English

The English program is divided into two sequences - Form III and IV courses that are required of all students and the two-year elective program for Form V and VI students. All courses include frequent in-class and at-home writing assignments. Writing assignments include a mixture of critical and creative writing, but the analytical essay is emphasized.

FORM III LITERATURE SURVEY

Form III English emphasizes the close study of some of the major works of Western literature. Students read The Odyssey, Oedipus and Antigone, selections from the Bible, Macbeth, Fathers and Sons, Their Eyes Were Watching God, Things Fall Apart, and In Country. The writing program in Form III emphasizes a formal, intensive review of the fundamentals of writing essays. The study of vocabulary, grammar, and usage begun in the middle school continues.

FORM IV AMERICAN LITERATURE

The English IV course is a survey of American Literature. Authors studied include Hawthorne, Emerson, Whitman, Thoreau, Melville, Twain, Toni Morrison, and Sherman Alexie. The course shares some readings with the American History classes, and some projects, trips, and presentations are planned jointly as well.

THE ELECTIVE PROGRAM FOR FORMS V - VI

CREATIVE WRITING WORKSHOP

This course provides the student with the opportunity to write original prose, poetry, and drama,

In previous years, works by Rainer Maria Rilke, David Mamet, Annie Dillard, and John Guare have been studied, as well as short stories from the collection The Art of the Tale, edited by Daniel Halpern.

ESSAY WRITING

This course focuses on the writing of the essay. Great essayists are studied (McPhee, Emerson, E.B. White, Woolf, for example); papers will be frequent; sharing of work is mandatory; journals are required.

FILM AND LITERATURE

Editing, camera position, frame composition, camera movement, and other techniques are studied in the films of Bergman, Truffaut, Fellini, Welles, and others. Literature varies from year to year, and includes a wide variety of works (Joseph Conrad, Graham Greene, Virginia Woolf, and Kobo Abe, for example).

NINETEENTH CENTURY ENGLISH LITERATURE

In this course students read representative works of the romantic, early Victorian, and late Victorian pre-modern periods. Writers studied have included Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Emily Brontë, Thomas Hardy, Mary Shelley, Charlotte Brontë, and Joseph Conrad.

AFRICAN-AMERICAN LITERATURE

This course focuses on the varied forms of African-American literary expression. The students discuss

the influences of the African oral tradition, African-American folklore, and dialect. Readings include works by Ellison, Morrison, Naylor, Wright, Baldwin, Hughes, and Hurston.

THEMES IN AMERICAN LITERATURE

In this course students will read and discuss works not covered in the Form IV curriculum, either because of their difficulty or their length. Some possible works are Melville’s Moby Dick, Henry James' Washington Square, Emerson's essays, Whitman's Leaves of Grass, and Ellison's Invisible Man.

COMEDY AND SATIRE

This course will examine works of representative writers of comedy and satire, from Aristophanes to Jane Austen, from Shakespeare to Langston Hughes.

CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE

This course examines the new voices of contemporary literature, looking for common themes and concerns. Writers studied have included Calvino, LeGuin, Kundera, Garcia Marquez, Tim O'Brien, Isabelle Allende, Mahfouz, Primo Levi and Morrison.

DRAMATIC LITERATURE AND THE THEATER

Students in this course see approximately 8 to 10 plays on or off or off off Broadway. They discuss the shows, write reviews, discuss theater history, and write original dialogues. (A fee of approximately $200 is collected at the beginning of the course; financial aid is available.)

JOURNALISM

This course involves the study of English, history, and graphics. Students learn the skills necessary for newspaper writing, discuss the history of the press, and are introduced to the technical aspects of newspaper production. All members of the class write, and much of the material goes to The Fieldston News. This course must be taken in addition to another English course.

LATIN AMERICAN AND CARIBBEAN LITERATURE

This course is designed to introduce students to the literary worlds of Latin America and the Caribbean. Possible authors include: Lima, Garcia Marquez, Borges, Puig, Neruda, Castellanos, Vargas Llosa, Allende, Lispector, Cesaire, Walcott, Naipaul, Selvon, Harris, Lamming, Brathwaite, Phillips, and Danticat.

