English: Politics and Minority Art 2 One semester (Offered Second Semester) Prerequisites: None
information, developing sources, finding an “angle,” and writing for a mass audience. Students will work in teams to report, edit, fact-check, and publish their own work. We will follow developing news stories, study pieces by great reporters of the past, and bring current masters of the craft into the classroom. At the same time, each student will go through the entire process, from conception to publication, of reporting two original pieces—one news story and one feature story—for the class publication, The Ligg . Text: The Associated Press Stylebook
This course focuses on the same issues as Politics and Minority Art 1, but it examines different texts. Students who take the first course will experience a deeper exploration of similar topics, but the first course is not a prerequisite; the previous offering is relevant but not required or necessary. Texts: The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, Black Boy
English: Short Story One Semester (Offered First Semester) Prerequisites: None
English: Poetry One Semester (Offered First Semester) Prerequisites: None
This class will focus exclusively on the short story, investigating a variety of literary issues, some of which are universal and some of which are unique to the genre. Due to the brevity of each text, students will have an opportunity to encounter and analyze a much wider range of authors and writing styles than in a class that reads standard-length novels and plays. A central goal of the course is to help students to discover and define personal preferences. The works for this class have been selected with an eye to serious, adult-themed literature that would serve as preparation for university study. Text: Coursepack
This course is designed to help foster close reading and critical thinking through the study of poetry. Students will expand upon their working understanding of poetry beyond the University Liggett School core English curriculum and examine how poets use imagery, structure, diction, implication, and voice in order to explore a representational and thematic study of twentieth-century poetics. In this course, students will focus heavily on contemporary American poets and the dynamic cultural conversation they strive to initiate, not only with us as readers, but with the poets who came before them. Text: The Penguin Anthology of American Poetry
English: Women’s Literature One Semester (Offered Second Semester) Prerequisites: None
English: Politics and Minority Art 1 One semester (Offered First Semester) Prerequisites: None
This course explores the history of women’s literature and how it engages with gender assumptions, norms, and expectations. Feminist and New Historicist critical theories underpin our approach to analyzing texts. The course asks students to develop their own answers to the following essential questions: How have women been historically represented in society and in literature? What stereotypes has literature created, enforced, and/or perpetuated? Who benefits and who suffers when these views become widely accepted and seen as natural? How do the traditional representations, responsibilities, and roles of women affect women’s lives, bodies, and minds? How do they affect women’s abilities to assume non-traditiona l roles in home, at work, and in society? How do writers support, resist, and/or undermine dominant ideas about gender? How do they define and portray both oppression and empowerment? How does women’s literature explore the intersections of gender with other identities (race, class, sexuality, ability, etc.)? How might the definitions of “womanhood” and “femininity” need reconstructing? Text: Coursepack
Examining the art of minority populations raises the questions of universality and exceptionalism–does minority art illuminate universal human experience or is it uniquely relevant to minority points of view? What responsibilities do minority artists have to their audience(s), and are those responsibilities different from those of artists who belong to majority demographics? What are the definitions and differences between “selling out” and remaining true to one’s identity? This class will study a sampling of works from various writers to explore these questions through the lens of African-American experiences. While history and politics are significant aspects of this endeavor, the primary focus is literary. In the course of exploring the nature and goals of literature, students will engage sensitive issues, consider viewpoints perhaps different from their own, and question their own assumptions about artistic and social issues–all in a responsible and rigorous way. Texts: Their Eyes Were Watching God, The Bluest Eye, Kindred
67 Upper School
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