English IV

From the mead-halls of Anglo-Saxon England to the wine-dark sea of ancient Greece, epic poetry encodes the values, fears, and aspirations of entire civilizations. Students analyze the conventions of the epic tradition and trace the archetype of the hero across cultures and millennia.

Seven hundred years of English literature span the pilgrims on the Canterbury road and the ghost on Elsinore's battlements. Students explore how the shift from medieval faith to Renaissance humanism reshaped what literature could say about power, desire, and the individual.

The eighteenth century believed in reason, progress, and the perfectibility of human society — and its greatest writers demolished those beliefs with savage wit. Students analyze Enlightenment satire as a genre of social criticism, examining how irony, hyperbole, and persona construction expose what polite discourse conceals.

As factories darkened the English sky and cities swelled beyond recognition, literature responded with two powerful visions: the Romantic glorification of nature, imagination, and individual feeling, and the Victorian novel's unflinching account of what industrialization actually did to human beings. Students trace this tension between ideal and reality across poetry and prose.

After two world wars, the confident structures of Western literature — plot, character, reliable narration — looked like casualties alongside everything else. Students examine how modernist and postmodernist writers broke form itself to represent a fractured consciousness and a world that had lost its organizing myths.

The British Empire produced not only wealth and subjugation but also one of the most generative literary conversations of the twentieth century: the writing back against empire by writers from Nigeria, the Caribbean, India, and Latin America. Students examine how postcolonial literature reclaims language, rewrites canonical narratives, and asserts the complexity of lives that colonialism reduced to categories.

The writing that waits on the other side of high school is not a longer version of the five-paragraph essay — it is a fundamentally different conversation. Students study the demands of college-level academic argument, develop a distinctive writerly voice through drafting and revision, and examine the college application essay as a genre with its own conventions, opportunities, and traps.

War does not end when the guns go silent — it continues in the literature it produces. Students examine how WWI and WWII shattered nineteenth-century optimism about human progress, tracing the shift from patriotic verse to bitter truth-telling in the poetry of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon. They consider what literature can do that journalism and history cannot, and how the tension between propaganda and truth defines the art of every generation that lives through catastrophe.

Dystopian fiction does not predict the future — it diagnoses the present. Students examine how George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, and Margaret Atwood used speculative worlds to interrogate the political conditions of their own times, exploring how surveillance, propaganda, pleasure, and fear operate as mechanisms of social control. The unit asks students to read these texts not as cautionary tales about distant regimes but as analytical tools for understanding the pressures on freedom in any society.

Existentialism and absurdism are philosophical traditions that take seriously the question that most people prefer to avoid: what do you do when you discover that the universe offers no inherent meaning, no guaranteed purpose, no external authority that tells you who you are or why any of it matters? Students engage with Camus, Beckett, and Kafka to understand how literature became the primary arena for working through the crisis of meaning that defined twentieth-century thought.

Poetry is the oldest portable literature — the form that travels across borders, survives translation, and carries the emotional and intellectual DNA of cultures that have otherwise been transformed beyond recognition. Students read Neruda, Rumi, Szymborska, and Walcott to encounter the variety of what poetry can do, the irreducible losses translation involves, and the ways in which universally human experiences — love, grief, wonder, justice — are inflected by language, place, and history into something both recognizable and genuinely strange.

Literary criticism is not about finding the "correct" interpretation of a text — it is about asking better questions of it. Students master three major critical frameworks — Marxist, psychoanalytic, and deconstructionist — learning to apply them as analytical lenses that reveal different aspects of the same text. They develop the college-level capacity to use theory as a tool, not as a destination, and to evaluate the strengths and limitations of different critical approaches.

Reading literature is one half of the education; writing it is the other. Students move from literary analysis to literary production, engaging with the craft principles that govern fiction and poetry: scene versus summary, concrete detail, the compression of the lyric, the difference between a character who serves a plot and a character who generates one. The unit culminates in a revision workshop where students apply the analytical tools developed across the year to their own work — discovering that reading and writing, criticism and creation, are not opposites but the same activity performed in different directions.

Four years of literary education culminate not in a test but in a synthesis. The senior capstone asks students to choose a text they find genuinely compelling, apply the full toolkit of analytical frameworks developed across the course, and produce a college-level literary argument. The unit teaches students to understand their own intellectual development as a story — to see how they read now compared to how they read as ninth-graders, and to articulate what literature has done for them that other kinds of learning could not.