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US English (US)
The NCS English curriculum seeks to nourish intellectual curiosity and enrich a student’s unique way of seeing the world and responding to it. The heart of our program is studying literature from a variety of genres and cultures, practicing literary analysis and creative expression, mastering grammar and syntax, exploring methods of research, and expanding working vocabulary. With an emphasis on age-appropriate literature and skill development, the Department encourages each student to communicate with competence and confidence.
Grades 9 and 10
English 9 and 10 are year-long courses that focus on cultivating students’ skills in critical reading, writing, and making contributions to literary discussion. English 9 introduces students to literature in several genres from Africa, Asia, the Americas, and Europe. The year begins with a focus on close reading skills as students read and study poems and short stories from various cultures. Students then read several novels, including a graphic novel, 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. English 10 builds on the skills of English 9 through studying key moments in British literature from the Renaissance to the present day. They discover new ways of understanding literature; improve their vocabulary; and develop their working knowledge of English grammar to articulate their own ideas in speech and writing. During the fourth quarter, students explore the elements of research in the humanities and the effective use of secondary sources as they develop an original argument about a novel or play in the British literary tradition.
Grades 11 and 12
All English courses at this level are one-semester NCS/STA coordinate electives. During the last two years at NCS, students are required to take four consecutive semesters of English. Foundations in American Literature must be taken during junior year. All courses are designed to refine skills in a variety of modes. Materials are chosen to broaden the student’s acquaintance with major works of literature.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Drawing on the rich literary traditions from the Caribbean and the
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.
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.
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.”
Why are "The Harlem Renaissance" and "Modernism" often taught as different movements? After all, the themes and trends we consider to be Modernist — a rejection of realism and embrace of abstraction, an attention to psychological interiority and fragmented perspectives, and a focus on urbanism and modern life — actually emerged in writings across the color line. This course will challenge the conventional racial boundaries of Modernism by uniting African-American and Anglo-American literary traditions, thereby offering a complete perspective on the literature as well as the movement's racial politics, which became central to the formation of and dynamics within Modernism. Some writers whose works will be included are: Jean Toomer, T. S. Eliot, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Gertrude Stein, W. E. B. Du Bois, Ezra Pound, Hilda “H. D.” Doolittle, Nella Larsen, and Claude McKay; as well as visual art by Georgia O'Keeffe, Jacob Lawrence, Alfred Stieglitz, and Elizabeth Catlett.
This course examines dystopian literature authored during the 20th century until the first decade of the 21st century. While the principal focus of the course will be the revolutionary concepts in dystopian societies, the class will begin with a historical examination of utopias to aid our study. Close attention will also be paid to the historical, societal, and political contexts of each literary work. Students will, eventually, construct their own utopias after comparing the varying dystopias in the course’s texts. Writers such as Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, Margaret Atwood, Philip K. Dick, and Octavia Butler will be studied.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
