English

9th Grade: “The Literature of Marginalized Voices”

Essential Questions:

Members of marginalized communities are discriminated against and excluded from equal power distribution based on race, economic status, politics, cultural affiliations or any other distinction that renders them inadequately represented. They are forced to live on “the margins of society” and are prevented from sharing the same privileges and acknowledgement as those individuals who are part of the mainstream. Ninth Grade English will focus on texts written by and about these marginalized voices. All literary genres that reflect this theme will be explored, thoroughly examined, analyzed, and discussed. Students will learn to read critically with a discerning eye for detail and nuance. They will engage in meaningful discourse with one another and share their insights in a safe classroom environment that welcomes all ideas. They will also learn to write with sophistication, organization, and authenticity. While students will continue to refine their formal essay writing skills, they will also enjoy plenty of opportunities for creative writing. Additionally, the course will include multimedia projects designed to encourage students to experience the world around them and express themselves artistically on various platforms. Ultimately, the goal of this course is to raise awareness, sensitivity and compassion for all voices through the study of literature.

Some of these voices “on the margins” belong to the following groups:

The sophomores will delve into themes about otherness and great manipulators. We will begin our year reviewing “otherness” with summer reads from two Nobel Prize winning authors, Doris Lessing and Toni Morrison. In literary theory, the process of “othering” is the depiction or categorization of a person or group of people as distinctly different, often with overtones of dehumanization. We will also be interlopers who learn the secrets of literature’s great manipulators, which may include one or more of the following: Lady Macbeth from Macbeth, Victor Frankenstein from Frankenstein and Amanda Wingfield in The Glass Menagerie. Studying novels, plays, short stories and poetry the students will see literature as a mirror and a window as they are guided thematically. By analyzing emotions, motivations and behaviors of characters, students will become better readers as well as foster empathy. By close textual analysis, we will hone our writing skills as we write using evidence from the texts and learn how to best support our claims. Students will also have the chance to flex their creative writing muscles for Conversatio, poetry assignments, and group projects.

Semester 1: “Dystopia as Mirror”: During first semester of 11th grade, students will grapple with the concept of dystopia as depicted by various authors (novels by George Orwell, Octavia Butler, Dalton Trumbo, and shorter selections from many other writers). In particular, we will seek to discover the boundaries between fictional dystopias and the actual worlds we live in – whether NYC, the United States, or planet earth in 2021. We will also look for the features that tend to define fictional dystopias. During this unit, students will be asked to write across genres, crafting expository and argumentative essays as well as creative essays that depict their own dystopian worlds. Some the essential questions we will focus on:

Core Texts: Orwell’s 1984, Butler’s Parable of the Sower, and Trumbo’s Johnny Got His Gun

Excerpts: Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Huxley’s Brave New World, McCarthy’s The Road

Semester 2: “Literature of The Great Migration”: Few factors influence the identity and destiny of a town, city, or country more than its experience with migration and settlement. With each migrant who settles in a new place – temporarily or permanently – comes a new lived experience that has the potential to re-define not only the migrant, but the place in which he/she settles.

For thousands of years, migrants have left accounts of their journeys and their attempts to make new lives in new places. Nowhere have these accounts been more thoroughly, passionately, and creatively documented than in the literature that came out of America’s “Great Migration” between the years of 1915 and 1970 when at least six million black men, women, and children risked everything to leave the Jim Crow South and move north and west in search of better lives for themselves and their families. By the time our Great Migration had slowed in 1970, entire cities had been forever changed: Chicago, New York, Cleveland, Milwaukee, Oakland, Philadelphia, Detroit, Los Angeles, Pittsburgh, and countless other smaller cities and towns. As the Pulitzer Prize winning scholar and author Isabel Wilkerson notes, America’s Great Migration “…was the first big step the nation’s servant class ever took without asking,” and their accounts of their migration and settlement document the American experience with fear, pain, and uncertainty, but also with passion, hope, and joy.

This course will focus on the fictional and non-fictional accounts left to us by these migrants and those who were closest to their lived experiences. We will look at works by Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, Mahalia Jackson, Marcus Garvey, and other novelists, poets, and playwrights. Additionally, in order to better connect with the full legacy of America’s Great Migration, we will examine the art, music, faiths, and even the cuisines these migrants brought with them from the South and made a part of their lives in the cities of the North and West.

Among others, we will ask the following essential questions:

11th grade students will also begin work on their college application essays during the second semester.

A.P. English Language and Composition: Students who apply to and are admitted to this college-level course will spend the year developing the advanced reading, writing and thinking skills needed to succeed on the annual A.P. English Language and Composition exam and, perhaps more importantly, in college and the professional worlds they’ll find themselves in thereafter.

