English

Who am I? Who are you? Who are we?
How can literature help us to live with unanswerable questions?
Who is a hero, and what are heroes for?
What is clear expression and how can we achieve it?

Ninth graders spend their first year of high school reading and discussing myths and legends: the stories we have told ourselves about ourselves from culture to culture, age to age. In the opening weeks, students read a wide array of short stories by modern authors and then write and share about their own identities in order to situate themselves within the school and the curriculum, get to know each other, and begin a four-year conversation about how to build a just community. Then, using Joseph Campbell’s schema of the hero’s journey, students focus particularly on characters who have taken risks—of faith, of intellect, of caring—in order to inspire and redefine their cultures. Homer’s Odyssey is the course’s most ancient text; students also study such classic and modern texts as Shakespeare’s Macbeth and Toni Morrison’s Sula as they explore human myth making, hundreds of years ago and today.

How is our reading experience opened up when we look at plays rather than prose or poetry?
What do we learn when we isolate a text from its performance; is it even possible to do so?

Even though the casts of The Lion King or Les Miserables or The Book of Mormon are technically performing the same show night after night, no two performances are ever the same. Lines might get dropped or the audience could laugh harder than expected. Yet, the text, the play, is static; what the playwright put down on the page never changes. In this course, we will be discussing plays and what comes from looking at them as pieces of literature. We will become familiar with the terminology and style of playwriting, talk about how a play goes from nascent idea to a Broadway stage, and think about dialogue, rhythm and the subtlety necessary to make human voices sound "real" on paper. From monologues about Crown Heights to 2-minute long comedies, from Shakespeare to puppets, our critical lens will be geared toward understanding the role of plays in our literary canon and how, as Pulitzer-prize winning playwright Tony Kushner explains, theater brings us face to face with a more essential sense of what human beings truly are.

Texts will include work by Anna Deavere Smith, Paula Vogel, William Shakespeare and more.

How do we decide what constitutes a family? What does it mean to be a “good” mother, father, sister, brother, son, daughter?  What does our family owe us? What do we owe them?

The term “dysfunctional family” comes up a lot in literature classes, often acting as a stone thrown from glass house to glass house. In this course, we will look at families of all different compositions, examining how relationships bloom and shrivel and what people will do to keep relatives close or push them away. Using class discussion, written analyses, and creative work, we’ll also explore how and why society critiques familial units in the way we do.

Pulling from texts like Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home, short stories from John Cheever and Aimee Bender, Brit Bennett’s The Vanishing Half, and selected poetry, we will find ourselves exploring and challenging in what Leo Tolstoy meant when he wrote, “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

How can works of literature participate in a political discussion?
How relevant is an author’s racial, historical and geographical background to his or her writing?

As World War I was ending and the 1920’s roared in, a loose association of idealist and elite black artists with a few white allies—poets, essayists, painters, musicians—set out to “lift the race,” to change social attitudes, and so to spark a self-conscious renaissance of black art and literature. In this course we will not only steep ourselves in this exciting era, but also join later black writers in evaluating the movement, and in exploring the many purposes and effects of black literature in the first half of the 20 century. Since writers like DuBois, Hughes, Hurston, and Ellison tended to agree that literature was vitally useful, but to disagree passionately about what to use literature for, our reading, writing, and discussions in this course will lead us to ask larger questions about literature as a social and political force. We will also take at least one field trip to historic sites of the Harlem Renaissance. Texts include The Harlem Renaissance Reader, Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, and Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison.

