English Department

A lasting and relevant art form, the essay endures as a popular and useful genre of writing, executed by students, academics, writers, journalists, and politicians all over the world. Due to many essays’ relative short length and topicality, it may become the type of writing you read—and compose—the most in your adult life. By applying simple concepts of observation, reason and common sense, or intellect, essayists make illuminating discoveries and explore disparate topics, examining them from myriad angles to see what they might uncover and hoping to open readers’ minds to new ways of thinking about themselves and the world. In this course, students will learn about various types of essays—personal, political, and opinion—how to read them well, and how essayists use particular forms of argumentation, as well as rhetorical skills, to effectively persuade. Students will also learn how to compose a well-crafted personal essay for college applications. The course culminates in students writing an opinion essay on a topic of their own choosing, which will be considered for publication in Tusitala, the School’s newspaper. Teacher-selected readings will complement assigned readings from The Seagull Reader: Essays, They Say I Say with Readings, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s We Should All Be Feminists, and Marina Keegan’s The Opposite of Loneliness.

From Greek tragedy to contemporary drama, we will consider 2000 years of dramatic representations of love and betrayal, family secrets, sibling rivalry, and the pursuit of power within the microcosm of the family unit. We will view the family dynamic at its best and worst and consider the relationship between the past and the present, collective and individual memory, and the depth of what it means to belong. We will also consider the effect of social and historical contexts on the creation and reception of the genre by studying various texts and schools, including realism, tragedy, absurdism, and verse drama. We will spend time performing scenes in class, writing one-act plays, and engaging in analytical responses, including a comparative essay. Our texts may include Euripides’ Medea, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire, August Wilson’s Fences, Quiara, Alegria Hudes’ Water by the Spoonful, and Paula Vogel’s How I Learned to Drive. 

Gothic literature delights readers through its tantalizing combination of suspense, secrecy, the supernatural, and—sometimes—romance. In this course we will trace the development of gothic fiction from its origins in eighteenth-century England to present-day expressions of the macabre on the large and small screens. Students will explore the ways in which frightful stories often reveal the underlying fears and anxieties of an era, from the concerns about reverse colonization in Victorian England to the ways in which slavery and Native American removal haunt the literature of the United States. Readings will include Walpole’s Castle of Otranto, Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Stoker’s Dracula, and short stories by Edgar Allan Poe, Arthur Conan Doyle, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Angela Carter, and Carmen Maria Machado. The course culminates in an examination of the many strains of a more contemporary gothic style in Lynch’s Twin Peaks, Peele’s Get Out, and Childish Gambino’s “This is America.”

The British author Ian McEwan wrote that “the novella is the perfect form of prose fiction…long enough for a reader to inhabit a world or a consciousness and be kept there, short enough to be read in a sitting or two and for the whole structure to be held in mind at first encounter…” He also noted that “to sit with a novella is analogous to watching a play or a longish movie.” In this class, we will read iconic novellas from the 20th and 21st centuries and examine their adaptation to the screen. We will focus specifically on how authors structure and execute this particular form, create plot and subplot, develop character and convey theme(s) in a relatively short amount of space. Additionally, we will examine the transition of the novella to screenplay and eventually to film, seeing how the screenwriters and directors construct their adaptations. In-class and evening screenings of the films will occur. Readings have included Stephen King’s The Body and Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption, Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Steve Martin’s Shopgirl, Norman Maclean’s A River Runs Through It, and Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist.

This course allows students to get curious about how stories get written— and about how to engage their own experience and imagination to create original fiction. By examining a range of short stories—from Kate Chopin and Ernest Hemingway to Chimamanda Ngoze Adichie and Ted Chiang—we study and apply salient lessons of craft to our own writing. Much of the course focuses on analysis of our assigned readings and discussions about the author’s craft. We delineate what it means to read as a critic and writer. Students write craft essays on style, conflict, subtext, point of view, abstract and concrete language, and character interiority. In the final weeks, students experience a classic writing workshop in which they write their own short stories and serve as editors of their peers’ writing; they are also encouraged to submit to the School’s literary journal, Vailima. Teacher-selected readings will complement assigned readings from The Penguin Book of the Modern American Short Story, The Modern Library Writer’s Workshop, and They Say I Say.