ENGLISH
ENGLISH 9: EXPOSITORY WRITING
Teaching students the craft of nonfiction writing is the major objective in this course. To this end, students learn various types of nonfiction methods (including narration, description, comparison/contrast, causal analysis, classification, and argumentation). Students read and write real life nonfiction such as essays on sports, travel, personal conflict, political commentary, opinion pieces, memoirs and analyses of literature. Competence in organization, mechanics, and proofreading are major goals. The process approach to writing is used with students completing multiple drafts and employing peer editing. There is a comprehensive emphasis on the study of grammar and of vocabulary (through stems, prefixes, and suffixes). In conjunction with their history studies, Expository Writing students will write at least one research paper during the year using Modern Language Association (MLA) guidelines. Nonfiction, fiction, drama, and poetry texts read this year will model what good writers do and how they do it. These works include Homer's Odyssey, "Exodus", Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream, McBride's Color of Water, and selected short stories of Bradbury.
ENGLISH 10: WORLD LITERATURE
This is a year-long course whose primary goal is the teaching of thinking, reading, and writing skills through the study of great literature. First semester units focus on the literature of medieval and Renaissance Europe. Representative texts are Beowulf, The Inferno, Canterbury Tales, and Hamlet. Sophomores are responsible for putting on the school's annual Medieval Fair. Second semester focuses on post-colonial and contemporary literatures. Representative texts are Conrad's Heart of Darkness, Dangarembga's Nervous Conditions, Mehta's A River Sutra and short stories and poetry of various regions. In each unit, students will study the cultural and historical backgrounds of the text, deal with matters of comprehension and interpretation, and seek to apply the work to issues relevant their own lives. Writing assignments such as journals, essays, memoirs, short stories, and poetry collections are designed both to encourage original thinking and train students in the skills associated with good writing.
ENGLISH 11: AMERICAN LITERATURE
This course is a year-long study of the American experience from its beginnings in the seventeenth century to the present, paralleling the history department study of United States History. Readings will focus on the literary heritage of America and the ideas and conflicts that drove the formation and development of American civilization such as religion and community, individualism and rebellion, ethnicity and assimilation, and the "American Dream". Additionally, we may study transcendentalism, the Harlem Renaissance, the women's movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the Civil Rights movement, and the twentieth century Native American Renaissance. Examples of writers include Hawthorne, Twain, Crane, Fitzgerald, Wharton, Ellison, dramatist such as Miller and Williams, poets such as Lowell, Holmes, Whitman, Dickinson, Hughes, Frost, Sandburg and Plath and the nonfiction writing of Franklin, Emerson, Thoreau and others. Each study includes memorization, journal responses to the reading, grammar review, vocabulary building from the reading, multiple essays, quizzes, tests.
LITERARY ANALYSIS: SENIOR ENGLISH
This survey course for 12th graders is a genre-based study that teaches students the art of literary analysis. The four major genres--poetry, the short story, drama, and the novel--are covered. Units focus on both the formal structural elements of literature and on literature as a vehicle for communicating meaning. The goal of this class is to develop and hone the students' ability to deal with a work of serious literature--how to identify and interpret figurative language, how to recognize structural features of a work, and how to generalize and articulate the thematic issues that spring from a work. Formalism is the dominant approach, but various other methods of interpretation are introduced, i.e. psychological and historical approaches, archetypal/mythic criticism, and reader response interpretation. A ten-page paper on a novel of the student's choice, written during the spring semester is a requirement for every Seabury senior. There will be units on short fiction, poetry, and Greek tragedy. Examples of major works taught are Bacchae, Oedipus Rex, English Renaissance poetry, modern poetry, Shelley's Frankenstein, Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, Shakespeare's King Lear, and Morrison's Beloved.
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