English 9 challenges students to develop their own voices as critics and as writers, to think independently and reflectively, and to express their ideas clearly and powerfully.

Throughout the year, students read challenging texts that explore questions about identity, culture, and the complexity of relationships. From Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun, and Shelley’s Frankenstein, to Morrison’s The Bluest Eye and Shakespeare’s Macbeth, the range of works invites students to ask questions, so that they develop a deep understanding of how family, culture, race, and gender roles influence character choices and the development of narratives. Our curriculum exposes students to a variety of literary styles and genres. In addition, students develop media literacy skills by making informed connections between the written word and the screen. Class discussion and assignments emphasize close reading skills, informed speaking and active listening, rigorous literary analysis, and attention to the mechanics of writing.

In English 10, students discuss and write about increasingly sophisticated and complex literature. The goal is for them to become better readers, writers, thinkers, and communicators. Through discussion, writing, and group activities, the course stresses independent critical thinking, literary analysis, and original interpretation. Special emphasis is placed on making connections between works of literature, students’ experiences, and the contemporary world. Students gain practice in a variety of writing styles, including formal essay, reflection papers, poetry, memoir/ autobiography, and dramatic monologue. Class texts include F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, Shakespeare’s Othello, and Jeannette Walls’ The Glass Castle, among others.

In the 18th century, St. John de Crèvecoeur famously asked, “What then is the American, this new man?” This question has preoccupied and puzzled thoughtful Americans to the present. In the first semester of this yearlong course, we examine works that address this concept in three movements. Before doing so, however, we will begin with a contemporary novel by Douglas Clegg that will disturb and challenge your preconceptions about what American fiction has become. Then, returning to the three movements, we first explore “The Birth of an American Self” by looking at how 19th century writers (e.g., Twain, Thoreau), confronted by nature on a scale largely inconceivable to their European forebears and by a new social and political order that strained the limits of individual sovereignty, set out to define a new sense of self and arrive at forms of imaginative expression commensurate with their novel circumstances.

Next, during “The Fracturing of American Identity,” we investigate the way 20th-century writers, particularly in the Lost Generation (e.g., Hemingway, Eliot) and later, the Beat Generation (e.g., Kerouac) focused on the decay and growing alienation of the individual, as reflective of what they had witnessed in the horrors of both World Wars. To complete the semester, students ponder “The Death of the American Dream” by focusing on writers such as Morrison, Miller, and McCarthy, who question the veracity of the ideals that continue to be vital to our national ethos.

John of Gaunt, in Shakespeare’s Richard II, describes the British Isles as “This other Eden, demi-paradise,/ This fortress built by Nature for herself/ Against infection and the hand of war” (2.1). Though he is bemoaning the current state of England under King Richard II’s leadership, his words hint at a nation that will go on to develop a sense of safety in its separateness and dominance. In Advanced British Literature, students will read a wide variety of works, from the Anglo-Saxon conquest through the 21st century. Our early attention is on the honing of a British literary identity. We then focus on English writers who, over successive eras, crafted a robust voice that spoke of an island’s quest for global dominance while simultaneously portraying the mental and moral vulnerability of those back home who were victims of Britain’s imperial lust. Texts from the 21st century refine our understanding of Britain’s dependency on hierarchy through explicit exploration of the intersection of race and social class. Our inquiry takes in texts by Charlotte Brontë, Geoffrey Chaucer, Joseph Conrad, Bernardine Evaristo, Seamus Heaney, Ted Hughes, Kazuo Ishiguro, Ian McEwan, William Shakespeare, Oscar Wilde, Virginia Woolf, William Wordsworth, and others.