Specifically, students will devote themselves to understanding how rhetoric functions in their daily lives – in speeches, sermons, editorials, mass media, images, etc. And, in studying how rhetoric functions in the written and spoken arguments of others, students will also learn how to craft their own advanced written arguments that effectively and efficiently align the speaker/writer, audience, and message. Students will internalize the wide range of rhetorical strategies and choices available to any writer or speaker and, along with learning to make use of them skillfully, students will learn to recognize when a writer or speaker has failed to use them skillfully in making an argument. This course is typically oriented toward non-fiction reading and writing but will occasionally look at how language/rhetoric are used in fiction.

This course relies heavily on deeply engaged students who are comfortable participating regularly. This course also depends on students remaining deeply engaged with the various worlds around them: the political, economic, historical, scientific, artistic, social, legal, religious, etc. As we say so often in class, the students who “know more about more” are much more likely to succeed in this A.P. class than those who are less engaged with the world around them.

After the A.P. Exam in May, students will begin work on their college application essays.

As in any A.P. course, expectations and standards are high in this course. Written work must be extremely carefully crafted, all assignments must be submitted on time every time, and work will be assessed especially closely.

Seniors may apply to take Advanced Placement Literature and Composition, which is a college-level course of in-depth, critical reading and analytical writing. The course features a new theme each year and a revolving list of classic and contemporary literary masterpieces. This year we will focus on literary works that are "in conversation" with each other, sometimes explicitly as a newer homage to an older classic, sometimes as a newer critique that examines an older work more subversively, and sometimes when a newer work simply draws inspiration from or finds a reference point in an older text.   Our conversations in class will echo these forms of contrast and comparison as we find complexity and beauty in both classic and contemporary fiction.   Students will carefully examine not just the story or subject but also the writers’ art and techniques.  We will also spend a third of our time on the study of poetry, learning how to more deeply understand and appreciate verse and how to read closely with care for function and form.

Past themes have included the Search for Identity, Sisterhood, Immigration and Literature, and The American Dream.  Past texts: Free Food for Millionaires by Min Jin Lee; Americanah by Chimimanda Ngozi Adichie; The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz; In the Time of the Butterflies by Julia Alvarez; Hamlet, Othello, and King Lear, by William Shakespeare; Breath, Eyes, Memory by Edwidge Danticat; Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser; Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen; Middlemarch by George Eliot; The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne; Typical American by Gish Gen; A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry; and The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, among other works. 

AP students of literature must become skilled readers of complex texts, able to grasp the plot and meaning of a work and equally able to consider and examine the structure and craft that went into creating it. The class is conducted in a seminar style. All discussions are text-based.  Students spend some portion of their first-semester class workshopping their college application essays. All seniors also write literary research papers.

A bildungsroman is a classification term for novels that tell the story of an individual’s formative years during which there is typically a spiritual, educational, psychological and emotional transition from adolescence to adulthood. The actual translation of the word from the original German to English is “novel of education” or “novel of formation.” The young person at the center of the novel usually experiences at least four stages that lead to transformation and awakening. These four stages include loss, a journey, conflict, and maturity. Bildungsromane have come to be known as coming of age novels. Classic examples belonging to this category are To Kill a Mockingbird, Huckleberry Finn, and The Catcher in the Rye. More modern examples are the Harry Potter series, The Hunger Games series and The Perks of Being a Wallflower. This course will explore contemporary versions of the bildungsroman genre through the reading of several current coming of age novels. We will examine how the writing styles and structures of these novels have evolved over time. We will also thoroughly discuss each protagonist’s personal development. Ultimately, the goal of this class is to question what should determine a classic bildungsroman by challenging the literary canon. Over the span of the year, students will work on their own coming of age novels which will be workshopped in a safe, open and engaging classroom environment.

Coming of age literature is a genre of fiction that focuses on the story of an individual’s formative years during which there is typically a spiritual, educational, psychological and emotional transition from adolescence to adulthood. The young person at the center of the work experiences at least four stages that lead to transformation and awakening. These four stages include loss, a journey, conflict, and maturity. This course will explore both classic and contemporary versions of the coming of age literature. We will examine how the writing styles and structures of these works have evolved over time. We will also thoroughly discuss each protagonist’s personal development. In addition to reading, students will view several films that function as coming of age narratives on the screen. Over the span of the year, students will work on their own coming of age novels which will be workshopped in a safe, open and engaging classroom environment. They will use what we read together as inspiration to develop an authentic, believable and powerful voice for this longer creative piece.

***Supplemental works will be provided for students***

 

***Please visit the ND website for the official book list. Books should be purchased at the beginning of the school year.***