English

English Composition (9th Grade)

In this course, students explore the basics of English composition, the writing process, and literary analysis. A special emphasis is placed on revising and rewriting, crafting and sustaining arguments, organizing one’s thoughts in coherent and concise form, and developing style and writerly “voice.” Students examine what it means to perform literary analysis through thoughtful, careful, and close interpretation of texts, investigating the inner workings of style, genre, figurative language, and literary form. Weekly writing assignments and feedback from the instructor, accompanied by opportunities for peer review, allow students to revise and refine their writing as they strive for greater clarity of thought and expression.

Intermediate Composition (10th Grade)

In Intermediate Composition, we will continue to refine your writing, reading, and discussion skills by reading and responding to a wide array of texts. The common thread that weaves our readings together is a preoccupation with the power of stories. Why do we tell the stories we tell, and what would happen if we told new ones? How does the teller of the story impact its meaning? How can stories sustain us? At this moment in history, it feels especially important to explore the ways in which stories can be tools of survival and transformation. As readers, we will attend closely to the subtleties of our texts. As writers, we will respond to the texts we read in a variety of ways, exploring different modes of writing, including the personal, imitative, creative, and analytical.

Literature (11th Grade)

This course is, most broadly, about enjoying great works of literature — learning how to be engaged, careful, erudite readers — and, just as importantly, incisive, articulate, confident writers. By studying and learning to appreciate the unique, whole-hearted expression of the great writers of the past, we will learn to make our own unique, whole-hearted expression. But more specifically, the junior year English class is about comparative thinking and writing — drawing unexpected connections between texts, discovering commonalities that are unique to our own reading of the texts, that say something about ourselves as readers just as much as they say something about the authors of those texts. The texts we will read this fall (James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues,” Gloria Anzaldúa’s “Toward a New Consciousness,” Chen Chen’s “Kafka’s Axe and Michael’s Vest,” and “Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick) will be challenging (in all senses of the word), but will reward effort. The same can be said for this course.

American Renaissance (Moby Dick)

On its surface, Moby-Dick is a book about a whale. (Less charitably, it is a 600-page, 173-year-old book about a whale.) But, look, this is a book about the unfathomable depths of the ocean and the mind, and the mysteries that exist therein — what use do we have for how things appear on the surface? For the past hundred years (after being almost entirely ignored for the first fifty years after its publication), Moby-Dick has been widely called the greatest American book, carrying within it potent lessons about fate and freewill, environmental degradation, power and persuasion, race and racism, sexual identity, madness and obsession, math and science, faith and doubt, God and religion, and the nature of perception. It also has much to teach us about coping with adversity, respecting ideological diversity, and living skilfully in a fickle, slippery world. Perhaps most importantly, one of Melville’s projects in the book is to show us that, just as every whaleman has his own unique notion regarding Moby Dick the whale, every reader has their own unique understanding of Moby-Dick the book. As Ishmael says, it “begins to assume different aspects, according to your point of view.” This is, of course, true of all literature. And it is this special relationship between reader and text that makes the study of literature so valuable in a person's life. We will spend the entire semester (!) immersed in this deepest of texts (and, somehow, we will not come close to exhausting all its wonders). We will discuss the book in great detail. We will write formal essays and informal reflections and explorations. We will make art. We will investigate secondary material and academic scholarship. We will embark on individual research projects. You will finish the course with a thorough understanding and appreciation (even if you end up hating it, which is entirely possible and totally fine) of one of the greatest books ever written.

Stories in the Margins: The Women of Ancient Greek Tragedies

Ellen McLaughlin believes that “...theatre has a singular capability to teach us about the nature of community and how we can collaborate to transcend even the most terrible pain caused by human divisions and rancor.” She wrote this in the introduction to her version of The Trojan Women, a play written by one of the three great tragedians of ancient Greece: Euripides. In the city-state of Athens in 5th and 6th century B.C.E, Euripides, along with Sophocles and Aeschylus, gave birth to tragedy as we know and understand it today through plays situated in the unfolding and aftermath of war. The majority of actors and audience members were either veterans of war or young men who knew they were destined to one day serve on the frontlines – they were no strangers stories and the horrors of war, and these tragedies offered the space for what Aristotle terms katharsis (catharsis), or purgation of the emotional weight they carried.

But why, then, in a male-dominated theatre space, are some of their greatest tragedies devoted to exploring the lives of women in times of conflict who, again in McLaughlin’s words, were living on “...the margins of the epic, the footnotes of the great drama…”? Why write narratives illuminating the grief and rage of those left behind? Of those ravaged in the wake of defeat? Of those uncelebrated, unseen, unheard in the theatre of war? What might this illuminate about the powerful role that tragedy played in the soul of the direct democracy conceived in Athens? The reliance of this infantile structure on the critical eye and vulnerable hearts of those who lived to defend it?