This course delves into the foundational texts of the Western literary tradition: Gilgamesh, Homer’s Odyssey; Euripides’ Medea; and Milton’s Paradise Lost. The heroes in these texts carve out a space for civilization from a world of chaos, monsters, and villains. In our discussions, we seek to understand what makes someone heroic, and also what defines the villains or monsters that the heroes defeat. Along the way, we ask two sets of questions: What do these narratives tell us about love, truth, justice, and community? And, how does a story begin? Where does it end? What makes incidents hold together in a plot? What makes a character believable and relatable? The course is divided into three main sections. We begin by exploring “The Hero’s Journey,” focusing on the goals that motivate epic quests, as well as the temptations (lust, pride, decadence) that threaten to derail them. Next, we investigate “Myths of Creation, Destruction, and Transformation,” analyzing what these stories tell us about the shifting and unpredictable nature of reality. We end the course by considering “Myth in America,” examining how these classical tales have been repurposed to address the pressing issues of our time in Luis Alfaro’s Mojada and Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones. Throughout the course, we juxtapose our primary texts with a variety of contexts. We analyze modern responses to the epic tradition—including a feminist revision (Madeleine Miller’s Circe), an African American recasting (Susan-Lori Parks’ Father Comes Home from the Wars), and a cinematic homage (Joel and Ethan Coen’s O Brother, Where Art Thou?).

This is a chance to read the greatest English novels (and a French one, too!) that formed our ideas of the modern self and created the genre that we’re so familiar with today. We seek to understand how novels work: How do they give the illusion that their characters are real people, moving through real time? How do they create—and manipulate—point of view? How do they balance major and minor characters, plots and subplots? What gives shape to a story, and makes it seem like more than a random series of events?

We read a coming-of-age novel, a novel told as a series of letters, a historical novel, a marriage plot, a mystery, and a short science fiction classic. In texts like Jane Eyre, for the first time we see literary characters imagined as fully-formed individuals with complete life stories and intricate conscious (and subconscious) motivations. Alongside this emphasis on characters’ interior lives, the great realist novels expand our vision of the ways in which individuals are enmeshed in larger social contexts. We analyze how novels like A Tale of Two Cities reflect a complex interplay between personal lives and cataclysmic historical events like the French Revolution. As well as telling new kinds of stories, the classic novel pioneered new narrative forms: we explore Austen’s use of irony (Pride and Prejudice), Laclos’s shifting points of view (Dangerous Liaisons) and Wells’ forays into speculative fiction (The Time Machine). Throughout, we’ll think about how these key cultural touchstones helped create our ideas about race, class, and gender.

“To be, or not to be: that is the question.” “We are such stuff as dreams are made on.” “If music be the food of love, play on.” “To thine own self be true.” “Parting is such sweet sorrow.” From familiar phrases to fundamental values, our world has been shaped by Shakespeare’s imagination.

How did a playwright who lived 400 years ago become so influential that one of his plays is currently performed, somewhere, every day of the year; that he’s been translated into every known language; that his plays have been adapted into movies hundreds of times; and that over 3000 of the words and phrases he invented are still in use today?

This course gives you the opportunity to explore a range of possible answers to the question: Why Shakespeare? We read Romeo and Juliet and uncover its complex interactions between desire, sex, love, and jealousy. In Henry V, we find the insights into power and freedom, war and political strategy that made Shakespeare a favorite of Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Barack Obama. In Much Ado About Nothing, we discover a surprisingly modern analysis of friend-group dynamics, slut-shaming and bullying— along with first-class insults and comic misunderstandings. We end with two of Shakespeare’s greatest accomplishments: Hamlet— a ghost story about a college student who can’t decide what to do with his life— and The Tempest— a fairy tale about colonialism, magic, and the power of language. Throughout the course, we explore the many ways Shakespeare continues to be reinvented by watching a range of film adaptations.

In his 1846 essay “The Philosophy of Composition,” Edgar Allan Poe defined the short story as prose fiction that could be read in one sitting— approximately 20,000 words or less. He believed this limitation, in and of itself, made it far superior to the novel, and he would have been quite pleased to see its popularity grow in the latter half of the 19th and 20th centuries. In the last three decades, there has been a reawakening and a transformation of the traditional short story; some have even called it a short-fiction revolution. In this course, we explore the historical development of this genre and the many unique short-fiction blueprints. Students analyze the timeless short stories of Kate Chopin, Ernest Hemingway, Amy Hempel, Jhumpa Lahiri, Dorothy Parker, Edgar Allan Poe, Alice Walker, and other great writers. We also read the following novellas: The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka, Black Water by Joyce Carol Oates, The Moon is Down by John Steinbeck, and Different Seasons by Stephen King. Students are expected to write formal analytical essays, as well as compose their own original short story collection.

