American Cultural Studies I:
The first semester of American Cultural Studies explores the complex intersections of literature, history, and culture in the United States—with particular focus on immigration and American identity on the one hand, and religious fervor and spirituality on the other. We will investigate how moments of cultural crossover—among people of different racial, ethnic, religious, and political perspectives—have shaped and informed American society. As we consider diverse U.S. communities and experiences in our reading, writing, and class discussions, we will also interrogate the meaning of “America” itself, what it means to claim an American identity, and how American writers have interpreted the local and national cultures that surround them. Given early immigration patterns in America, our literary and cultural explorations will also take us into questions of religious fervor and spirituality, ranging from Puritanism to the spirituality of the environment and modern religion. Our work together will highlight this body of literature and these conceptual questions while we also focus on key English skills: writing, reading, speaking, vocabulary building, and critical thinking. Core Texts: Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God; F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby; Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass; Emily Dickinson, Collected Poems. Other texts may include: Jamaica Kincaid, Lucy; Don DeLillo, White Noise; Julie Otsuka, When the Emperor Was Divine; Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter.
SPRING SEMESTER
American Cultural Studies II: Drawing from a variety of sources—visual art, music, film, nonfiction writing, and literary texts—this second semester course takes an interdisciplinary approach to American literature and culture. Our journey into this vast field and tradition will be guided by two major themes: discrimination and cultural clashes. We will devote a large block of time to Ralph Ellison’s masterful novel Invisible Man, and examine key texts in the pantheon of African-American literature. Later in the semester, we will look at how a seemingly singular grouping called "American" can be seen pluralistically, as a configuration of ever-changing cultures. Students will be able to draw directly on their concurrent studies in United States history as they continue to learn how to read literary texts in their social, historical, and cultural contexts. Core Texts: Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man; Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried. Other texts may include: Louise Erdrich, Love Medicine; Sherman Alexie, Reservation Blues; Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five; Kate Chopin, The Awakening; Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman; Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior.
American Studies [Juniors only.]:
This course offers an interdisciplinary approach to United States History (H300) and to much of the content of American Cultural Studies I and II (E300 & E303). Additionally, readings from 18th and 19th century authors are studied in their historical context. American Studies is taught by two teachers—one for history and one for English. Interdisciplinary themes provide an organizing structure for the course, e.g., the notion of a “City on a Hill,” competing visions for America, the creation of a national literature, women in the 19th century, the quest for social justice, wealth and virtue, and the idea of the frontier. Students write papers and participate in seminars discussing these themes, using literary and historical sources in combination. They receive two separate grades, one for history and one for English.
Grade 12
Fall
Semester
|Spring Semester
FALL SEMESTER
YEAR-LONG COURSE
E450a Chaos Theory and Literature (Interdisciplinary Team-Taught course - 18 students)
What do chaos theory and fractals have to do with novels? Surely, those topics belong in different buildings, no? Here’s a surprise: some of the great works of fiction from the last 100 years offer clear parallels to the world of mathematics, physics, and recent forays into chaos theory. In 1959, C. P. Snow (scientist and novelist) thought we had all lost a common culture, and that instead, two distinct cultures were emerging: scientists on the one hand, and “literary intellectuals” on the other. This class is an adventurous attempt to bridge those cultures.
We will do this by exploring literature through the lens of the mathematics behind chaos and complexity theory. This will dramatically sharpen our understanding of both fields. In this course, students will explore explicit and implicit connections between literary and scientific endeavors of selected writers, mathematicians, and scientists as they have struggled with the dynamically changing intellectual landscape of the 20th century. This will include looking at, for example, the metaphysically speculative fictions of Jorge Luis Borges (infinite libraries, parallel universes, etc.) and explorations of consciousness and time in Virginia Woolf, and seeing how they shed light on—and are in turn illuminated by—modern concepts of chaos theory (Lorenz, Poincaré, Mandelbrot, etc.). Looking in the other direction, we will also investigate how mathematical concepts such as iteration, recursion, and combinatorics help unlock certain works of fiction. Combining these fields will teach us about the nature of complexity and facets of chaos and order such as iteration, fractals, and attractors that are all becoming increasingly important in today’s research.
