English III

Explores the earliest American literary voices — Puritan sermons, colonial journals, and captivity narratives — to trace how writers shaped the foundational myths of American identity, purpose, and moral responsibility.

Investigates the Romantic and Transcendentalist movements of nineteenth-century America, examining how writers like Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, and Dickinson transformed nature, selfhood, and individual conscience into radical literary and philosophical programs.

Examines the literary movements of Realism and Naturalism as responses to industrial America's rapid transformation, analyzing how writers like Twain, Crane, Chopin, and Douglass used fiction and memoir to document social inequity, expose hypocrisy, and resist sentimentalism.

Explores the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s–1930s as a convergence of literary, musical, and political energies that transformed Black American cultural expression and challenged the racial premises of American literature, examining Hughes, Hurston, McKay, and the modernist experimentation that animated their work.

Develops advanced skills in rhetorical analysis by applying the SOAPSTone framework, examining logical fallacies and propaganda techniques, and practicing close reading of landmark American speeches and public arguments to understand how language constructs and manipulates reality.

Examines the American theater tradition through Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams, analyzing how dramatic conflict, allegory, and the stage as a physical space illuminate the tensions within the American Dream myth, exploring themes of identity, guilt, class, and disillusionment.

Develops advanced research and academic writing skills, guiding students through question development, database research, source evaluation, synthesis, citation (MLA/APA), and the construction of an evidence-based argumentative research paper.

Examines the literary response to postwar American prosperity and unease through Salinger, O'Connor, and Bradbury, exploring how fiction captured suburban anxiety, conformity, and the cost of the American Dream.

Explores how James Baldwin, Martin Luther King Jr., Maya Angelou, and other writers wielded language as an instrument of moral and political transformation during the Civil Rights Movement.

Examines how late-twentieth-century writers Sandra Cisneros, Tim O'Brien, Sherman Alexie, and Toni Morrison expanded American literature by insisting on the full complexity of experiences the dominant culture had marginalized or silenced.

Traces the arc of American poetry from Whitman's democratic sprawl through the confessional intimacy of Plath and Sexton to the spoken-word tradition, examining how poets have used the compressed art of verse to define, challenge, and reimagine American identity.

Develops students' capacity to construct, evaluate, and ethically deploy persuasive writing across genres including the op-ed, the proposal argument, and the policy brief, with attention to audience analysis and the line between persuasion and manipulation.

Develops college-level skills in literary analysis, including the construction of interpretive arguments, close reading at the sentence level, and the integration of secondary criticism into original analytical essays.

Synthesizes the year's study of American literature by tracing recurring themes across periods and traditions, inviting students to construct their own interpretations of the American literary tradition and reflect on their growth as readers and writers.