Courses
1310 Literary Explorations I
Grade Level: Sophomore
Length: Two Semesters
Credit: 0.50 per semester
Prerequisite: None
This course introduces students to a variety of genres in literature, to the processes of effective aesthetic reading, to the work of discussion and performance as a response to literature, and to the processes of writing in a variety of forms and for a variety of purposes. Past core readings have included Oedipus Rex, The Odyssey (in a poetry translation), The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and a Shakespeare play. Additional readings for this yearlong core course will be selected by individual instructors from a variety of authors and from many cultural traditions.
1320 Literary Explorations II
Grade Level: Junior
Length: Two Semesters
Credit: 0.50 per semester
Prerequisite: Literary Explorations I
The work of developing skill in aesthetic reading and in discussion, performance, and writing continues at higher levels. Students are expected to develop greater independence as readers and writers and to be more conscious of their own processes as readers and writers. Past core readings have included selections from The Bible; Euripides’ The Bacchae; a Shakespeare play; Richard Wright’s Native Son; Kafka's "The Metamorphosis"; Eliot’s The Waste Land; and Voltaire's Candide. Additional readings for this yearlong core course will be selected by individual teachers from a variety of authors and from many cultural traditions.
Students must be enrolled in an English class each semester of their senior year.
Year-Long Senior English Offerings
1370 Topics in World Literature: Modern American Poetry
Grade Level: Senior
Length: Year-long
Credit: 1.0 per Year
Prerequisite: Literary Explorations II
This yearlong course explores modern American poetry (definition and expression):its mathematical clarity and symmetry; its intellectual freedom; its contextual voices (spaces), dissonant and harmonious; its fundamental nature. We begin with B. H. Fairchild and end with Adrienne Rich, seeking our connection to the collective while listening to our own voices, “a journey of discovery and exploration for the writer as well as the reader”(Marge Piercy). Poets include Donald Hall, Walt Whitman, Denise Levertov, Wallace Stevens, A. R. Ammons, Elizabeth Bishop, T. S. Eliot. An important component of this course is acting as pen pals and mentors to a class of second-graders at a local grade school; we frequently conduct our class at the elementary school. Time during fourth quarter is often set aside for student-centered poetry workshops, directed, when possible, by guest poets.
Fall Semester Senior English Offerings
1335 Topics in World Literature: Modern World Fiction
Grade Level: Senior
Length: One Semester (offered Fall Semester only)
Credit: 0.50
Prerequisite: Literary Explorations II
We will read a selection of texts spanning the twentieth century (and samples from the turn of the millennium), and the globe. We will look at this literature (mostly in the form of short fiction, ranging from such writers as Borges, Faulkner and Kafka, to Achebe, Bei Dao and Akutagawa) as defining and expressive of modernism and post-modernism, in their many facets. More specifically, we will consider kinds of, approaches to, and functions of realism; challenges to realism; what constitutes a “modern aesthetic sensibility,” and what ends such a sensibility serves; and some major thematic issues particularly relevant to the twentieth century.
1338 Belief in Question in Modern Literature
Grade Level: Senior
Length: One Semester (Offered First Semester only)
Credit: 0.50
Prerequisites: Literary Explorations II
In this course we will raise the human experience of belief as a complex of attitudes that has stimulated the literary imagination. Works by Jorge Luis Borges, Graham Greene, Bernice Rubens, John Updike, William James, and Sigmund Freud, among others, will allow us to look at belief as a phenomenon that has served to radicalize thought as well as enslave it. We will see that while belief is commonly conceived and often expressed in religious terms, it is also a human stance secured by non-sacral tethers.
1339 Portraits of Creativity
Grade Level: Senior
Length: One Semester (offered Fall Semester only)
Credit: 0.50
Prerequisite: Literary Explorations II
We will examine the lives and work of creative people in several of the arts (including literature, music, and painting) and the sciences, posing questions concerning the nature of artistic and scientific work, the roles of the artist and scientist in our culture, and the relationship between Apollonian order and Dionysian spontaneity in creative work. Through discovery, students will consider issues of creativity in their own lives.
Spring Semester Senior Year Offerings
1352 The Idea of the Individual
Grade Level: Senior
Length: One Semester (offered Spring Semester only)
Credit: 0.50
Prerequisite: Literary Explorations II
The focus of this course is the individual: what is this being we call the individual? What is the self? What is the relationship of society, culture, and the self? Is there any such thing as a fully free individual? What forces threaten our individuality? These are just some of the many questions we will consider as we read works as diverse as Grendel, A Passage to India, King Lear, The Stranger, and a variety of poetry and short fiction, as well as supplemental selections from theologians, philosophers, psychologists and natural scientists. The whole notion of the self, from its roots in antiquity, to the revolution of evolution, to today’s possibilities of genetic manipulation in human beings, certainly suggests that we need to consider this topic if we are to make meaningful, powerful choices about what we want to be, and can be, both for ourselves and in our relations with others.
1355 Topics in World Literature: Victorian Fiction
Grade Level: Senior
Length: One Semester (offered Spring Semester only)
Credit: 0.50
Prerequisite: Literary Explorations II
This course will focus specifically on Victorian fiction, literature written between 1832 and 1901. One of our main objectives will be to explore the parallels between Britain of the nineteenth century and America of the new millennium. Much like our society today, Britain during this time was a nation facing unprecedented economic and technological growth. Through the study of the novel and the short story, this course will examine the social, political, and cultural ideology of Britain during an era in which it rose to dominance as both a nation and an empire. Some of the issues we will investigate include the effects of the industrial revolution and urbanization, the implications of advances in science and technology such as the railroad and the telegraph, and the ethics of imperialism. We will look at the works of Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Elizabeth Gaskell, Anthony Trollope, and George Eliot, among others.
1364 Modern Irish Literature
Grade Level: Senior
Length: One Semester (offered Spring Semester only)
Credit: 0.50
Prerequisite: Literary Explorations II
Irish artists sing songs of rage and rapture that are a forming force in modern literature. In listening to them we engage with an often-comic cultural vision that is oddly energized by a fear of sex and a love of death. The course explores the fiction and poetry of seminal authors James Joyce and W. B. Yeats, and the drama of Synge and O’Casey. In addition we read, discuss and write about some of their descendents in contemporary Irish literature: fiction writers William Trevor, Edna O’Brien, Roddy Doyle; poets Seamus Heaney, Eavan Boland, Michael Longley; dramatists Brian Friel, Marina Carr and Martin McDonough. Students are provided with information about the historical scaffolding of Irish culture in order to develop an understanding of the transformative change in a society that has moved from enervating famine to the economic feasting of the “the Celtic tiger.” Some of the resultant tensions are examined in class in the flowering of Irish film and Irish rock music in the l990s. Written work ranges from short writes to full essay (including a departure essay, “Farewell to IMSA,”) and there are opportunities for oral presentation and performance.