Fantasy stories continue to explode in popularity and morph into more forms: We have superhero films, Harry Potter, Percy Jackson, the Lord of the Rings books, The Chronicles of Narnia, time-travel stories, dystopian fiction, and more. What counts as fantasy? What counts as a fairy tale or folktale?

We begin by exploring the boundaries and traditional definitions of genres and subgenres, such as what kinds of stories overlap between fantasy and science fiction. What’s exciting is not how something gets categorized, but how that type of story relates to the heartbeat of culture and society, to history and life’s big questions. A fantasy story reveals the author’s ideas about good and evil.

We look at the rise of “classic high fantasy” in British and American literature (e.g., Lord of the Rings, fairies, and dragons), and the group will determine what you wish to focus on, depending on what you already know and what you find most intriguing. We read at least one classic British or American author, like J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Raymond Feist, Ursula LeGuin, Philip Pullman, Pamela Dean, or Robin McKinley. We also read at least one contemporary fantasy author from a different cultural tradition, such as Zen Cho, Nnedi Okorafor, or Tomi Adeyemi. We explore how different cultures conceive of “magic.” Then, we read some fairy tales, again starting with western European traditions and adding tales from other cultural traditions. Students write analytical papers and can invent their own project—options include creative writing, film analysis, or a research project. Overall, students learn to appreciate fantasy as a mode in which authors create new worlds, explore ethical values, speculate about the limits of human behavior in times of joy and suffering, and paint heightened portraits of what ultimately makes us human.

This course is designed to have as its center Jean-Paul Sartre’s play No Exit, which contains the infamous line from which the course title derives. We will spend the semester reading and discussing texts (plays, novels, short stories) in which the protagonists are psychologically (and sometimes physically) tormented by both the individuals they encounter and the social structures that dictate behavioral norms. As a counterpoint, we also explore how the characters often cause their own anguish. Many of the stories feature protagonists who do not necessarily embody the conventional definition of hero, and in some cases, may not be heroes. Therefore, we explore the notion of what it means to be a hero, the definition for which can be difficult to pin down and is often ambiguous. Many of the characters may challenge your ability to empathize, but this may change as we more closely examine each character’s unique circumstances. Much of the course is contextualized by an introduction to 20th century existentialism, which we use as a lens through which to read many of the texts. Aside from No Exit, other texts include Albert Kobo Abe’s The Face of Another, Camus’ The Stranger, Richard Wright’s Native Son, and Spike Lee’s film Do the Right Thing.

Every culture creates myths and legends to explain the world and people’s place in it. Through tales of perilous journeys and raging battles, these narratives ask fundamental questions about the meaning of heroism, justice, love, and truth. By analyzing texts like Homer’s Odyssey and Milton’s Paradise Lost, as well as modern-day epics such as George Lucas’s Star Wars, we’ll explore how our ideas about what it means to be a hero have changed over time. At their hearts, epics are about the attempt to carve out a space for civilization from a world of chaos, monsters and villains. In our discussions, we’ll consider who or what are the monsters in these texts: what does that tell us about what people over the centuries have been most afraid of? What kind of world were they trying to create, and what did they consider the greatest threats to that ideal?

Throughout the course, we’ll pair ancient texts with modern films, novels, and plays to forefront the question of what we’ve inherited from these foundational texts, and how our definitions of heroes, gods, and monsters continue to evolve.

This introductory course is for students interested in autobiographical writing. We explore the ideas of memory and truth as we analyze a variety of memoirs in all their forms and iterations. Spanning decades, nations, styles, and subjects, our reading list includes several of the following titles: The Diving Bell and the Butterfly by Jean-Dominique Bauby, Fun Home by Alison Bechdel, Fire Shut Up in My Bones by Charles Blow, Running with Scissors by Augusten Burroughs, The Yellow House by Sarah M. Broom, Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates, Not My Father’s Son by Alan Cumming, When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi, Girl, Interrupted by Susanna Kaysen, Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer, Let’s Pretend This Never Happened (A Mostly True Memoir) by Jenny Lawson, The Color of Water by James McBride, Just Kids by Patti Smith, Memorial Drive by Natasha Trethewey, Hillbilly Elegy by JD Vance, and Educated by Tara Westover.

