English Electives

ENGLISH

Electives are prioritized for Class 11 and Class 12. Electives must be taken in addition to core courses each year.

Creative Writing

Semester course For Classes 11 and 12

Prerequisites: department approval This workshop-based course will examine both prose and poetry. Students will learn how poems written in form can actually free the writer’s creativity. They will study works from the Romantic era to today and learn to write in many different verse forms. Students will also: read a diverse selection of short stories to study the craft; write essays about their reading; produce their own short stories to be workshopped by their peers; learn how to submit stories for publication to literary magazines; and submit to the school’s literary magazine, The Drumlin.

Ethical Philosophy Honors Seminar

Semester course For Classes 11 and 12

Prerequisites: department approval Should we allow genetic editing in humans? Do people have a right to death? Do businesses have social responsibilities? Should we encourage automation in the workforce? Is it wrong to eat meat? Besides providing an introduction to the philosophical study of ethics, this course is designed to help students develop their abilities to read, explicate, analyze, and evaluate philosophical literature, write and express themselves well about their own ethical positions, and think critically and analytically about ethical issues. Students will consider questions about: reasons we might have to act ethically; whether there are objective ethical facts and how we know them; and how one might think about what it means to live a good life. In asking these questions, we will consider how different views of the rightness or wrongness of action might give us guidance on several contemporary issues.

Film Studies

Semester course For Classes 11 and 12

Prerequisites: department approval Film Studies gives students the tools to comprehend narrative film as a unique, rewarding art form with a language all its own. The course begins with a broad history of motion pictures and aspects of production. From there, students are introduced to a varied selection of movies, filmmakers, and screenplays while developing their own critical and analytical skills. Films to be screened will range from classics such as Citizen Kane, Singin in the Rain, and Casablanca to movies like Pulp Fiction, Fargo, and Memento, and Us. Students explore the ways in which movies define cultural archetypes while addressing shifting mores of gender, family, and politics. Regular writing assignments include analyses, film criticism, and movie reviews. Weekly screenings form an important part of the coursework.

ENGLISH

Gender Studies Honors

Semester course For Classes 11 and 12

Prerequisites: department approval Regarding gender, Simone de Beauvoir once said: “One is not born a woman, one becomes one.” The Gender Studies course will introduce students to gender by having them read, discuss, and write about gender-related topics, which are often connected to issues of race, ethnicity, and class. By studying literature and historical scholarship, students will challenge their understanding and explore critical questions about the fluid constructions of identity, gender, and sexuality and the ways they intersect. They will analyze themes of gendered performance and power in a range of social spheres. By identifying proscribed “gender roles” and understanding that the study of gender is the study of power, students will take the first step in addressing social, economic, and cultural inequalities. Texts may include Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness, Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, Jeffrey Eugenides’s Middlesex and Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice or Twelfth Night.

Literature of Social Justice Honors

Semester course For Classes 11 and 12

Prerequisites: department approval This course will explore how various social movements and beliefs have been portrayed by and/or conveyed through the use of the novel, poetry, essays, and the arts. By reading about sexism, racism, imperialism, and other issues and ideas throughout the course, students will be expected to examine how authors bring to light or critique various social dynamics in the world around them with the goal of helping them better understand your power and ability to create positive change in the world. Students will be expected to think critically about themes that appear not just in one text, but across two or three. In their own writing, students will engage with critical essays related to current events. Overall, this social justice course will provide a foundation for students to explore social justice concepts, issues, and remedies, thereby developing the necessary analytical tools and information to see inequality and injustice and address historical and contemporary issues relevant to their present day lives with a look to future applications. The term will culminate with a research project and oral presentation that combines knowledge of a social justice movement with an analytical understanding of how one of the texts covered in class engages with that movement or how art has contributed to capturing the zeitgeist of a movement and advanced its major goals.

ENGLISH

Modernism: A Culture Honors

Semester course For Classes 11 and 12

Prerequisites: department approval This English course explores a diverse array of American Modernist writers. The Modernism movement spanned the decades from the 1910s to the mid-1940s, an imaginative, haunting, and progressive period of global history. This artistic period disrupted traditional expectations of literature, welcomed new voices, and, with the help of widely circulated literary magazines, popularized the young writers of this era. We will examine the effects of this historical time on writers. Throughout this course, students will read poetry and fiction, explore various arts movements within the Modern era, and explore how turn-of-the-century advancements spurred the global artistic and literary culture of Modernism. Students will read and write as both literary and historical scholars.