of his senior year.  

Aesthetics

Aesthetics is the branch of philosophy that deals with questions of beauty and sense perception.  Whereas aesthetics once had largely to do with the consideration of natural beauty, nowadays the word designates speculative inquiry into the nature of art.  In this course, students shall read a wide range of philosophical essays by such authors as Plato, Aristotle, Horace, Boccaccio, Burke, Schiller, Nietzsche, Wilde, and Freud that bear on the problem of art and its criticism.  In so doing, students will equip themselves with a critical toolkit that will aid them in their study of literature, music, painting, and film. We will also undertake a close reading of Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, which will serve as our novelistic centerpiece over the course of the term. Students will compose essays in a wide variety of genres. 

American Literature

This seminar surveys American literature from the first English settlements in Massachusetts Bay to the brink of the Civil War. Broadly speaking, we will be attending to the historical legacies of Puritanism as they were carried forth and transformed across two-and-a-half centuries of colonial and antebellum American writing. To that end, our work will fall across three successive movements: first, the colonial genesis in New England; second, the Transcendentalist expression of Emerson and Thoreau; and, third, the flowering of a self-consciously national literature during the “American Renaissance” of the 1850s. Unabridged texts will include Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave; Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter; Melville’s Moby-Dick; and Whitman’s “Song of Myself.” Further readings will include selected Puritan sermons and writings, sections of The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, essays by Emerson and Thoreau (including portions of Walden), and lyrics by Emily Dickinson.

Dante

Dante's Commedia is a poetic epic about the journey of a pilgrim (Dante himself) from our earth to hell to heaven.  In this course we will follow Dante's journey from the lyrical love poetry he wrote as a younger man to his philosophical, political, and poetic journey to the heavenly stars in his Purgatorio and Paradiso.  During the first weeks of the course we will read his early love poetry in the context of the Inferno.  During the heart of the course we will examine Dante's Purgatorio and Paradiso as poems transforming the tradition of lyric love poetry in Italian (a tradition giving birth to the sonnet at the Sicilian court of Frederick II).  We will examine Dante's claims of prophetic revelation as he sets his epic poetry in the lyric tradition of David's psalms in the Hebrew Bible.  Time permitting, in the final weeks we will read several of Boccaccio's ribald tales that transport us from the sublime Commedia to the vulgar tales parodying Dante's poetry.

Independent Study

A student in grades 11, and 12 may undertake an independent project for English credit. To do so, he must first present a suitable proposal, preferably with the help of a member of the department. This proposal should be submitted at the time of registration the semester before the student wants to pursue his independent study. The student must meet with his faculty advisor at least once a week during the semester of the independent study.  The chair will consult the department and then inform the student of its decision. The completed project must be submitted to the advisor by the last day of classes of the semester.

Irish Literature

In the context of British colonial rule comes a legacy of Irish literature that raises questions of a national identity, language, and literature. The class will begin with three plays by late 19th century dramatists: Oscar Wilde's farce The Importance of Being Earnest, J.M. Synge's bleak tragedies Playboy of the Western World and Riders to the Sea. Then we will focus on the two giants of 20th century Irish literature, W.B. Yeats and James Joyce. In reading Yeats, we will explore the Irish poet’s profound response to the Romantic tradition, the Irish nationalist movement, and the cataclysms in Europe of the 1910's and 1920's. We will then turn to James Joyce’s Dubliners, a masterful collection of short stories. After Joyce’s Dubliners and his novel, Portrait of an Artist As a Young Man, we will return to W.B. Yeats, whose late poems offer a brooding, brilliant series of meditations on his poetry, his mortality, and his world. We will end the term in the contemporary Irish world—surely with poems by Seamus Heaney collected in Opened Ground, perhaps with a contemporary play. All students will write analytically and creatively.

Modern Drama

This course will act as a literary survey of some of the important trends in dramatic writing during the period that helped to define the idea of modern drama. In the contemporary section of the course, we shall discuss texts that reflect the recent interest in widening the cultural and ethnic contexts of drama.  Students will be asked to read several plays (sometimes, one per week). The second half of the course will also include an individual scriptwriting project.

Shakespeare and the Elizabethan Theatre

This course will examine the life and career of William Shakespeare. The focus will be on his plays, but we shall also examine his poetic output. In studying a selection of the plays, we shall build on the acquaintance with his works begun in the 9th and 10th grade. The Shakespearean forms of history, comedy, romance, and tragedy will be discussed. During the writing periods of the course, some of the themes and issues encountered in these plays will provide stimulus for critical commentary and creative writing.

Shakespeare II

In this course, we study several of Shakespeare’s plays that exemplify his fascination with the classical world. Starting with a focus on Rome, we widen our tour of the ancient world to include Egypt, the Mediterranean, and then Greece. The order of study is not completely chronological in terms of the plays’ likely composition, but it presents a kind of chronology of Roman politics, with a brief study of TITUS ANDRONICUS as prologue, followed by JULIUS CAESAR and ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA. To complete this part of the course, we turn to a late play, CORIOLANUS. In the second part of the course, the focus is on two plays set in Greece: TROILUS AND CRESSIDA and TIMON OF ATHENS. (Other and earlier plays by Shakespeare, where the locations, events, and themes glance at the classical world – plays such as A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM and THE COMEDY OF ERRORS  – are mentioned in passing.)

Short Fiction

Students in this elective will read, analyze, and compare short stories. A consideration of the genre will inform the study of writers from several cultures and time periods. Students will write critically in response to the literature in addition to writing personal narratives. Authors considered may include: Junot Diaz, J.D. Salinger, Julie Orringer, Tim O’Brien, Ernest Hemingway, Raymond Carver, and Alice Walker.