English

Major year course. 3 credits. Form III.

A major objective of the English 9 “Coming of Age” program is to increase student knowledge of the way language works and how authors strategize to produce a variety of literary genres; students read, discuss, and write analyses of short stories, novels, dramas, and poetry. Other key aims are to help students improve their essay writing skills, elevate their vocabulary, and shore up grammar mechanics. Students read seminal texts of Western Literature: Sophocles’ Oedipus the King and William Shakespeare’s The Tragedy of Othello, the Moor of Venice. More modern works incorporate diverse cultural perspectives: Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, Miller’s Death of a Salesman, Fugard’s “MASTER HAROLD” . . .and the boys, Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-time Indian, and Salinger’s teenage classic The Catcher in the Rye.

Major year course. 3 credits. Form IV.

In English 10, students move to a new level of sophistication, reading literature that represents diverse voices and time periods. A theme-driven course, “Power, Privilege, and Responsibility,” English 10 asks students to explore texts-in-conversation and to make connections between texts and the socio-political and cultural contexts out of which they arise. Students use literature as a lens to discuss power dynamics that have existed and still exist in society. Texts for the course include: James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain, Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre paired with Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, and William Shakespeare’s The Tragedy of Macbeth paired with Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger. In addition to prose, students will also explore a full-length poetry collection of their teacher’s choice. Students also become more adept at critical interpretation; as they are exposed to various critical theories and major literary movements, they are urged to recognize that literary works are open to multiple interpretations and that, with the proper skills and knowledge, they can infer themes themselves. Writing assignments and class projects are designed to foster critical thinking, intellectual self-awareness and self-reliance, creative experimentation, research skills, and a more mature, precise style of expression. Oral participation is emphasized to promote active learning. Vocabulary is assigned each cycle.

Major semester course. 1.5 credits. Form V.

American Literature is a chronological survey course featuring authors who made significant contributions to the mosaic of American letters from the early-nineteenth through the early-twentieth century. Students begin with Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, examining the conflict between American ideals and racial injustice. The course then shifts to the writings of Emerson and Thoreau, exploring the Transcendentalist reconciliation of individual and collective identities, a theme also central to the mid-century works of authors such as Hawthorne, Melville, Douglass, and Twain, and poets such as Whitman, Dickinson, and Poe. With the century’s end, the focus shifts to the Naturalism of Gilman, Crane, and Chopin, a sometimes brutally pessimistic reaction to 19th-century optimism. Turning to the Modernism of the ’20s and ’30s, the course highlights a period of ascendancy for American literature with Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and the voices of the Harlem Renaissance. The course considers major critical modes, and students are encouraged to make connections between historical/biographical elements in the course and their work in junior-year American history.

Moving chronologically, this course will survey African American literature from the 1700s to the 21st Century. Beginning with Phillis Wheatley and Frederick Douglass, and concluding with contemporary writers, we will explore the role that African American writing has played in the long fight for freedom and equality, how African American writing has changed over time and circumstance, how the literature has shaped, and been shaped by, the uneasy relationship between African Americans and America.

When it comes to climate change, the future is now. From devastating superstorms to eroding coastlines to climate refugees, some of the tolls of a warmer world are already upon us. And while it was thought that climate change might unite the world around a common problem that “affects everyone,” it has become clear that the climate crisis impacts communities of color, poor communities, and those living in the Global South more profoundly than it does elite communities of the Global North. This course examines a genre of literature, Cli-Fi, that has emerged in recent years to treat the environmental and human issues raised by climate change. By studying such texts as Jenny Offil’s Weather and Sherri Smith's Orleans, this course will ask: how does contemporary literature depict climate change? How does it understand the relationship between race, geography, and climate? And what role, if any, does literature have in stemming the crisis?

Major semester course. 1.5 credits. Form V.

