These semester courses focus on major writers, central literary themes, genres or periods, or on the art of composition itself. Grammar review and vocabulary workbooks are used in all seminars to prepare students for College Board Examinations. Seminar offerings vary from semester to semester, with new courses being added regularly.
Fall 2012 Seminars
Moral Mayhem!
We often think we know the differences between good and bad, but how can we be
sure? We’ll begin this course by examining Ancient Greek and Chinese notions of
goodness and then turn to the question of moral choice: what happens when our
values collide and we’re forced to choose between them? In specific, we’ll
track issues of freedom and justice in Ann Patchett’s award-winning novel Bel Canto; we’ll explore the costs of a
western education in Zimbabwean author Tsitsi Dangarembga’s novel Nervous Conditions; and we’ll consider
moral dilemmas caused by modern technology in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go. In addition to
traditional essay writing, we’ll be writing frequently and informally in this
class. You’ll also be asked to come up with questions for class discussion and
to participate in leading these discussions. Be prepared to talk, write, think,
and have fun!
Rites of Passing
Do we have a permanent identity? If you adopt another persona, do you stop existing as who you were? Originally, “passing” was a term exclusively reserved for nineteenth-century light-skinned African Americans disguising themselves as “white,” but this is only one example of passing. Our investigation into the phenomenon will be showcased in texts that involve characters crossing lines of racial, gender, and class identities. We will begin with an inquiry into the idea of a discrete, unified self. We will read of black characters passing as white, women passing as men, and many cases of mistaken identity. Texts may include: Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, Nella Larsen’s Passing, Jessie Redmon Fauset’s Plum Bun, Richard Rodriguez’s Hunger of Memory, Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, the Oscar-nominated Albert Nobbs, and Philip K. Dick’s sci-fi classic, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
Literary Monsters
The landscape of our literary tradition is strewn with monstrous beasties of both
the literal and the symbolic sort (and is there really a difference there?). Our task will be to consider this
phenomenon and to consider explanations for it. What is the imaginative
function of these monsters? To what use are they put by their progenitors? What
do they illustrate about – gasp! – ourselves and our deepest fears? Our
desires? Do these monstrous characters perform, as has been suggested, the
descent of human beings into “the duality of being”? Dramatic stories will,
naturally, inspire our discussions of monsters great, small, strange, and
familiar.
Wilderness Within, Without
The course title captures our seminar’s three central questions: What wilderness
exists within us, as human beings? What relationship should we have to the
wilderness without—that is, the one outside of us? And, lastly, what would the
world be without wilderness if we were—borrowing a line from the poet G. M.
Hopkins—to become “bereft … of wildness”? As we will find in our readings, the
wilderness has been feared, reviled, and conquered, and sometimes seen as a den
of demons or savages; at the same time, it has been revered and preserved, and celebrated
as the pure expression of God or nature’s creativity. In all cases, wilderness
has mirrored back to us our own humanity (or lack thereof). Likely novels
include Faulkner’s The Bear, Stephen Crane’s naturalistic novel Maggie:
A Girl of the Streets, Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop,
and Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal Dreams. Shorter readings will include
short stories, poems, and excerpts from Genesis, Milton’s Paradise Lost,
Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, and Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at
Tinker Creek. We will also view, analyze, and maybe even sing along to
Stephen Sondheim’s musical Into the Woods.
Rebels and Rabble-Rousers
The 1960s civil rights and anti-war activist William Sloan Coffin
defines a “robust nonconformist” as someone whose opinions have transformed
into convictions. How does such a transformation occur? What enables a person
to take an unpopular stand, to stir up trouble, to be willing to die for a
cause? What can get in the way of acting on one’s beliefs? When is it
acceptable to be, as per Holden Caulfield, “half yellow”? These are questions
our protagonists wrestle with – a young American who joins a guerilla band
during the Spanish Civil War (For Whom
the Bell Tolls, Ernest Hemingway), a con man who tries to rally fellow
mental patients to change hospital policy (One
Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Ken Kesey), a jazz musician who fights for his
dignity on the drug-infested streets of Harlem (“Sonny’s Blues,” James
Baldwin), lovers in modern India who attempt to defy the laws of the age-old
caste system (The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy), and a
senior at a competitive elite boarding school who struggles to stay true to
himself (Old School, Tobias Wolfe).
Come revel with the rebels.
Haunting Homes
Americans celebrate “Independence” as a central value, yet “home” and “hearth” also loom
large in the American imagination. And if our national attitude toward “home”
is divided, so is the arc of our emotional lives, as we leave home in
youth and long for it again as we age. With “the house” as its center
and circumference, this course investigates the dual movement toward and
away from home in life and literature. Topics will include the American
mystique (and stigma) of dwelling on the margins of society; whether “the home”
is a structure of captivity or liberation; and the extent to which language,
literature, and memory are freighted
with homesickness. Our consideration of such issues will begin with Walden;
or, Life in the Woods (1854) by H.D.
Thoreau. Additional works may include: Jacobs’s Incidents in the
Life of a Slave Girl (1861), Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
(1885), Chopin’s The Awakening (1899), Agee and Evans’s Let Us Now
Praise Famous Men (1941), Robinson’s Housekeeping (1980), Krakauer’s
Into the Wild (1996), and Donoghue’s Room (2010). A selection of
essays, short stories, and poems will supplement our readings.
Canon and Challenge
In our literary past, certain books become parts of what we call “the canon,” that
is, they become powerful forces in shaping, reflecting, and continuing dominant
ideas which are, as Karl Marx tells us, the ideas of the dominant class. Other
literary works struggle to challenge, weaken or replace these ideas and the books
which represent them. In this course we will read works from the literatures of
ancient Greece and Rome with an eye to discerning “a canon” and its
“challengers.” Our authors include many names you know—Homer (The Iliad), Virgil (The Aeneid), and Ovid (Metamorphoses)
among others—but also some you may not know—Sappho (the Tenth Muse, as the
ancients called her), Aeschylus (The
Oresteia), and others. I find that the farther back in literature we go,
the more clearly we find ourselves and our roots. I hope you will feel the same.
Story Writing Workshop
This workshop teaches advanced writing skills.
You produce four short stories, applying the process of analysis and rewriting
that develops exploratory first drafts into focused, finished works. It's a
challenging process, but it's how real writers go about it. Between stories we
study the formal devices of short fiction by great authors. For your pains you
will emerge with a clearer, more personal, and more confident voice whenever
you sit down to write (these skills are applicable at no extra charge to non-fiction,
as well). Two one-hour meetings per week, Mon &Thur, eighth period. Open to
sophomores, juniors, and seniors. May be repeated.