MODERN BRITISH LITERATURE

This course covers English literature from l890 to l950 and traces major trends in the development of the novel in Britain during the three crucial decades of the modern era. Authors studied have included Virginia Woolf, Joseph Conrad, Thomas Hardy, James Joyce, and D. H. Lawrence.

MODERN DRAMA

This course examines modern drama from the social and psychological realism of Ibsen, Strindberg, and Chekhov to the expressionism of Genet, from the absurdism of Pirandello and Ionesco to the political and family focus of Brecht and August Wilson. Other playwrights studied have included Lorca, Pinter, Beckett, Stoppard, and Wasserstein.

MODERN EUROPEAN LITERATURE

Representative poetry, drama, and fiction from the modern period of Europe are examined. Writers studied have included Flaubert, Kafka, Mann, Camus, Kundera, Ionesco, Chekhov, Dosteovsky, Gide, and Sartre.

NATIVE AMERICAN LITERATURE

This course explores the roots of Native American culture and literature and analyzes both the loss of identity experienced by some Native Americans and the problems of interaction with the wider American culture. Attention will be given to the oral tradition, myth, and personal writings that comprise the background for more recent writings. Representative authors include Scott Momaday, Leslie Marmon Silko, James Welch, Paula Gunn Allen, Michael Dorris, Louise Erdrich, and Mary Tallmountain.

POETRY

Typically the course begins with older English poetry, including a study of traditional verse forms such as the English ballad stanza, the sonnet, the villanelle, and blank verse. The course moves on to modern poetry, in which students see both the persistence of these traditional forms and departures from them in the many varieties of free verse.

RUSSIAN LITERATURE

Why did 19th century Russia generate so many of the masterworks of world literature? Were there particular social forces that contributed to this extraordinary fertility of imagination and achievement? Readings include works by Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenev, Tolstoy, Chekhov, and Dostoyevsky. Writers of the Soviet period are sometimes studied as well.

SHAKESPEARE

This course is devoted to the study of some of the masterworks of the foremost dramatist and poet of the English language. Students read five or six plays, usually drawn from among the following: The Merchant of Venice, Much Ado About Nothing, Julius Caesar, Henry IV, Henry V, Measure for Measure, Hamlet, Othello, Antony and Cleopatra, and The Winter’s Tale.

SOCIAL AND POLITICAL ISSUES IN LITERATURE

This course examines the ways in which novelists, dramatists, and poets have reacted to major social and political ideas and events. Writers studied have included William Blake, Émile Zola, Charles Dickens, Virginia Woolf, George Orwell, Albert Camus, Arthur Koestler, Jose Saramago, John Berger, and August Wilson.

WOMEN AND LITERATURE

Writers studied have included Charlotte Bronte, Jean Rhys, Kate Chopin, Virginia Woolf, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Louise Erdrich.

WORLD LITERATURE

This course focuses on selected works of literature from Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. In recent years, works from Nigeria, Iran, India, and China have been studied. Authors and works read have included Yoruba folktales, Wole Soyinka, Ben Okri, Rumi and Sufi poetry, Simin Daneshvar, Nahid Rachlin, the Bhagavad-Gita, Raja Rao, Shashi Tharoor, the Tao Te Ching, Lu Hsun, and Su Tong.

IMAGES AND WORDS: POETRY, PAINTING, LANDSCAPE

This one semester elective examines the connections between the visual image and the written word, focusing specifically on the connection between poetry and painting. Students will write essays and do some creative work of their own. Museum and gallery visits will also occur. John Asbury’s Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, John Berger’s Ways of Seeing, and films by Ingmar Bergman and Peter Greenaway will be studied as well

THE LITERATURE OF WAR

In addition to The Iliad, texts may include novels by Stephen Crane, Ernest Hemingway, Virginia Wolfe, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Tim O’Brien, poems by Walt Whitman, Carolyn Forche, W.H. Auden, Thomas Hardy, John Donne and Randall Jarrell, and films such as Apocalypse Now and Deer Hunter.

SENIOR SEMINAR

The Senior Seminar is open to Form VI students who have sustained an honors average in English in Forms III-V and who have demonstrated a strong interest in literature. The curriculum varies from year to year, but authors typically include the Beowulf poet, Shakespeare, Austen, Conrad, Kafka, Faulkner, and several contemporary authors.