Students will write assignments of varying length and in different modes (analytical, personal, creative) that will combine literary, metaphysical, and mathematical elements of the course. We will also do projects such as constructing the Mandelbrot set and other fractals, study the mathematical complexities of infinity (as exemplified by Cantor’s set theory), use Excel and Java applets to explore phase-space topology and the mathematics of iteration and recursion, and construct virtual colonies that exemplify complex behavior but follow very simple rules. Spring semester is devoted to urban studies and various aspects of complexity theory. Texts read in this course may include Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions, Connie Willis’ Bellwether, Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, Italo Calvino’s Mr. Palomar and Invisible Cities, Anna Deveare Smith’s Twilight: Los Angeles 1992, Franz Kafka’s The Trial, Colson Whitehead’s The Colossus of New York, Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia, William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition, Briggs and Peat’s Turbulent Mirror, and Steven Johnson’s Emergence.
[Counts as an English OR a Mathematics credit]
SEMESTER COURSES
FIRST SEMESTER
What’s American about American Poetry?
What do Emily Dickinson, Bob Dylan, and Tupac Shakur have in common? How does America—its landscape, population, politics, ideals, and art—influence what its poets have to say? And how do poets—through writing, spoken-word, and song, and in movements ranging from the Beats to the Confessionalists to Hip-Hop and Slam—influence America? What does American poetry and its many manifestations tell us about what it means to be American? This course will explore these questions through the work of prominent American poets and poetic movements. Issues that may be examined in-depth include: poetry’s overlap with popular music; poetry’s intersection with art; poetry as a vehicle for protest and social change; poetry as performance. Students will hone their skills in reading, orating, analyzing, and writing critically and creatively about poetry while also drawing upon their knowledge and experience of America to come to an understanding of this important literary genre and the society that creates and is created by it.
Ancient to Modern: Forbidden Knowledge:
“There is no case where ignorance should be preferred to
knowledge—especially if the knowledge is terrible.”
-Edward Teller
What themes connect the modern world to the past, and how does a study of ancient writers shed light on what we identify as “the new” in art and literature? Specific themes, topics, and authors vary according to the interests and expertise of the instructor, but in general the class moves between ancient and modern texts, searching for patterns.
The current class focuses on the human quest for knowledge, especially that knowledge which may be dangerous or terrible. Today, we often accept that freedom of information and open knowledge are necessary for preconditions for progress. But should terrible knowledge, in fact, be sought? Should there be certain limits to human inquiry? What is the price of human striving after that knowledge? We will see how current debates over scientific advances (cloning, nuclear energy, and the search for intelligent life in the universe, to name a few) extend a line of anxiety and argument going back to the first human stories. Texts include stories from myths (Orpheus, Pandora), the Bible (Eden, the Tower of Babel), and a wide assortment of classic and contemporary poems, plays, and novels, which may include Milton’s Paradise Lost; Shelley’s Frankenstein; Kafka’s The Trial; Calvino’s Mr. Palomar; Edson’s “W;t”; and Borges’ Ficciones. We will also look at some important films that trace this theme (e.g., Coppola’s “Apocalypse Now” and the Wachowski brothers’ “The Matrix”). This is a writing intensive course, with several formal papers and an on-going journal; in addition, students compose a creative work (short story, brief play, drawing or painting, etc.) responding to our theme and readings.
Postcolonial and Diaspora Literature
In the past half a century , literary voices from outside the intellectual establishments of Europe and the United States have provided provocative counterpoint to the dominant colonial narrative of literary history. These newer voices , which often emerge from formerly colonized nations , have served to energize and deepen the pantheon of literature in English by deconstructing European depictions of colonized people as the racial counterpart – the “Other” – to a European self. Postcolonial and diaspora writers examine the causes and consequences of colonization, resist colonial stereotypes, and define their own cultural experience at the center rather than on the margins of their societies. Although some postcolonial and diaspora poets and authors "write back" to their colonial predecessors, others highlight independent stylistic and thematic literary innovations.
At the discretion of individual instructors, we may read literature in many genres by writers such as Chinua Achebe, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Nadine Gordimer, Salman Rushdie, Arundhati Roy, Edwidge Danticat, Michelle Cliff, Derek Walcott, Nawal el Saadawi, David Malouf, Keri Hulme, Zadie Smith, Michael Ondaatje, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Isabel Allende, and Jorge Luis Borges. Students will respond to this literature in a variety of expressive forms, including creative writing, personal essays, and theoretical explorations of the issues of identity.