Celebrating the raw beauty of language, poetry has the power to capture and articulate the ineffable. This course will teach students to appreciate the variety and exuberance of poetry since 1945. Moving through various poetic movements—Black Arts, Beats, Black Mountain, New York School, Confessional and Post-Confessional, Deep Image—the course offers an exploration of such masters as Gwendolyn Brooks, Allen Ginsberg, Frank O’Hara, Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, James Wright, Yusef Komunyakaa, Li Young Lee, Robert Hass, and Tracy K. Smith, among others. Through reading poetry and writing their own, students will begin to appreciate verse’s unique power. In addition to producing a portfolio based on a chosen single volume of poetry—the portfolio will include a critical essay on the chosen text, pastiche poems, and a reading process analysis—students will also keep a journal in which they record their reactions to and thoughts on each night’s reading. The semester will end with a “Battle of the Bards,” in which poets vie for victory and popularity in order to win the coveted crown (think March Madness but with poets). 

Major semester course. 1.5 credits. Form V.

How do contemporary short stories reflect, serve, or otherwise explain American culture? This question will guide the inquiry for The Contemporary American Short story course. The discussion-based course will examine American short stories, and short story collections, with particular attention paid to those written in the past 15 years. We will analyze the short story medium, with particular emphasis on its technical and thematic possibilities, as well as its recent evolution. We will also attempt to define the grounds by which we consider a story successful. There will be a creative writing option in this course for students interested in developing short stories of their own.

Major semester course. 1.5 credits. Form V.

This course explores the uniquely American evolution of “place” through rural, urban, and digitally-set narratives told in a variety of forms. The Western landscape, despite its perceived lawlessness and ethical shortcomings, forges an American mythology of economic possibility that growing cities and recent technologies amplify. From the frontier to the cosmopolitan to the digital, we will analyze the enduring allure of get-rich-quick schemes that emerge within the market and moral contexts of each era.   

By comparing novels, essays, film, television, and poetry, we will ask why the gold rush mentality and the idea of the “wild west” are foundational to how entrepreneurial characters imagine opportunity and risk in settings that share a lack of regulatory oversight. We will look at how gossip, rumor, and news—sometimes fake, sometimes real—cascade through complex social networks to inform different speculation strategies. Whether these transactions consist of bartering along the boundaries of a mapped territory, slipping cash into a handshake within a city center, or clicking the “like” button somewhere in cyberspace, we will examine how these systems of social organization and resource distribution influence the lives of the subjects they bind. Crime, poverty, violence, addiction, corruption, and obscenity threaten to make each of these “places” untenable despite a facade of economic success. We will question to what extent do characters have agency over their lives, and how their available choices intersect with the political, social, and economic institutions that eventually come to govern local power dynamics and organizational hierarchies. In addition, we will become attuned to richly expressive American slang that suffuses and shapes each narrative, as students will experience bursts of dialogue and description that grow as unregulated and pragmatic as the dramatized dealings at the heart of each text. These, though, are only general impressions, places where we as a class might start our thinking. Our aim is never to confirm what we think we already know, but to examine some uniquely American stories told in variety of vernaculars to see what pans out.

To guide our inquiry, we will bring interdisciplinary scholarship about labor markets, competitive strategy frameworks, disability studies, and human cognition and attention to bear on the narratives we read and watch, as well as borrow interpretive tools from digital humanities and media studies. Course texts and screen media may include: Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian; HBO’s Deadwood (Season 1); Simon Ortiz, From Sand Creek; There Will Be Blood (film); The Godfather Parts I and II (film); Lynn Nottage, Sweat; HBO’s The Wire (Season 3); The Social Network (film).

Content Warning:

Some of the content we will engage with in this course is graphic in nature and intended for an adult audience. Specifically, there are scenes of extreme violence, explicit language, and illicit drug use, as well as some nudity and self-harm. While we will engage with this material through an academic and artistic lens to gain distance and perspective, some students may find it challenging. Please consider the content when choosing to enroll in the course and ask the teachers clarifying questions as needed. 

