e n g l i s h . d e p a r t m e n t c o u r s e . o f f e r i n g s WESTERNWESTERN LITERATURE & THE ESSAY (9th Grade) The backbone of the ninth grade English course is formed by modern European and American literature, with a place for Shakespeare, Sophocles, and poets from all periods. The students’ greatest challenge is to narrow the gap between their spoken responses and their written analyses, and they practice this in numerous specific essays. Grammar and vocabulary exercises continue weekly to reinforce reading and writing skills. POETRY, DRAMA & THE NOVEL (10th Grade) Sophomores are in training for the independent work of junior and senior English electives. Demands on the quality of their thinking and writing are intensified, while we provide a widening background in the Western classical tradition and in modern voices. Working with a different teacher each semester, the students examine several genres in depth. One semester might concentrate on poetry and short forms, the other on drama and the novel. Authors include Shakespeare, E. Brontë, Camus, Faulkner, Morrison and O’Connor. In an additional class period each week, small groups of six to ten sophomores polish their writing skills or work on individual writing problems. JUNIOR/SENIOR ELECTIVES THE ABSURDITY OF TRAGEDY Funerals, regicide, star-crossed lovers...ha ha ha! Oh, sorry. Tragedies feature goofy misunderstandings ("Now, exactly how does this sleeping potion work, Romeo?"); slapstick mishaps ("The trigger gave," Meursault explains in The Stranger after shooting a man on the beach, which is the existential equivalent of "Oopsie!"); doting, star-crossed lovers coo-cooing in the night ("Wherefore art thou Romeo?"); and—nearly forgot—death ("Akk!"). In this course we will celebrate both the absurd and the tragic, and we will revel a bit in the ridiculous, too. The year will begin with Sophocles' powerful play Antigone, which is about breaking the law in the name of one's principles. Troilus and Cressida, Shakespeare's rarely-performed and wordy play, pits language and rhetorical persuasiveness against the brutish forces of war and lust. We will end the first semester with Hardy's lyrical tragedy Tess of the D'Urbervilles, about a young woman who has a very difficult time of it (note: here I doubt that we'll find much to laugh about, but we will all be better people for having read Hardy). We'll begin the second semester with Faulkner's seminal The Sound and the Fury about the collapse of a family down South, followed, I hope, by the equally racy, grotesque and nuanced Madame Bovary by Flaubert. At the end of the year we will study a pair of wonderfully offbeat plays, Wedekind's Spring Awakening and Waiting for Godot by Beckett. We may even perform a play or two as a class. Along the way, we will read fairly dense criticism on the texts, as well as some knotty theory about tragedy and the absurd. Students who take this course need to be prepared to perform in plays, memorize lines, write stories, poetry and papers, and read a heck of a lot. Those who come along for the ride are in for a very demanding but rewarding year. Possible authors and texts: Sophocles, Antigone; Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida; Hardy, Tess of the D'Urbervilles; Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury; Flaubert, Madame Bovary; Wedekind, Spring Awakening; Beckett, Waiting for Godot; time allowing, we may also peek into works by Gogol, Tolstoy, and Morrison. THE ART OF LYING: FICTION, POETRY, AND MEMOIR In this course we will read and write texts that show all the signs of bearing witness. Students will respond creatively and analytically, in discussion and in frequent writing assignments, to texts as diverse as: Alain- Fournier’s The Wanderer, Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man, Woolf’s Moments of Being or A Room of One’s Own, Babel’s Red Cavalry, James’ Daisy Miller, Shakespeare’s The Tempest or King Lear, Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room, Beard’s The Boys of My Youth, Welty’s The Optimist’s Daughter, Mendelsohn’s I Was Amelia Earhart, Kincaid’s The Autobiography of My Mother and a slew of poems, stories and essays by contemporaries. As we crapshoot our way through these works, we will hunt down such elusives as: How do we make a fabrication sound true? What do we mean by “voice” as opposed to “style”? What are the merits (or limits) of a “poetry of presence”? What if our work disturbs family or friends? Does art imitate life, as Oscar Wilde asks in “The Decay of Lying,” or vice versa? We seek not a group response (you may eschew the worldly origins of any text) but the facilitation of each reading-writer’s truest falsehoods. THE BIBLE How does The Bible frame our view? Our understanding of everything, from sexuality to global warming, has powerful underpinnings in The Bible. No other work has such far-reaching influence, and yet it is possible to be deeply unaware of how The Bible informs our lives. The Bible is fundamental—fundamental on another order from a writer like Shakespeare. The Bible as a collection of writings is sui generis—font of law and language and narrative, emerging in severe