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Our readings in this course are from the Ancient Near East and the Greco-Roman world, spanning a period of some 2,500 years. We start with outstanding literary works of ancient Mesopotamia (Exaltation of Inanna, Gilgamesh), Egypt (Sinuhe), and Canaan/Israel (Hebrew Bible, Baal Cycle), plus Wisdom Literature from all three regions. We then move to the Greco-Roman world, beginning with its grand narrative, the story of Troy, and spending fully a third of the course on selections from major Troy-related epic verse (e.g., Iliad, Aeneid) and drama (e.g., Agamemnon). After a brief look at Sappho’s pioneering lyric poetry, we devote several sessions to Plato’s dialogues featuring his mentor, the ever-enigmatic Socrates. The course concludes with selections from history writing from the Roman Tacitus.

In this advanced seminar we will study works of American horror that explore issues related to race and racism in the United States. Taking the lead from authors, directors, and literary critics, we will consider how the literary conventions of the genre of horror lend themselves to imaginative explorations of race and racial injustice in the United States in the past, present, and future. Central to our study will be literary works that use supernatural figures like monsters, witches, and other uncanny beings as tropes for racial otherness and the cultural anxieties caused by it. What do these works reveal about racial anxieties at different points in U.S. history? What concerns do more recently written works of horror convey about the state of race and racism in our society and our current understanding(s) of our history? Warning: Many of these literary works contain depictions of graphic violence, especially racially-charged physical and psychological trauma. Texts may include Uriah Derick D’Arcy’s “The Black Vampyre,” Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar,” Stephen Crane’s The Monster, Stephen Graham Jones’s Mongrels, and Tananarive Due’s The Reformatory, among others.

In this course, students will investigate the use of literature as a means of recording, understanding, and attempting to advance change in societies across the world. Units will be organized regionally around specific kinds of social protest and will use fiction, historical texts, and nonfiction prose to investigate how writers may use different forms of literature to incite social change. Students will explore such themes as national identity, discrimination, trauma, rejection of social systems, political power, alienation, dislocation, and communication in novels, essays, and poetry as well as primary historical texts. Selected readings investigate different perspectives of social movements and ask students to recognize both universal and disparate elements of protest. Texts may include: Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, Tracy K. Smith’s Wade in the Water, Booker T. Washington’s “Atlanta Compromise,” W.E.B. Du Bois’ The Souls of Black Folk, Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place, Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things, J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace, and Yiyun Li’s A Thousand Years of Good Prayers.

In this course, students will examine the dynamic relationship between Asian-American literature and the histories of the various Asian ethnicities in the United States. Literature by authors of Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Filipino, Vietnamese, Hmong, and Indian descent will provide fodder for unraveling both similarities and differences of experience among the various ethnicities. Furthermore, students in this course will examine the following sub-topics: the immigration experience, the formation of cultural and political identities, literary framing of social and systemic racism, stereotypes, generational challenges, and gender issues. The shifting function of Asian immigrants and Asian Americans in U.S. culture and economy will be a focal point as we explore how Asian-American literary concerns and styles have evolved with that shifting function. 

How powerful can a book be? Why do governments ban or censor books? What is lost when governments restrict access to certain books and ideas? Is restricting access to books always bad? By reading and examining literature banned not by popes and ayatollahs, nor by communist or fascist regimes, but by governments in the United States, students grapple with these questions and others about censorship. Readings may include such works as George Orwell’s 1984, Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl,” Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, Art Spiegelman's Maus, Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, Akwaeke Emezi’s Pet, Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, and James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room.

Black Lives in Literature takes as its subject the excellent writing by African-American authors from the South since 2005. Some of the literature engages explicitly with the destruction along the Gulf Coast caused by Hurricane Katrina that made apparent the enduring inequities that result from the racialized history of the United States. Much of the literature engages explicitly with injustices in the criminal justice system. However, all of the literature lives in the historical context that gave rise to the Black Lives Matter movement. Students will read fiction, poetry, and memoir from a diverse group of Black American authors and examine the literature in the historical contexts of Hurricane Katrina and the Black Lives Matter movement, as well in the context of the historical roots of the civil rights struggle and previous voices in that struggle.