Reading Load:

Each week, students will read approximately 100 pages of text or watch 3-4 hours of media to prepare for class, which translates into 33 pages or 2 hours of media screening as homework per session on average. Please note: class time will not be used to screen episodes in their entirety. Close-reading papers involving media “texts” will require students to watch with closed captions to transcribe dialogue for quotations.

Major semester course. 1.5 credits. Form V.

As the title suggests, this course is primarily about how writers use the sea in their stories.  The sea is both tempestuous and calming, a symbol of rebirth, life, and the struggle to find meaning.  Core questions include:  How do these writers invoke the sea?  How does the sea work as a symbol?  What is behind the eyes of the writers when they view the sea?  Does a journey to sea lead to freedom?  Does it provide an escape?  Do writers view the sea the same way or differently? Of course, Herman Melville’s Moby Dick is one of the seminal texts in American literature; in its wake are countless works in which the sea plays a pivotal role, including Andrea Barrett’s Ship Fever, Annie Proulx’s The Shipping News, and Charles Johnson’s Middle Passage. Collectively, these stories represent a rich body of literature, and they will form the focus of this course. 

Furthermore, we want to explore how texts interact with each other.  When an author alludes to other works, as John Gardner does in “The King’s Indian,” these works become a part of the text.  In this case, a piece of literature exists in a multi-textual world; not only does it include a symbol of the sea, but there exists a response to earlier texts that share the same symbol. In these ways, texts draw from their literary forebearers. Gardner’s “The King’s Indian” purposefully alludes to Moby Dick (among others) to serve as a bedrock for a new story and to link the two literary worlds. Identifying and exploring these connections gives us a deeper appreciation, not just of particular literary texts, but also their relationship to other texts.

Major semester course. 1.5 credits. Form VI.

In his 1955 essay The Myth of Sisyphus, Algerian philosopher Albert Camus asserts that all of humanity suffers from an “intellectual ailment,” a keen appetite for happiness and understanding that is ultimately stymied by the irrational and “unreasonable silence of the world” (28). What results is the absurd: a sharp “divorce between the mind that desires and the world that disappoints” (50). Rather than resulting in human despair, however, the absurd, according to Camus, can lead to personal honor, an individual acknowledgement and acceptance of the ongoing battle “between [...] conscious revolt and the darkness in which it struggles” (61). Facing the contradictory truths of the world but equipped with “lucid reason noting its limits” (49), we are like the Greek king Sisyphus, rolling the boulder up the steep hill again and again, aware of the futility of our actions but elevated to heroic status by the dignity of our perseverance.

After unraveling more of Camus’s own logic in this course, we will explore the strange, at times alienating, absurdity of various 20th and 21st century world authors, from Franz Kafka, Virginia Woolf, and Samuel Beckett to Haruki Murakami, Ben Okri, and Italo Calvino. The course will move through three overlapping sections, which might be interpreted as varying artistic responses to absurdism: existential, magical, and comical. Whichever section they inhabit, each of our authors examines the plight of the modern individual peering into the darkness of the world--shuddering, crying, laughing--striving to make sense of what is, finally, nonsensical.

Major semester course. 1.5 credits. Form VI.

In this elective, students will examine a number of texts that take crime and punishment as their main subject. With these texts, students will look at crime and punishment from various points of view, including those of the victims, the perpetrators, and members of the justice system. These are their stories. Students will read Crime and Punishment by Dostoevsky in its entirety and watch films, read poems, plays, and memoirs. Some readings will be excerpts from longer texts.

Major semester course. 1.5 credits. Forms VI.