majesty from the dark, backward and abysm of ancient tradition. It is sacred history. It is the writing primeval, shaping our literature with its imagery of creation and destruction, promise and failure, blissful ignorance and painful knowing, and crime and punishment and redemption. This course will study the central stories of the Hebrew Scriptures, known in Judaism as The Tanakh, and within Christianity as The Old Testament. We will study the rise of a radical idea, monotheism, and track the journey of the Israelites, called by God to be his people and promised by God the land of Canaan. We will also study some of the so-called “stand alone” books of the Bible, such as Job, Ruth, Proverbs and Ecclesiastes, exploring their poetry and philosophy. Finally, we will close the year with New Testament study, exploring the stories of Jesus. As we go we will study various literary and legal antecedents such as The Myth of Atrahasis, The Enuma Elish, The Epic of Gilgamesh and The Code of Hammurabi. And when we can, we will look at literary explorations of Biblical stories such as Chaucer’s The Miller’s Tale. This course will involve critical and creative writing, and there will be exams as well, there to help us pull together and solidify what we have learned. DANTE AND MILTON I AM THE WAY INTO THE DOLEFUL CITY, I AM THE WAY INTO ETERNAL GRIEF, I AM THE WAY TO A FORSAKEN RACE… BEFORE ME NOTHING BUT ETERNAL THINGS WERE MADE, AND I SHALL LAST ETERNALLY. ABANDON ALL HOPE, YE WHO ENTER HERE. The Inferno, Canto III (1-9) So read the grim words on the great gate to Dante’s hell. In this elective, we will read words far grimmer. A veritable journey to hell and back, the course will explore two massive and major epics, Dante’s Inferno and Milton’s Paradise Lost. Beginning with The Inferno, we will follow Dante as he treks through the city of Dis, each of its nine circles containing motley sinners whose creative punishments reflect their dreadful crimes. (If you eat everything in sight, you’ll be dumped in slop. If you lie to everyone in sight, you’ll be dumped in poop.) Paradise Lost introduces a different kind of sinner: Satan. The arch-enemy is oddly heroic; an eloquent, seething rebel against God, he is trapped in a prison both physical and psychological: A dungeon horrible, on all sides round, As one great furnace flamed; yet from those flames No light; but rather darkness visible. Both books are challenging, harrowing and glorious—full of adventures, horrors and revelations. We will read them closely, examining the fabric of the text and the author’s use of rhetorical and poetic language. Papers will often be close readings too, written in the form of explications. Expect frequent creative writing exercises as well. Further reading may include T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, poetry by Milton, Shakespeare and Donne, and possibly Dante’s Purgatorio. FLAUBERT, ORWELL, NABOKOV In this course we specialize in the work of three major writers: Gustave Flaubert, George Orwell, and Vladimir Nabokov. Starting with Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, arguably the most influential novel ever written, we then read Three Tales, selections from Flaubert’s letters, and large portions of The Dictionary of Received Ideas. Switching to Orwell, we spend most of our time with Burmese Days, Homage to Catalonia, and The Road to Wigan Pier, but we’ll also re-read those two books you studied long ago, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-four. Nabokov occupies most of our second semester, as we examine his three great novels of exile: Lolita, Pnin, and Pale Fire. Limiting ourselves to these three novelists will allow some study of the relevant historical backgrounds, including Flaubert’s trial in Paris on obscenity charges, political upheavals of the 1930s, and the flight of the Russian intelligentsia after the 1917 revolution. We’ll also have to address some broader questions—aesthetic, ethical, political—about the nature of fiction. As an occasional vacation from the main theme, throughout the year we read (and write about) several lyric poems. HAPPY FAMILY All happy families resemble one another; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. -– Leo Tolstoy Nobody who has not been in the interior of a family can say what the difficulties of any individual of that family might be. –– Jane Austen Throughout literature we encounter the dysfunctional family in all its rage and glory, and we may feel repulsed by it, but there is no question that we can identify with it on many levels. What makes each family in some way simultaneously ordinary, unique, and insane? Are there patterns of dysfunction, paradigmatic relationships that we can examine in the context of some larger socio-political picture? Are there determinants of certain typical family problems? Are relationships always, to some degree, problematic, and even crazy? In this course we live closely with the dysfunctional family as it has been written, while we try to unpack the idea of family itself. Authors may include, but are not limited to, William Shakespeare (King Lear), Jane Austen (Pride and Prejudice), William Faulkner (The