English

Featured Courses

AP English Language and Composition

This college-level English course, open to eleventh and twelfth graders, engages students in the task of becoming better readers of prose written in a variety of disciplines, during different eras, and within many rhetorical contexts. It also helps students develop their writing skills so that they can communicate their ideas effectively to target audiences. Most importantly, AP Language challenges students’ thinking about the texts that they read and cultivates their abilities to parse information; to recognize fallacies of argument; to grapple with misinformation; and to make effective and productive decisions based on their assessments. In other words, AP Language is the study of rhetoric and rhetorical strategies, in students’ own work as well as in others’. Students use their honed critical reading, thinking, and writing skills for a variety of purposes, including their best possible performance on the Advanced Placement Language and Composition Exam in the spring. Of utmost importance, this course is designed to raise students’ awareness of the interactions among a writer’s purpose/purposes, audience, occasion, subject, and techniques for communicating effectively.

AP English Literature and Composition

This is a college-level course open to seniors. The central focus of the course is how authors use the resources of language to express meaning in imaginative poetry and fiction. Class discussion might cover topics as diverse as close syntactical analysis of a single sentence, a poet’s evocative use of allusion, and the role of hubris and catharsis in Shakespeare. Over and over, students are required to move beyond mere observation and get to argument, to an assertion about why authorial choices matter. The daily work of the course prepares students both for the AP exam in May and for a lifetime of voracious independent reading.

Outsiders in American Literature

In the canon of American literature, we see a fair share of misfits and outsiders. Whether it’s a mischievous Tom Sawyer or a disillusioned John Proctor, these types of literary characters and their authors shine a light on the dynamic American experience. Students will explore various genres, authors, and characters with an eye on those individuals who find themselves on the outside looking in.

Gothic Literature: Are You Afraid of the Dark?

In this course, students dive into the murky depths of literary Gothicism. Gothic writers, the most well-known of whom is Edgar Allan Poe, dedicated themselves to exploring the deepest, darkest parts of the human consciousness. Themes of madness, lost love, the grotesque, the supernatural, isolation, alienation, and death abound in these spine-tingling stories that will keep you up listening for things that go bump in the night.

Full Course Catalog

The Upper School English Department encourages students to read as writers and write as readers so that they come to recognize and appreciate both the art and the craft of verbal expression. Through careful, active reading and the respectful exchange of ideas in discussion, our students come to understand rich texts, recognizing the intentional choices writers make–from diction and syntax to patterns of allusion and figurative language–and appreciating how those choices create meaning. Influential literary works that span eras, genres, and cultures provide opportunities for a broad investigation of the human experience and the vast world of ideas. We want our students to become lifelong readers, who reach for a book both for pleasure and for their own edification, so we encourage them to maintain a robust independent reading life beyond the classroom.