This course looks at the ways in which writers have tried to make sense of a world that they find hostile and alien by portraying ethical people searching for guidelines in an unethical world. Because of the eclectic variety of poetry, novels, and plays, students will be exposed to a wide variety of styles and will have an opportunity to test a number of different critical approaches. Each work will be placed in its historical context with an analysis of the intellectual and artistic world in which it was written; there will be a particular attempt to show that literature is not created in a vacuum, that it is derived from the conditions of the world in which the author lived. Authors may include García Márquez, Ibsen, Shakespeare, Graham Greene, Oscar Wilde, and Maxine Hong Kingston.

How do you write a substantial, college-level research paper in the discipline of English? In this course, students will take a deep dive into research methods and literary theory. Our aim will be to understand the many decisions that scholars make when constructing chapter-length critical analyses. Questions include: what are the different lenses that scholars use to analyze literature, and how do you decide which one(s) will inform your perspective? What steps do you take to begin a research project, and in what order? How do you keep track of and organize a large batch of secondary sources? To answer these questions, we will read a sample of literary theorists, as well as scholars who use these theorists in their work. We will also explore several prominent interdisciplinary subfields, including Black studies, feminist and LGBTQ studies, environmental humanities, and digital humanities. The final third of the course will be devoted to each student conducting original research on a topic of their choice. At this point in the term, our class will become a writing workshop in which students will receive feedback on each component of their projects, from their research question, to their thesis statement, to their draft. Students will be selected for this course on the basis of a research proposal on the topic they wish to pursue for their final project.

Successfully scheduled students will receive information over the summer about how to prepare for the course.
 

The Covid-19 pandemic caused seismic shifts in basic realities for the world’s population.  Billions of people struggled to confront the anxiety of potential infection, the loss of friends and loved ones, and the “new normal” of everyday life. For as transformative as these experiences have been, they are not unique in human history. Literature reveals a long legacy of struggles and triumphs in humanity’s confrontation with contagious disease.  

This course will examine the ways in which literature grapples with the uncertainties of plague-era life, creates a language for understanding the trauma of these times, and ultimately transforms us. A central subject of analysis will be contagion as metaphor, including the processes through which interpretive language and broader worldviews become contagious. 

“Viral Literature” will not merely focus on the experience of illness or quarantine; it will illuminate human resilience in the face of trauma and uncertainty.  Exploring perspectives that include and transcend the present pandemic, the course will implore students to ponder what it means to retain our humanity when disease forces us to reimagine what it means to be human. Possible texts include excerpts from Giovanni Boccaccio’s The Decameron, Albert Camus’ The Plague, Geraldine Brooks’ Year of Wonders, Ling Ma’s Severance, and Zadie Smith’s Imitations.

For the purposes of this course, we define The Apocalypse as the attempt of surviving humans to reboot civilization after civilization has fallen.  It is a societal rebirth, therefore, and the next step is to use literature and film to determine if human conflict is derived from our attempt to return to a primordial state.  This return, of course, is futile because humans can’t return to an original state without a fall.  The opening question is, “Would Colonel Custer have become like Colonel Kurtz had he survived The Battle of Little Bighorn?” Each text will give us layers to consider and ask us to question the nature of humanity.  Some of the movies we watch will be discussed in conjunction with their appropriate texts, and we will ask questions about the choices they make.  There will be frequent, short writing assignments to assess the texts we’ve read and to address the operating questions.  In addition to Francis Ford Coppolla’s 1979 film “Apocalypse Now,” possible texts include Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker, and Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake.

Major semester course. 1.5 credits. Form VI.

In his essay, "Black to the Future," author Mark Dery, who coined the term "Afrofuturism," poses the driving question behind it: "Can a community whose past has been deliberately rubbed out, and whose energies have subsequently been consumed by the search for legible traces of its history, imagine possible futures?" Jamie Broadnax explains the genre of Afrofuturism by saying, "What makes Afrofuturism significantly different from standard science fiction is that it’s steeped in ancient African traditions and black identity. A narrative that simply features a black character in a futuristic world is not enough. To be Afrofuturism, it must be rooted in and unapologetically celebrate the uniqueness and innovation of black culture." Students in the Afrofuturism elective will read, view, listen to, and analyze a range of texts that epitomize Afrofuturism and also point to the roots and reasons for the genre. Starting with contemporary works such as Black Panther and Janelle Monae's Metropolis suites, students will dip back in time to more foundational texts such as James Weldon Johnson’s Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man and "The Comet" by W.E.B. Dubois. Texts will include poetry, short stories, novels, art, music, and film. Activities and assessments will range in variety, too: discussions, projects, papers, and presentations.
 