Asian American Literature and Culture
What does it mean to be Asian American? How have Asian Americans shaped the culture, history, and literature of the United States? In this seminar, we will explore Asian American writing from many different genres, ancestries, and time periods. Our study of the literature will be situated in the chronology of U.S. history—from the early immigration of Chinese American laborers at the end of the 19th century, to the watershed years of Japanese American incarceration during WWII, to the major shifts in Asian American demographics following the conflicts in Korea and Vietnam. Texts will include fiction, poetry, drama, and memoirs by authors such as Carlos Bulosan, Maxine Hong Kingston, Frank Chin, Hisaye Yamamoto, Joy Kogawa, Chang-Rae Lee, Garrett Hongo, Cathy Song, Jessica Hagedorn, David Henry Hwang, Teresa Hak, Kyung Cha, Shawn Wong, Amy Tan, Le Ly Hayslip, Andrew Lam, Gish Jen, and T.C. Huo.
Modernism: The world, and human understanding of it, changed dramatically at the turn of the 20th century, undermining assumptions that had existed for hundreds, if not thousands of years. People began to reappraise the most fundamental of questions: Who am I? What is my relationship to the natural world? What is my relationship to other human beings? What do I believe in? Where is the moral center? What is art? What is real? On what can I rely? Literature, like the visual arts, was marked by innovation and experimentation. Writers and artists turned increasingly inward for inspiration; the world of the mind became a page to be explored and transcribed. Developments such as Freud and Jung's psychoanalytical theories, Einstein's theory of relativity, “The New Woman,” “The New Negro,” colonization and its consequences, and the world wars, all prompted new visions and representations of reality in the written word. In this course, we will explore how the major upheavals of the age manifested themselves in the poetry, prose, and drama of writers such as Joseph Conrad, T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Franz Kafka, Gertrude Stein, E.M.Forster, Ralph Ellison, Anton Chekhov, Jorge Luis Borges, and Samuel Beckett.
The Victorian Era: Unzipped
If the mention of the Victorian period too often calls to mind stuffy people insisting that the legs of their pianos be decently covered, this class seeks to study the period properly in order to better access and enjoy some seminal works of literature. The course will examine the social and aesthetic philosophies of the period that were often at odds with the ideals of the Enlightenment and, by extension, all of the preceding time periods of literary history. For this was the time of rampant industrialization, of Darwin, and of a sense of cultural fragmentation. These social realities gave birth to a literary output that is as decidedly modern as it is “Victorian.” Within this social, cultural, and historical context, we will examine such issues as the emphasis on first-person narration, the prevalence of orphan-heroes, the advent of the dramatic monologue, and the appearance of several formidable heroines. Course readings may include the following authors and texts: Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice; Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre; Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea; Charles Dickens, Great Expectations; Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights; Alfred Tennyson and Robert Browning (selected poems).
African American Literature and Culture
Two centuries separate the publication of Phillis Wheatley's curious book of poems and Toni Morrison's reception of the Nobel Prize for literature in 1993. This course will study black cultural expression from its beginnings to the present—including folk tales, blues, gospel music, and sermons—tracing the stages of a distinctive black literary tradition in America. Works will be situated in the chronology of African American history and drawn from the vernacular tradition, the literature of slavery and Reconstruction, the Harlem Renaissance, urban realism and modernism, the Black Arts movement, and contemporary writers. We will also create “constellations” of readings around such themes as “Bondage and Freedom,” “Migration: The Rural South and the Urban North,” “Family and Community,” and “Identity.” Readings may include works by David Bradley, Toni Cade Bambara, Amiri Baraka, Charles Chesnutt, Frederick Douglass, Paul Laurence Dunbar, W.E.B. Du Bois, Ralph Ellison, Lorraine Hansberry, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Harriet Jacobs, Nella Larsen, Toni Morrison, Sonia Sanchez, Ntozake Shange, Alice Walker, Booker T. Washington, Richard Wright, and Phillis Wheatley.
The Mysteries of Irish Literature
How has Ireland, with its relatively tiny population, managed to produce so many outstanding writers? Why have some of the very greatest sought self-imposed exile from her shores? What indeed is “Irish” about a literary tradition largely composed in the language of brutal English colonizers? We cannot hope to solve these conundrums, but we can plumb them by focusing on the major Irish writers of the last century: WB Yeats, James Joyce, and Samuel Beckett. To do this trio justice, we look at their shared background in heroic sagas, legends, and folk tales, and then at the work of their equally famous predecessors: the dark comedies of Jonathan Swift, Oscar Wilde, and George Bernard Shaw. Lastly, we will investigate the latest incarnations of the Irish mystery: poets and dramatists who write today of political terrorism, the role of women, and the enduring beauty of the land.
