Senior Humanities
Grade 12 students choose among four elective courses: Advanced Placement English Literature and Composition; 20th Century Culture and Thought; Advanced Studies in Writing Styles; and Literature and Film.
Advanced Placement (AP) English Literature
Students in this course engage in the careful reading and critical analysis of adult-level poems, short stories, novels, and plays encompassing a variety of genres and time periods. Careful, thoughtful reading is expected as students take time to unpack a work’s complexity, understand the various levels of meaning, and analyze the author’s methods. Students employ established literary theories for their analysis and develop an appreciation for the scope and influence of particular works. The composition portion of the course is challenging, in that students are required to write relatively brief, carefully worded, expertly supported critical essays at least twice a week. Students are expected to complete a quarter-long, self-regulated poetry project. Preparation for the Advanced Placement exam is part of the course. Among the authors read over the year are: Sophocles, O’Connor, Alexie, Ballard, Hawthorne, Morrison, Baldwin, J. Irving, Atwood, Hardy, Mukerjee, Perkins-Gilman, Shakespeare and Shelley.
20th Century Culture and Thought
This elective course is designed to introduce students to the major 20th Century cultural and philosophical developments that occurred along side the well-known political events. Students study a host of different texts, from literature and history, to poetry and philosophy. To better prepare students for their impending transition to college, the course is strictly writing based, as each semester the class is asked to turn in at least one major paper, take two essay-based exams, and compose a number of shorter pieces based on the readings. Works read in the first semester include No Exit by Jean-Paul Sartre, The Nietzsche Reader, and sections from Studs Terkel’s Hard Times.
Creative Writing
This course involves the study of the organized structure of poetic words, lines, and stanzas, as well as the overall study of sentences, paragraphs, and larger discursive patterns that will introduce students to the semantic, structural, and rhetorical resources of the language in order to elicit a response from their writings. Students will learn how to organize their thoughts into creative but clear, focused, and logical structures (poetry, short stories, plays, and creative nonfiction). Students will learn the logical and functional relationships of words to lines, lines to stanzas; words to sentences, sentences to paragraphs (within stories, plays, or essays). In addition, students will expand their creative language tools in vocabulary through systematic activities that will enhance the understanding of the terminology needed to effectively communicate in specific and creatively written formats. Finally, students will create an end-of-the-year portfolio in a creative format which showcases their cumulative creative work for the year.
Literature and Film
This course explores the complex relationship between literature and film. Select novels and plays are analyzed in relation to film versions of the same works in order to understand the possibilities and problems involved in the transposition to film. The course explores texts and films from the 1930s through modern day cinema, spanning several genres and literary/cinematic movements. By reading literary texts alongside their film adaptations, students will come to a deeper understanding of the ways in which artists, both literary and cinematic, create meaning and artistic experience via their respective mediums. At the same time, students will learn and apply the terminology of film analysis, both those terms shared with literature (characterization, setting, theme, etc.) and those specific to film (mise-en-scene, lighting, sound, etc.). To prepare students for their transition to college, the course requires weekly participation in a class blog, formal writing assignments, and two substantial group presentations. Among the texts and films students examine over the year are: Gone with the Wind, The Big Sleep, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, A Streetcar Named Desire, Macbeth, and No Country for Old Men.