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Based on the assumption that literature reflects the scientific discoveries, historical events, and philosophical views of the period in which it was written, this course examines several works authored between 1600 and 1900 not only as major artistic achievements, but also as expressions of the Renaissance, Neo-Classical, and Romantic worldviews. Authors studied will include Shakespeare, Racine, Voltaire, Goethe, Blake, and Dostoevsky, among others. The reading material will be supplemented by relevant music and art samples.

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Students continue to develop their oral and written expressive skills while reading significant works of British literature within their literary and historical contexts. For three quarters of the year, students study major literary figures and movements, beginning with early modern expression and ending with postcolonial literature. During the fourth quarter, students will focus their study on a book they choose from a list of predominately 19th- and 20th-century authors from Britain and the former British colonies. Students will conduct research and write an original work of literary criticism. Texts may include Macbeth, Pride and Prejudice, When Rain Clouds Gather, among others.

English 9 begins with the presumptions that telling stories about and from within one’s culture is one of the most profound expressions of humanity and that it is a grave human responsibility to know how to read and interpret stories from multiple perspectives. Consequently, English 9 introduces students to literature in several genres from around the world and teaches students the skills to read, understand, and write about literature. The year begins with a focus on close reading skills as students read and study poems, personal essays, and short stories from various cultures. Students will then read several novels, including graphic novels, and two plays as they apply their developing skill as readers and writers to longer and more complex works and the cultural contexts that produced them. Students will write repeatedly through the year in analytical and creative modes. With literature from Africa, Asia, the Americas, and Europe, English 9 seeks to teach students to engage with a variety of expressions of humanity from around the globe.

By considering American authors of the 19th and early 20th centuries, this course examines literary movements that were fundamental in defining American literature: Romanticism and the American Renaissance; Realism, Regionalism, and Naturalism; and the Harlem Renaissance and Modernism. Drawing upon the rich and varied literature of these periods, instructors will supplement novels with short stories, drama, and poetry. Novels may include The Scarlet Letter, Work: A Story of Experience, The Awakening, Yekl, O Pioneers!, The Marrow of Tradition, The Great Gatsby, Passing, and When Washington Was in Vogue, among others. This is a required course for NCS students in their junior year.

This course is organized around a fundamental question: how do directors and screenwriters adapt literature for the silver screen? In other words, how do they transpose content from a written medium into a visual one? The class will read film theory, as well as a variety of short texts and novels alongside their respective filmic adaptations. While honing our close reading skills, we will learn how to analyze or “read” the techniques and aesthetics of film, among them mise-en-scène or frame composition, montage or sequence, camera shot, lighting, and soundtrack. Students will watch films the weekends after we read and discuss assigned readings. Note: Some of the films are rated R. Readings and films may include: Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence (1920) and Martin Scorsese’s 1993 adaptation, Elmore Leonard’s Rum Punch (1992) and Quentin Tarantino’s Jackie Brown (1997), Alice Walker’s The Color Purple (1982) and Steven Spielberg’s 1985 adaptation, Washington Irving’s “Legend of Sleepy Hollow” and Tim Burton’s 1999 adaptation, Alan Moore’s The Watchmen and the HBO 2020 adaptation and Zack Snyder’s 2009 adaptation, and Philip K. Dick’s “Minority Report” and Steven Spielberg’s 2002 adaptation.

In Global Perspectives, students investigate 21st-century literature by authors from a diversity of national and cultural backgrounds, including African, Middle Eastern, and North American. Students explore such themes as national identity, gender perception, class differences, political power, alienation, dislocation, and communication through their reading of novels and supplementary writings. The cultural milieu in which the literature is set, the traditions from which it arises and the ways in which the questions of these texts are relevant for contemporary discussions about social inequalities will be an important focus of class discussions and assignments. Novels may include Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing, Louise Erdrich’s The Painted Drum, Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, among others.

