2 semesters, 1 creditPrerequisite: English II or American Studies
English III students select from a range of course offerings. Options may shift from year to year based on student interest and schedule availability.
-Everything Old is New Again: Texts in Conversation
This course engages students with canonical texts and related contemporary texts to practice perspective-taking and identify conversations in literature. Students will explore poems, short stories, films, and novels. The course will build on foundational reading, writing, and discussion skills and employ self-reflective and analytical writing. Students will grapple with identifying and weighing themes that recur in literature. They will create and attempt to answer essential questions about the predictive power of authors past and the choices creatives of the present make in homage or argument. Texts will include familiar and diverse contemporary discoveries. An example from the first semester includes magical realism and hauntings from Edgar Allan Poe, Charlotte Gilman, and Helen Oyeyemi’s White Is for Witching. Later in the year, students explore narrator perspectives with a dive into The Odyssey and Circe. We will discuss, write, and critically argue together as we study literature and ourselves.
-Reading World Religions
Both ancient and contemporary texts are used to explore religions and spiritual philosophies from around the world. The objective is to dive into literature that sparks a curiosity to learn more about the religion that it highlights, gaining a better understanding with each layer that is peeled back and examined. Reading materials consist of selections from sacred texts such as the Koran, Bible, and Torah in addition to the Sutras, Vedas, and Tao Te Ching. Students will look at creation myths, devotional poetry and songs, plus the folktales associated with pantheistic religions. Contemporary literature selections rely heavily on religion, whether philosophically or contextually. The class will explore the poetry of Rumi, Donne, and Dante, as well as the novels of Diamant, Mafouz, Mishima, and Hesse. Plan on hearing from guest speakers and taking field trips. Assessments will be mostly comparative literary analysis, research, and some creative writing and projects.
-Pop-culture: A Literary Exploration
Social trends in television, movies, clothing styles, and music have a tremendous influence in our daily lives. Popular literature can have an equally compelling impact. Although in academic settings we often read the “best books” of an era, we don’t always read the most popular texts. Pop-culture: A Literary Exploration is a chance to look at best-selling authors through the ages and what compelled readers to gravitate toward these works.
Part of this journey includes reflecting on our own time as we explore what popular works motivate us emotionally, socially, and economically. Blockbuster films without much plot tend to fare far better at the box office than do the winners of the Cannes film festival; humanity is funny that way. It is important to note that as we go back in time to earlier eras, access to writing and to the education that helps to cultivate effective writers was limited by both racism and class distinctions. We will interrogate those silences through our readings and class discussion.
Students will read excerpts from Robinson Crusoe, Gone with the Wind, and Hunger Games as well as full-length texts, choosing from The Murder of Delicia, Kite Runner, Where the Crawdad Sings, Beloved, Angela’s Ashes, and On the Road. Students will watch Mockingjay, Avatar, and Life of Pi and keep track of top songs and best-selling novel lists throughout the year. Explorations of the works will consider their historical context and their relevance (or not) for contemporary audiences. Student assessments are based on class discussions, projects, and writing.
-Murder and Mayhem Honors
Prerequisite: Department approval of a writing portfolio. The portfolio will include samples of the student’s work from English II. Admission is at the discretion of the English Department Chair and reading committee. (Grade 11)
Murder and Mayhem will explore the “dark side” of the human character. Students will read novels, plays, poetry, short stories, and essays as a way to speak and write about the nature of evil. The class explores society and the human mind to discover what makes people do wrong. They study the impact of retribution, both individual and societal, for wrongs done. What does it take to be a villain? What is the source of evil? Who is to blame if one engages in villainous activities—the individual? Society? The family/ neighborhood/ environment in which the person is raised? Are we villains if we do not actively confront evil? Is redemption possible? Texts may include The Inferno, Hamlet, Crime and Punishment, Heart of Darkness, Native Son and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
-Shakespeare in the Wild Honors
Prerequisite: Department approval of a writing portfolio. The portfolio will include samples of the student’s work from English II (for rising juniors) or English III (for rising seniors). Admission is at the discretion of the English Department Chair and reading committee. (Grades 11 & 12)
Students navigate the environmental landscape of early modern England, using Shakespeare’s work as their north star. While some openly embraced England’s growing power to map, transform, and dominate the natural world during this period, others decried it, raising concerns about resource extraction, land enclosure, pollution, species loss, and deforestation—concerns that still persist today. While some turned to Christian doctrine to defend humankind’s right to master the earth, others feared the cost of trafficking in this rhetoric, reminding us that Christian doctrine also urges us to steward and take care of the earth. Still others called for more creative thinking—asking us to imagine alternative ways of inhabiting, managing, and caring for the earth. With Shakespeare at the center of this course, students deepen their understanding of his work as a record and rebuke of the modes of thinking, practices, and policies that shaped the early modern English landscape.
Through close readings of Shakespeare’s plays, we will encounter forests and trees, earth and sea, stone and sky, listening carefully to the stories we tell about them. We will brave the “blasted heath” with Macbeth and marvel at the “moving grove” that foretells his fall, weather Prospero’s storm and seek peace on the island’s shore. We will be undone by Lear’s despair for having “ta’en / Too little care of this,” and remade by the Duke’s deep love for “sermons in stones, and good in everything.” Along the way, we will engage with ecocritical literary theory and sample environmental writing from across literary history to situate Shakespeare in a long, ongoing conversation about nature, ecology, and humankind’s relationship with the earth. By the end of the year, we will have a deeper, more comprehensive view on Shakespeare’s ecological thinking and, more broadly, the role stories play in shaping our perceptions and treatment of the natural world. As a reminder, this is an honors seminar, meaning that students are expected to complete a substantial amount of reading, writing, and research.
-Philosophy Honors
Prerequisite: Department approval of a writing portfolio. The portfolio will include samples of the student’s work from English II (for rising juniors) or English III (for rising seniors). Admission is at the discretion of the English Department Chair and reading committee. (Grades 11 & 12)
How do I live a good life? What can I know for sure? Does God, beauty, or evil exist? And really, how do I know that the earth is round and the moon is not a delicious wheel of provolone cheese? This class will engage with life’s most compelling and vexing questions by analyzing and critiquing the musings of philosophers from across the globe from antiquity to the present. Moreover, each student will interrogate, evolve, and refine their own thoughts on such questions. All the while, we will resist pat answers and conventional thinking, aware, as Slavoj Zizek reminds us, that “the task of philosophy is not to provide answers, but to show how the way we perceive a problem can itself be part of the problem.” The class will follow the progression of the “Western” tradition of philosophy that emerged in Ancient Greece and trace its global dissemination.