Major semester course. 1.5 credits. Forms VI.

This is a workshop course for students who want to get in touch with their writer’s voice, who feel moved to express themselves through poems, stories, sketches, and other traditional forms of writing. The only prerequisite is the understanding that the romantic image of oneself as a writer is not enough; one must actually write. The assignments will be fun, exciting, expanding, sometimes scary, but they will be work. Every student will be expected to complete a writing exercise in preparation for every class meeting. Assignments will be supplemented with readings from the texts Telling Stories and Literary Nonfiction along with assorted poems, short stories, and handouts. Toward the end of the course, the short exercises will lead to the construction of a longer, more complex work. Students will be encouraged to submit their best pieces for publication.

Major semester course. 1.5 credits. Forms VI.

This cross-cultural course is devoted to the literature whose basis is a world where archetypal magic is very much a facet of everyday life. The various literary and visual works from around the world will explore how the traditional issues of people confronting themselves, their societies, their environment, nature, and the metaphysical are influenced by a sense of wonder and magic. Besides the magical content of the course, the form of the works will also be examined within the context of the cultures that produced them. Artists who may be studied include Jean Rhys, Ang Lee, Isabel Allende, Franz Kafka, Toni Morrison, Gabriel García Márquez, and Laura Esquivel.

1.5 credits, spring semester, Forms VI.

Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey have been at the heart of western literature for about 2,800 years, and these stories of war, betrayal, jealousy, and hubris continue to engage and enthrall modern readers. The myths about the Trojan War, the Greek and Trojan warriors, the women and children whose lives were ended or shattered, and the gods with whom they interacted pervade western culture through art, literature, film, and archaeology and provide a critical foundation for understanding the many cultural references to these works.

Did Homer write both of these works? What was the war really about? Is there any archaeology to support the narrative or at least to tell us something about Mycenaean culture? Who was the real hero of the Iliad, Achilles or someone else? Who were Andromache, Thersites, Dido, Eumaeus? Why did some gods fight on one side and some on the other? What happened to the survivors on either side?

Major semester course. 1.5 credits. Form VI.

Was Shakespeare, as his contemporary Ben Jonson wrote of him, “not of an age but for all time”? This course will attempt to answer that question by providing an in-depth study of the playwright, five of his major plays, and a variety of secondary sources. The goals will be to explore the four types of plays Shakespeare wrote (tragedies, comedies, histories, and romances), to examine how Shakespeare was very much a man of his own time, and to consider the critical debate and inquiry that continue to surround the Bard. In addition to the plays themselves, students will read some literary history and criticism and write scholarly critical analyses themselves. Possible reading selections include the sonnets, Twelfth Night, Hamlet, Henry IV Part I, The Merchant of Venice, and Richard III. Critical articles will generally be included in the required texts as well as in supplemental sources in the library.

One of the defining features of the Pingry education is the community’s adherence to the Honor Code with its emphasis on the common good. This course will provide an opportunity for students to situate their developing habits of civic virtue in a broader context by surveying the intellectual and literary history of the common good, analyzing it as a motif in both political and moral philosophy and world literature. Cross-disciplinary and comparative analysis will support interpretation of varied perspectives on social responsibility, community obligations, and individual rights. How does honor shape community? What if the common good conflicts with self-interest? How does literature – from narrative fiction to slam poetry – make us better citizens? The course will consider such questions and culminate in a community engagement project of students’ choice.