By examining theorists of humor from Plato to Freud, and by looking at examples of comedy from Shakespeare to Hannah Gadsby, this class examines how humor works, especially in literature that predominantly uses humor as its mode of discourse. The class examines how comic literature works to make readers laugh and how comic literature works in society. Students read theories of humor as well as comic literature from several genres. Literature from a variety of cultural contexts may include: Twelfth Night by Shakespeare, short fiction, satires by George Schuyler and Oyinkan Braithwaite, and essays.

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In this course, we will study both source literature and essays of film theory and aesthetics from these key genres: Crime, The Western, Historical Fiction, and War. Our critical theory work is informed by Rudolph Arnheim’s groundbreaking Film as Art; literature will include short stories and poetry illuminating each genre’s modes of representation, including the works of Edgar Allan Poe, Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, Joyce Carol Oates, Phil Klay, and Layli Long Soldier, among others. The goal of the course will be to immerse ourselves in literary representation and theory and to use this knowledge to examine how visual media makes meaning. Films will be viewed in class. 

This course will provide students with the opportunity to explore issues related to LGBTQ+ identity and reflect on the depiction of homosexuality/queerness in American literature, history, politics, media, and popular culture. The course in its very nature will be interdisciplinary so that students understand the full reach of LGBTQ+ Studies and how it isn’t ghettoized in a specific discipline (viz., English/the Humanities). In their study of American history, students will work to understand what LGBTQ+ life was like in America before the Stonewall riots in 1969. We will study the momentous shifts within the modern gay rights movements, including schisms that emerged among its very diverse members (e.g., LGBTQ+ people of color and the racism prevalent in LGBTQ culture, assimilationists versus sexual outlaws or revolutionaries). We will read literature, including a novel, short stories, and poetry, and consider how they reflect the development of a LGBTQ+ literary tradition and voice.

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The Vietnam War was not only waged by soldiers on the battlefield. Long after Saigon fell in 1975, the traumas of this war have persisted in the memories and scarred bodies of those who fought, and in the nightmares of civilians whose lives were destroyed or irrevocably changed. This course explores the creative outpouring of responses to the Vietnam War, highlighting voices that include Vietnamese, American, British, female, male, military/veteran and civilian writers. We will ask how authors and artists have represented the experience of those on the battlefield and the home front; how they fought symbolic battles over the interpretation and memory of the war; how they sought consolation for unfathomable losses; and how they produced a legacy for future generations.

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Drawing on the rich literary traditions from the Caribbean and the United States, this course illustrates how narratives of race and freedom are constructed and charted in the works of North American writers.  Students will examine various themes which frame these hemispheric literary productions, including slavery, colonial and post-colonial, identity, and culture, to name only a few.  In locating these thematic concerns, each text under consideration will be placed in its historical and cultural contexts.  Although there will be lectures, the class will be primarily discussion-based, with students developing their analytical skills through both informal and formal writing assignments.  Authors may include Olaudah Equiano, Herman Melville, James Weldon Johnson, Claude McKay, Jean Rhys, V.S. Naipaul, Derek Walcott, and Jamaica Kincaid, among others.

In this course, students will consider a variety of Native writers from different tribal nations in order to cultivate a deeper understanding of America’s literary diversity. Students will begin with texts from Europeans' first encounters in North America to investigate the historical, economic, and political motivations behind the racial stereotypes of Native Americans. They will then compare these accounts with Native American myths, songs, and folklore that reflect the cultural richness and values of different tribal nations. The course will continue chronologically to examine stories of resistance against European invasion and colonization and finally consider post-colonial and postmodern texts that confront dominance while celebrating the resilience of indigenous lives. Through novels, essays, poetry, short stories, and historical texts, students will explore such themes as the tensions between national and ethnic identity, colonization, trauma, exploitation, displacement, alienation, genocide, assimilation, gender, race, sexuality, intersectionality, appropriation, and resistance.

In this course, students will consider the genre of science fiction in order to cultivate a deeper understanding of the implications and applications of science, how art and science can influence each other, and, more broadly, which genres “count” as literature. Students will begin with Mary Shelley’s classic Frankenstein as a means of entering the debate about the proper role of science and ambition in human progress. They will trace the genre as it evolves to become more mainstream, culminating with Margaret Atwood’s 2003 Oryx and Crake or Emily St. John Mandel’s 2011 Station Eleven. Through novels, as well as science writing, short stories, and historical texts, students will explore the ways in which science can expand art, and vice versa.