Personal essays by James Baldwin, Edwidge Danticat, Lars Eighner, Mindy Kaling, Frank McCourt, and Elie Wiesel are incorporated. We consider what these texts can tell us about the complex intersection of art and truth as we explore questions of empathy, self-expression, memory, and the making of identity. Through free-writing exercises and specific writing prompts, students pull from the fabric of their lived experiences to craft original works of their own. During the writing workshops, students learn to employ fictional techniques such as characterization, dialogue, and plot, as well as how to employ emotional tools (authenticity, curiosity, empathy, and urgency) to transform their personal experience into compelling prose that speaks to the humanity in all of us.

In this course, students are introduced to some of the major writers and thinkers from late 19th century to early 21st-century Japan. We explore modern Japan by studying authors from every era of the nation since the Meiji Restoration. As these eras directly coincide with the reign of each emperor, you notice that they are each characterized by a distinct political and cultural spirit. In the late 19th and early 20th century, we examine the struggle of national identity, as the people attempt to reconcile between centuries of tradition and the desire to become a modern and consequently more Westernized nation. This moves us into the interwar years where Japan feels compelled to prove itself to the West, and on to the postwar years which are fraught with uncertainty, angst, and fear. Finally, we’ll end with contemporary life, with Japan as one of the safest and most advanced nations in the world. To provide a deeper framework for understanding the cultural context, you are also exposed to some aspects of the Japanese language and the historical and philosophical forces that have shaped Japanese thought for hundreds of years. Students are expected to annotate and write responses to each reading, and dissect each overall piece by way of critical essay and/or a creative project.

In this half-credit elective course, students become adept at the art of public speaking. Public speaking is one of the most important life skills, from the application of school presentations, future career opportunities, or even speaking at a friend’s wedding. The craft encompasses multiple forms of communication, well-placed pockets of storytelling, and creative techniques of body language. Throughout the course, we focus on three major types of speeches: demonstrative, informative, and persuasive, and uncover the ways each of these gradually build upon the next. Though students may enter the course with some angst, shyness, or fear, they exit with tremendous confidence, courage, and ultimately, a powerful voice to call their own.

An interdisciplinary, team-taught course, this class addresses the writer as artist and performer. Students examine a wide range of alternative, mainstream, and experimental theatrical and literary genres. Units include solo spoken word, slam poetry, epic theatre, street theatre, fringe theatre, Commedia dell’Arte, and, ideally, a smattering of both performance and conceptual art. In addition to the analytical examination and discussion of selected texts, students are expected to participate in the creation and performance of original, written, theatrical and poetic works. This is as much a creative class as it is an analytical one—which fittingly, divides class meeting locations between a regular classroom and the theatre stage. Students also participate in required trips, both in the evening and during the school day. Past classes have attended evening performances at La Mama Experimental Theater on East 4th Street, Lincoln Center, Irish Repertory Theater, and poetry workshops at The Nuyorican Poets Café. Texts for the year include works by Aristophanes, Samuel Beckett, Lorraine Hansberry, Eugene Ionesco, Charles Ludlam’s Ridiculous Theater, Luigi Pirandello, The San Francisco Mime Troupe, Tom Stoppard complete volumes of contemporary poetry, and more! One does not need to be a drama student to take this class. Talent and experience are appreciated, but optional.

What happens when girls and women are prevented from learning about the world outside of their experiences? What happens when a woman is unable to acknowledge all of her identities? What did women do when they were denied entry to becoming their full selves? In this course we discover how a uniquely diverse group of 20th-century female authors recognized the psychological price paid by women when they expressed forbidden thoughts and actions, and why their fictional characters dared to cross (or circumvent) intersectional social barriers in various ways.

We focus primarily on (1) how the effects of the first and second waves of feminism influenced the themes of each literary work and (2) examine why these movements inspired the practice of reading women’s literature from the intersectional lenses of race, class, gender, and sexual orientation. And finally, (3) we reflect on whether the third wave of feminist texts were decidedly impacted by the writers from the previous feminist eras. Related excerpts, short stories, and essays are added periodically.