Exposition is a required fall term course for Sixth Form students that focuses on the personal essay. Students read a range of published essays that might include works by James Baldwin, Joan Didion, Ocean Vuong, David Foster Wallace, Zadie Smith, Amy Tan, and E.B. White. Students typically produce four essays, and the course utilizes the workshop model which requires clear, consistent, and thoughtful feedback from the teacher and students. After receiving feedback, students are expected to revise their work extensively before submitting a final draft. In this way, the course emphasizes the role of revision in the writing process and the deep relationship between good thinking and good writing.

In Fourth Form English, students examine a range of literary works including the novel, short fiction, drama, and poetry. Authors that students will study include, but are not limited to, Shakespeare, William Faulkner, James Baldwin, Gabriel García Márquez, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Jhumpa Lahiri, Ha Jin, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Teachers emphasize close reading and clear, focused writing that exhibits an understanding of literary and poetic devices. The majority of Fourth Form writing is analytical, though students will also write personal narrative and creative works.

Open to Sixth and Fifth Formers. Who (or what) is an American? What has the term “American” meant throughout history to the people living in what we call North and South America? How might issues of race, ethnicity, class, and gender among other social constructs inform and impinge on our definitions of “American” identity and culture? How do literature and film help to create a national and/or transnational community? Through an introduction to the literary and cultural productions of the Americas from the pre-Columbian era to the present, this course seeks to explore the complexities of and broadness of the terms “America” and “Americanness.”

The course will expose students to a broad range of films and literature emerging from the United States, Canada, the Caribbean, and Latin America. (All readings will be in English translation where applicable.) As this is a class with a comparative focus, students will be encouraged to draw connections between and highlight differences among authors throughout the Americas. Topics for the course may include: inter-American creation stories and foundational myths, formation of American republics, North-South dialogues, and American modernism(s). Possible authors and directors for the course include, but are not limited to: Langston Hughes, Walt Whitman, Maya Angelou, Walter Salles, José Enrique Rodó, José Vasconcelos, José Martí, Elena Garro, Fernando Ortiz, Ruben Dario, Herman Melville, Nicolás Guillén, Fernando Meirelles, Jorge Luis Borges, Carlos Fuentes, Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, Clarice Lispector, Rachel de Queiroz, and Laila Lalami.

Open to Sixth and Fifth Formers. In this class, we will start with some excerpts of Gothic literature from the 18th and 19th centuries, then trace the genre’s tendrils as they continue to reappear again and again in literature, art, and pop culture. The villains and supposed heroes depicted in these texts can tell us about the fears of the cultures/people we will explore, which will open our discussions to topics of race, gender, class, sexuality, and ability/disability. This class will draw on a range of authors that may include Tracey Baptiste, Ambrose Bierce, Octavia Butler, Neil Gaiman, Shirley Jackson, David Hoon Kim, Florence Marryat, and Edgar Allan Poe. In writing assignments that will likely include three papers, students will not only consider how the monsters in these texts reflect the fears of the people creating and reading the stories, but they will also confront the monstrosity within their own histories and narratives.

 Open to Sixth and Fifth Formers. T.S. Eliot’s modernist masterpiece, The Waste Land, is widely considered one of the most important poems of the twentieth century. Woven through the poem are allusions to texts that span across time, such as Dante’s The Divine Comedy, the legend of the Holy Grail, Shakespeare’s plays, art, popular song lyrics, Eastern and Western philosophy, the Bible, and the Upanishads. By studying excerpts from these texts, students will explore the way in which Eliot’s intertextuality transformed the way poetry was written. The class will culminate in a writing project where students will spend the last few weeks of the course writing their own prose poem, in imitation of Eliot, using material from their own lives - books, mythology, songs, film, media, art, history, sports, politics, cultures and traditions, etc.- as sources of inspiration. 

Open to Sixth and Fifth Formers. We have turned to images of the future in literature for hundreds of years, often projecting our fears, anxieties, and hopes onto imagined lands and times. Utopian and dystopian narratives encompass a range of different possibilities, shifting from so-called paradises to hellish landscapes that uncover and voice core questions that we must contend with as a society—what communal values do we hold most dear? What do we most fear? Can we imagine a place free of inequality? How do we define identity in relation to authority? Could a “perfect” society last? These stories have also offered the theoretical possibility of an escape from different systems of power, even those so deeply embedded that they seem immovable and eternal. We will study accounts from the 16th century on to explore what these narratives can tell us about some of these societies in the past as well as our own, an urgent register now as we confront the active dismantling of democracies around us and the haunting image of what might replace them. Course readings might include works by Thomas More, H.G. Wells, Ursula Le Guin, Philip Roth, Suzanne Collins, Mat Johnson, Octavia Butler, Cormac McCarthy, and Arundhati Roy.