Possible Texts: The Tain, ed. Kinsella; Brian Friel, Plays 2; Eavan Boland, In a Time of Violence and Object Lessons: The Life of the Woman and the Poet in Our Time; Wilde, “The Ballad of Reading Gaol,” Shaw, Man and Superman; Yeats, Selected Poems; Joyce, Dubliners and Ulysses [selections]; Beckett, Krapp’s Last Tape and Happy Days; Seamus Heaney, Field Work; Edna O’Brien, Lantern Slides.
SPRING SEMESTER
The Literature of Social Reflection: Literature and Cultural Context of Global Infectious Diseases (Interdisciplinary Team-Taught course - 18 students)
The Literature of Disease course is a multifaceted study of global infectious diseases. The course will use a case study approach around the “big three” diseases—HIV/AIDS, Malaria, and Tuberculosis, as well as other important pathogens. Each case study will examine not only the fiction and nonfiction literature around each disease, but also the epidemiology (the incidence, distribution, and control of the disease in a population) and pathology (the study of the essential nature of the disease and especially of the structural and functional changes produced by them). Students will also explore the cultural contexts of these diseases, and the issues around “international development.” For example, why do some health care systems work in one country and not in another? Can international development, and the attitudes that may come with it, be ultimately harmful to those whom it hopes to serve? Thus prepared, students will embark on solution-based projects relating to a specific infectious disease. Outside speakers, field trips, and service learning are an essential part of the course.
Writing in this course involves students’ personal reflections on their understanding of the workings of disease in society, especially as it relates to factors such as poverty and other social dynamics. This writing takes the form of journal entries. Other forms of writing will be in the form of proposals for action and/or grant proposals. A third form will be the descriptive narrative, as students synthesize their learning by creating portraits of individuals who cope with the various infectious pathogens.
Potential readings include The Plague, by Albert Camus; The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, by Anne Fadiman; Sickness and Wealth, Fort, Mercer, and Gish eds., 2004; The Hot Zone, Richard Preston; and Mountains Beyond Mountains, by Tracy Kidder. Potential films include And The band Played On (1993), The Seventh Seal (1957), Panic in The Streets (1950), and Rx for Survival: A Global Health Challenge (2005).
[Counts as an English OR a Science credit]
Film Studies:
This class provides an overview of cinematic art. We begin by looking at the basic elements of a film, from the scene to the shot to the individual frame; doing so helps us better understand such things as the use of the camera’s angle and focal distance; the composition of lights and darks (cinematography); and the ordering and pacing of shots (editing). In the process, we’ll examine how stories variously get told; how genres shape our understanding; and how sound and special effects add to our enjoyment. The course emphasizes independent work (students choose their own area of focus) and group projects (students write, direct, shoot, and edit their own short films). Films studied may include “The Godfather,” “The Graduate,” “Double Indemnity,” “Vertigo,” “Citizen Kane,” “Chinatown,” “City of God,” “The Bicycle Thief,” and “The Maltese Falcon.”
Fiction Writing:
Great writers are, more often than not, voracious readers whose fiction is inspired by the powerful prose of their literary predecessors and contemporaries. Great writers write often, sometimes producing in a single sitting a story surprising for its polish—more often, however, revising drafts many times in order to achieve a story's greatest potential. Taking our cue from these writers, in this course students will study the craft of fiction in the stories of a wide variety of such short story writers as Anton Chekhov, Kate Chopin, Willa Cather, Raymond Carver, Jorge Luis Borges, Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Ernest Hemingway, Katherine Mansfield, Flannery O'Connor, Frank O'Connor, and Leo Tolstoy. Using the workshop model in which small groups (and sometimes the whole class) offer constructive critiques of peer manuscripts, students will also write several drafts of their own stories, leading to the creation of a portfolio of critical and creative writings due at the end of the semester.