And how do these narratives stand the test of time?  

In this course, we will look at a selection of these Greek dramas that deal specifically with narratives of women in war. Readings may include, but are not limited to The Oresteia by Aeschylus, Iphigenia in Aulis and The Trojan Women by Euripides, and Electra and Antigone by Sophocles. We will first engage with a “loyal” translation (whatever that means…we’ll talk about it) of each play to garner a foundational understanding of context, plot, and character. Then, we will explore more generous adaptations and reenvisionings of these plays, paired with appropriate scholarship, as we explore the continued immortalization of these women through the revisionist rereading and reframing of their portrayal. This course will involve reading a variety of translations and adaptations of these plays, writing analytical comparisons, bringing these texts to life out loud and on our feet, and conceptualizing original versions of these narratives and characters in our own time and place.

The Essay

The word essay, as a noun, comes from the French for "trial, attempt, endeavor." That, in turn, is connected to the verb (in English [okay, also in French]) assay, which means to “test, strive, assess.” (Assay is often used in a metallurgical context. And in Milton’s Paradise Lost, Eve asks, “And what is faith, love, virtue, unassayed / Alone, without exterior help sustained?” (IX.335-336). Both words are ultimately derived (don’t ask me how but this is what the etymologists say) from the Latin exagium — "a weighing, a weight” — connecting ex- (“out”) with -agere (“set in motion, drive”), to make a word that suggests “drive out, force out” or “require, exact” or “examine, test, try.”

The Western tradition of essay-writing is usually said to have begun with Montaigne (who wrote works like “On Cannibals,” “Of Friendship,” “Of Cruelty,” and “Of Books”). But the Japanese form zuihitsu (literally, “following [the impulses of] the brush”) predates Montaigne by at least 400 years, yet accords with how he (Montaigne) described his own work:

I get lost, but more from license than carelessness. My ideas do follow on from each other, though sometimes at a distance, and have regard for each other, though somewhat obliquely. . . . I love the gait of poetry, all jumps and tumblings. . . . . I change subject violently and chaotically. My pen and my mind both go a-roaming. If you do not want more dullness you must accept a touch of madness.

This is the sort of work we’ll be reading, and writing, in this course — following the impulses of the brush; circling around a question or possibility; drawing unexpected connections; scratching at an idea or a concept. These are not academic essays, or the loathed and derided “five-paragraph essay.” We will read relatively short pieces, and everything we read will be unabridged: James Baldwin, Jamaica Kincaid, Virginia Woolf, Richard Rodriguez, David Foster Wallace, Kamo no Chomei, Zadie Smith, Simone Weil, Meghan O’Gieblyn, Ayad Akhtar, and others. We will read things and write about them; we will reflect on our own reading and writing; and we will conduct our own tests, assessments, and attempts.

Theatre of the Oppressed: Reviving the [Spect]actor

In the foreword to his manifesto, Theatre of the Oppressed, acclaimed Brazilian theatre practitioner and activist, Augusto Boal, asserts that “...all the activities of man are political and theater is one of them” and that theatre can be a “...weapon for liberation.”. He argues that theatre must be revolutionized, must not be an event during which an audience passively receives the action, lulled into the comforts of spectatorship, but is rather called to act in response to injustices dramatized on the stage. 

Boal rose to prominence in 1956 when he became the artistic director of the Arena Theatre in São Paulo, Brazil. Eight years later, in 1964, a military coup overthrew the Brazilian government and instated a military dictatorship that would last for the next twenty years. During this time, Boal created and produced theatre in direct response to the new fascistic reign, and was ultimately exiled. It was in exile that he wrote Theatre of the Oppressed along with a number of his plays, traveled to Paris to establish the International Festival of Theatre of the Oppressed, before returning to Brazil in 1986 where he started the Centre for Theatre of the Oppressed in Rio De Janeiro and a number of community theatre companies.

In this course, we will explore the ideas of spectatorship and civic duty in the modern-age of social media: how may we act in the face of injustice? How may we respond to calls to action? How often, when given the choice to act or ignore, do we succumb to the comforts afforded us for just a little longer? What would it take to make the choice to act? And what do we hope to do? To guide our exploration of these questions, we will read excerpts from Theatre of Oppressed, in addition to the writings of other artists – those who influenced Boal’s conception of his practices, and those on whom Boal had a profound impact. Other readings may include, but are not limited to, Poetics by Aristotle, Brecht on Theatre by Bertolt Brecht, Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire, An Actor Prepares by Konstantin Stanislavski, in addition to plays written by Augusto Boal, Bertolt Brecht, Tony Kushner, Caryl Churchill, Anna Deavere Smith, Jackie Sibblies Drury, and Ntozake Shange. This course will involve writing analytical responses, and experimenting with playwriting and devising as we bring Boal’s practices to life.