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Writer William Faulkner once said: “To understand the world, you must first understand a place like Mississippi.” The American south is a region rich in history, culture, and conflict, and in southern literature, the south itself is at once setting, character, and story. For reasons to be studied -- the human struggle at its foundation? The breeze-less humid days? -- the south has produced some of America’s finest and most compelling writers. This course will explore the theme of place in classic and modern southern literature, calling on the stories of such writers as William Faulkner, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, Flannery O’Connor, Eudora Welty, and Jesmyn Ward.

This course considers how the experience of “coming of age” is depicted in 19th- and 20th-century British and postcolonial novels. We will discuss how questions of gender, sexuality, class, race, family, education, work, and religion contribute to characters’ personal development in novels by writers such as Charlotte Brontë, E. M. Forster, Jean Rhys, Oscar Wilde, and Virginia Woolf. These novels stage, respond to, critique, and/or reimagine contemporary cultural narratives of coming-of-age, testing the ability of the bildungsroman form to accommodate protagonists whose gender, sexuality, racial identity, and/or class may place them at the margins of social power structures. We will supplement our reading with literary criticism about the bildungsroman and other frameworks developed by literary scholars who study the evolving (and enduring) tropes of coming-of-age narratives. Students will reflect on how literary coming-of-age narratives both responded to and influenced important social and historical developments of the 19th and 20th centuries that created and protected adolescence as a stage of life. More generally, we will consider how history, culture, and politics affect the ways these authors represent the experience, the aims, and the very possibility of “growing up.”

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This course examines short stories of various cultures from the 19th century to the present. Students will study the works of European, American, Latin American, African, and Asian authors.  In close readings of selected short stories, students will analyze narrative techniques, themes, and symbolism.  In understanding each writer’s work, attention will be paid to the historical development of the short story as a genre, as well as the cultural contexts in which the assigned stories were written.  The class will be primarily discussion-based, with students developing their analytical skills through both formal and informal writing assignments. Authors may include Edgar Allan Poe, Franz Kafka, James Joyce, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, Katherine Anne Porter, Jorge Luis Borges, James Baldwin, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Haruki Marukami, Ben Okri, and Amy Tan.

Since the beginning of western drama, theater has been intimately concerned with the workings of the state and vice versa. The democratic leaders of Athens established a play festival as part of the City Dionysus in the fifth century BCE to promote civic virtues. Since then, playwrights from Sophocles to Susan Lori-Parks have used theater to examine state power and the relationship between individuals and their states. This course looks at some of the various theatrical forms used by playwrights to question and define the relationships between citizens and their state. Plays range from Antigone by Sophocles from 5th Century BCE Athens to 21st Century plays, like Kimberly Belflower’s John Proctor is a Villain. The semester culminates with a collaborative playbuilding project that addresses some relationship between theater and the state.

This course helps students learn to write rationally and persuasively about their political beliefs. The course also places those beliefs in the context of the philosophical debates at the heart of the political and economic systems in the United States. Students write a series of essays modeled after newspaper op-ed pieces. In addition, students learn about philosophical arguments and approaches to moral psychology that support and challenge contemporary politics, democracy, and the market economy by reading about the work of Emmanuel Kant, John Stuart Mill, John Rawls, Russell Kirk, and Robert Nozick, among others, as well selections from work by moral psychologists Jonathan Haidt and Kurt Gray.

This one-semester course is designed to further the student’s understanding, practice, and enjoyment of the art of creative nonfiction. The class format includes the study and discussion of assigned readings by established essayists, writing-in-progress seminars, and workshopping sessions. Students use model essays to guide their study of writing. The course provides the opportunity to practice an effective writing process, cultivate a literary voice, and gain confidence writing in a clear, engaging style. We will study and practice several modes of writing throughout the semester: the personal essay, person and place sketches, the definition essay, and others. All writing will grow out of the writer’s personal experience and interests.