Sound and the Fury), John Cheever (short stories), Virginia Woolf (To the Lighthouse), Vladimir Nabokov (Lolita), J.M. Coetzee (Disgrace), Donald Barthelme (short stories), and Willa Cather (The Professor’s House). Fiction is interspersed with poetry and the occasional piece of nonfiction. LITERATURE OF DISPLACEMENT The central question of this course is one every high school senior must eventually ask: What good can come from leaving home? Immigrants and exiles face a host of challenges, including the loss of land and language, community and culture. To Romeo, exile is “death mistermed.” But it would seem to make for good writing: Ovid was banished from Rome, Dante and Petrarch from Florence; Byron and Shelley fled England. By the first half of the twentieth century, voluntary exile becomes a form of literary education for early modernists like Eliot, Joyce, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald. One finds in the work of each a sense of inwardness and selfconsciousness born of distance and isolation—as well as a sense of the possibilities expatriation provides for reinvention. As counterpoints we will examine a few cases roughly opposite: those, like Flaubert’s Bovary and Faulkner’s Compsons, who despite all efforts to the contrary find themselves unable to escape their places, pasts, families, and selves. Shakespeare Antony and Cleopatra Flaubert Madame Bovary James Daisy Miller Hemingway The Sun Also Rises Faulkner The Sound and the Fury Fitzgerald Tender is the Night Nabokov Pnin Shorter work by Kafka, Eliot, Joyce, Lahiri, Bezmozgis, and Jin ON OR ABOUT DECEMBER 1910: WHAT MODERNISM WAS I. Dickens Great Expectations 1861 II. Flaubert Madame Bovary 1857 Dostoevsky Notes From Underground 1864 Conrad Heart of Darkness 1899 III. Eliot “The Waste Land” 1922 Woolf Mrs. Dalloway 1925 Faulkner The Sound and the Fury 1929 “On or about December 1910,” Virginia Woolf once observed, “human character changed.” That is, the character of human self-understanding changed. That is, art went wild. Picasso attacked the illusion of space, painting his dealer, Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, as a jumble of broken planes; Arnold Schoenberg attacked the idea of harmony, theorizing a framework for atonal music, works composed in no key; and in February of that year, T.S. Eliot began drafting his attack on the old Romantic unities of time, memory, and the self. Hamlet had been modern; Prufrock was a modernist. The aim of this class is a history of that shift, in three acts: the rise of the bourgeois novel (Dickens, Austen); early doubts and challenges (Flaubert’s aestheticism, the Underground Man’s nihilism); and the high-modernist revolution (all-out fragmentation in Faulkner and Woolf). The books are great, but we’ll need to able to talk about them at some level of abstraction to answer the questions posed above. With practice, we’ll soon find ourselves remarking that “Literature is modernist precisely in the disavowal of its own modernity,” and other things like that. RUSSIAN LITERATURE You too are an exile, I thought. You mourn for the broad open steppes where you have room to spread your icy wings. Here you feel stifled and constricted, like an eagle that cries and beats against the bars of an iron cage. -Mikhail Lermontov, A Hero of Our Time Since the late eighteenth century when Russian authors began to be translated into French, German, and English, Russian literature has moved and intrigued Westerners with its depth and subtlety. This course considers a number of the major figures in Russian literature—beginning in the first part of the nineteenth century with Russia's foremost lyric and narrative poet, Alexander Pushkin, and concluding in the second half of the twentieth century with the multi-layered work of Vladimir Nabokov. The reading list also includes works by Mikhail Lermontov, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Leo Tolstoy, Ivan Turgenev, Nikolai Gogol, Anton Chekhov and Alexander Solzhenitsyn. This is indeed a weighty and wide-ranging enterprise that raises questions of the individual’s place in society and the world, the nature of truth and reality, the meaning of faith in God, and the role of the past in the present—to name a few. THE WINTER OF OUR DISCONTENT To put meaning in one’s life may end in madness But life without meaning is the torture Of restlessness and vague desire— It is a boat longing for the sea and yet afraid. —Edgar Lee Masters Could there be a more heroic ambition than the striving for that which, by all reasonable assessments, ought to be beyond your grasp? The unhappy wife convinced she has met her soul mate, the impoverished nobody determined to make his fortune, the man who could never be satisfied by “the sensations…derived from natural fornication.” Would you urge these people, Stay where you are. Be content with your life of quiet desperation.? I think not. So how does literature treat those who would pursue happiness, greatness, fortune, fulfillment? Let’s find out together (though be forewarned—it’s not pretty). We will most definitely be reading Lolita, Madame Bovary and The Sound and the Fury. Be prepared to re-read The Great Gatsby.