Shakespeare and the “Final Lore”:
“No utter surprise can come to him,/ Who reaches Shakespeare’s core;/ That which we seek and shun is there,/ Man’s final lore.” —Herman Melville
Nearly 400 years after his death, Shakespeare’s plays are still performed widely and read avidly throughout the English-speaking world. According to Melville, one primary reason discerning readers have always held Shakespeare in high esteem rests in The Bard’s deep knowledge of human experience, expressed with dazzling eloquence through his poems and plays. Perhaps Melville is right: in studying some of Shakespeare’s greatest tragedies, histories, and comedies, not only can we delight in his extraordinarily skillful use of the language, but more importantly, we may also reach a more profound understanding of humanity’s “final lore.” We will read a combination of Shakespeare’s plays and sonnets throughout the semester, giving some time as well to learning about the Elizabethan world in which Shakespeare lived. The course includes a great deal of dramatic reading and acting, as well as creative projects and essays ranging from the personal to the analytical.
The Craft of Poetry: The Craft of Poetry: Audre Lorde writes that “Poetry is not only dream and vision; it is the skeleton architecture of our lives.” Indeed, poetry frames how we understand the world—from the most ancient works of literature to our own earliest memories of nursery rhymes and playground chants. In this course, we will explore the craft of poetry writing as a doorway to imagination, observation, literary experimentation, and personal expression. Daily creative exercises will sharpen our skill with poetic elements such as sound and line. Weekly peer-review workshops will allow us to share and refine our work. For inspiration, we will look to art, music, nature, and a wide range of foundational poets—including Basho, Shakespeare, Emily Dickinson, T.S. Eliot, Robert Frost, Langston Hughes, Allen Ginsberg, Elizabeth Bishop, Pablo Neruda, Maya Angelou, Seamus Heaney, and Wislawa Szymborska. At the end of the semester, we will compile individual anthologies of polished writing and perform a group reading for family and friends
Travel Writing: Travel guides are often quite dry and factual; travel memoirs, however, are lit up by an 
author’s personal experiences on the road (or at sea), and can therefore be by turns hilarious (especially when the trip is a disaster), disturbing, and emotionally wrenching. This course introduces students to the rich history of travel writing, and gives them the chance to do some of their own, focusing on the Seattle region – and farther afield if they do their own traveling. We will study excerpts from some of the greatest travel narratives, both ancient and modern, in units that focus particularly on Asia and Africa. The course will investigate not only the enormous variety of travel writing styles, but also the very meaning of the genre itself by comparing different ways – including fictional – that a particular region has been written about. We shall also go on a few local field trips to different kinds of environments and write about them, as local observers and under the guise of a stranger’s perspective. Our model for this will be Colson Whitehead's Colossus of New York. Other authors examined may include Marco Polo, Samuel Johnson, John Lloyd Stephens, Mary Kingsley, Mark Twain, Beryl Markham, Patrick Leigh Fermor, Bruce Chatwin, Robyn Davidson, Jonathan Raban, Italo Calvino, Redmond O'Hanlon, Stanley Stewart, Jan Morris, and Pico Iyer.
Quest:
The objectives of the three-part Quest class (English class, Outdoor Program, natural science) are to establish a clearer sense of one’s identity and values, to experience living and traveling as a small group through the canyon country of Utah, and to gain an understanding of the natural history and environmental issues associated with this unique region.
For the English dimension of the Quest class, students will compose essays covering a range of topics from expositions to descriptions and narratives. There is a major emphasis on journal writing, with entries inspired by the readings and the trip to the canyon country. Readings include works by Elizabeth Gilbert, Annie Dillard, Edward Abbey, Craig Childs, David Roberts, Ann Zwinger, Terry Tempest Williams, and Jonathan Franzen.
The outdoor component of Quest is a three-week trip to canoeing through Labyrinth and Stillwater Canyons of the Green River. This three-week period includes the school’s spring vacation, and the weeks before and after when students will miss class. Participants will backpack and canoe, camp out every night, and be self-sufficient for the entire stay.
The natural science portion is individual projects focusing on archaeological, biological, geological, and astronomical phenomena most easily studied in the field. Each student will choose a topic early in the semester, will research and become expert on there topic, and give a presentation to the group at some point during the field portion of Quest.
Limit of ten students. Cost: Approximately $750.
Alternates for Quest: All students who sign up for the class but do not get selected will automatically be in the alternate pool. At the end of the drop/add period in the fall, a drawing will be held to determine the order of the alternates. There will be a separate drawing for boys and girls since gender balance is a priority of the course. This list will be published and available.
