AREA I DISCIPLINESENGLISH SAMPLE COURSE DESCRIPTION
GS- East
The definition of education as being that activity in which the student and the
teacher are the same person is the guiding theme for English at Governor's
School East. In the spirit of that definition these are the goals of the department:
- To acquaint our students with works in poetry and fiction that they will not be exposed to during their tenure at their high schools back home
- To provide a learning atmosphere that encourages critical thinking, as the students encounter these new poems, short stories and novels
- To present a diversity of authors and works, so as to afford the students a widened and deepened perspective on the themes which literature makes available
- To offer, in each of the three sections, opportunities to not only read the works but to write originally and creatively in response to them
- To promote an understanding of how the themes and situations in the poems and short stories and novels which they read have interdisciplinary connections
- To allow them the intellectual autonomy to recognize that the themes of literature are, first, the themes of life
- To emphasize the value of process over product
Historically, the English Department has offered three courses. In Contemporary American Short Fiction, students read and discuss a range of short stories by authors such as Jamaica Kincaid, Toni Cade Bambera, Tony Earley, Lee Smith, Raymond Carver, Donald Barthelme, John Barth, and others and applied various schools of literary criticism and interpretation (e.g., feminism, Freudian interpretation, deconstruction). In Documentary Fiction the students have read examples of documentary fiction (such as Into the Wild, Everything is Illuminated, and House of Leaves) and worked on projects such as written ethnographies, audio documentaries, and multimedia, collaborative projects. In Twentieth-Century Poetry, poems are mined by the class so that students may not only chip away to the meaning of the poem but, even more importantly, dig out how the poet accomplished the meaning. Some of the poets encountered are Gerard Manley Hopkins, Wallace Stevens, Hart Crane, Richard Wilbur, Randall Jarrell, Robert Lowell, Anne Sexton, Adrienne Rich, Amiri Baraka, Louise Edrich, and our own poet-in-residence, Chuck Sullivan.
GS- West
- Introduction to Postmodern Narratives.
This course introduces students to the form and structural experiments undertaken by writers of "postmodern" fiction. Over the course of six weeks, students read short stories and novels and participate in discussions analyzing postmodern writers' use of self-reflective, disrupted, detached, and fragmented narration. Students and teachers work together on both textual and visual projects in efforts to interpret and understand the ironic, irreverent, and formal "playfulness" that are characteristic of contemporary literary arts. Readings typically include selections from the works of Margaret Atwood, Padgett Powell, Lorrie Moore, John Edgar Wideman, Dennis Johnson, Rick Moody, Kelly Link, Mark Richard, and several other late 2Oth century writers who explore issues of race, class, and gender while pushing the limits of conventional approaches to character, theme, and plot. Towards the end of the session, students participate in creative projects that require them to direct their insights about postmodern literature outward from the classroom and into a broader social context, examining the "cultural narratives" or stories we tell ourselves about the consumerism, emptiness, and desire that shape so much of our lives.
- Contemporary African-American Literature or Racial Politics in American Literature. Although this course may take one of two forms (depending on the judgment of the instructor), its consistent focus is on the ways either African American writers (exclusively) or a multiracial sampling of writers explore questions of racism and equality in contemporary fiction, poetry, and drama. In discussions of works from writers such as Toni Morrison, Audre Lorde, John Edgar Wideman, Cornelius Early, August Wilson, and Lewis Nordan, students analyze the ways writers imagine "whiteness" or "blackness" as social and political identities. Throughout the entire course, students are encouraged to examine the relationship between various writers' sense of the causes and functions of racial inequality, and the possibility for politically charged literature to play a role in social transformation.