“It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.”—Jane Austen, Pride & Prejudice

“Yes, Austen belonged to a slave-owning society, but do we therefore jettison her novels as so many trivial exercises in aesthetic frumpery? Not at all, I would argue, if we take seriously our intellectual and interpretive vocation to make connections, to deal with as much of the evidence as possible, fully and actually, to read what is there or not there, above all, to see complementarity and interdependence instead of isolated, venerated, or formalized experience that excludes and forbids the hybridizing intrusions of human history”

—Edward Said, Culture & Imperialism (1993)

What if we acknowledged more explicitly that the world and worldview inhabited by Jane Austen’s characters was profoundly reliant upon—and therefore influenced by—the ideologies and economics of transatlantic slavery? How might such a perspective alter our reception of words such as “possession” or “good fortune” underwriting the romantic truth ironically acknowledged as “universal” in Austen’s famous opening line of Pride & Prejudice? Literature scholar Edward Said insisted upon the importance of this historical perspective in an influential chapter on “Jane Austen & Empire” in his 1993 book Culture and Imperialism. But Said wasn’t the first reader of Austen to sense that the social content & commentary of her novels often (conspicuously) conceal and formally repress historical horrors which they indeed uncomfortably rely upon. No, it was in fact Jane Austen’s literary dark doubles and near contemporaries, Emily and Charlotte Brontë, who first began to excavate this tumultuous terrain, landscaped over by what Charlotte sneeringly referred to as Austen’s “cultivated gardens.” And they did so in two brilliant novels, Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre, which place questions of race & ethnicity alongside questions of gender & sexuality, wealth & class in order to explore the strange inner-workings of the British nation in the early nineteenth century.

In this class, we’ll read these works of the Brontë sisters alongside Jane Austen’s novels, Mansfield Park and Persuasion, with an eye towards the intersection of historical discourses of sex, class, and race. We’ll consider—and reconsider—the love stories, the windswept romances, the timeless tales of love lost and found again that these novels are so often known for (and reduced to), in the context of their historical moments, asking both what falsehoods about universal values these love stories tell us and what affirmative values love, desire, and romance posit in the face of the march of time and history. Reading these novels in context and in conversation, we’ll come to a greater sense of both the historical and the future-oriented discourses of these great novels. 

What characterizes horror as a genre, and why has it been read as trashy?

How have horror stories reinforced conservative cultural notions of race, gender, and other aspects of identity & power—and how have they disrupted these same constructs?

How is horror as a genre particularly suited for cultural disruption?

Horror: the genre of ghost stories and sleepovers can also be a sharp political tool. Maybe you saw Get Out and began to understand the genre’s potential as bone chilling anti-racist commentary. Or maybe you read The Power and smiled a tiny smile as teenaged girls began electrocuting their attackers. In this course, we’ll study precisely how horror works, and what about its strange cocktail of menace, outrage, and irreverent humor can make it a particularly brilliant tool of social criticism. Starting with especially gruesome fairy tales and early lesbian vampire fiction, and sampling a wide array of modern short fiction (with a couple of required evening watch parties along the way), we’ll learn to recognize when and how horror can be a tool of anti-racism, feminism, and queer positivity.

“The thing about science fiction is that it's totally wide open. But it's wide open in a conditional way.”   — Octavia Butler

What does it mean to envision the future, to dream and imagine a new and unfamiliar world that is connected to or disconnected from the modern world? Can science fiction reveal more about who and where we are now than what might become of us? And moving beyond an anthropocentric construction of reality, what can contemporary science fiction reveal about the effects of climate change on our rapidly changing and complex ecosystems?

This course will examine work by Octavia Butler, Walter Mosley, Ursula Le Guin, Hassan Blasim, Wilda Imarisha, and many other authors and artists. Each novel, short story, poem, and work of art centers the voice of those typically disenfranchised and underrepresented by the tropes of popular culture. We will consider how an imagined past or future can serve as an accurate reflection of the current injustices that POC, LGBTQ+ folk, and working class people must endure without end. Perhaps these texts will provide us with a new way of seeing our place in the world, a way that does not center us and moves toward an object-oriented ontology (Heidegger, y’all). Students will write analysis essays, poetry, and create their own piece of science/ speculative fiction. We— most importantly— will imagine, reimagine, question, and truly value our place in the omniverse (Thank you, Sun Ra!!).

What are the rules of poetry and how can poets break them properly?

To what extent is poetry political, radical, transformational—to what extent can poetry change us and change the world?

Can poetry change the world? It doesn’t sound likely, but history is full of poets who believed that it could. (And Amanda Gorman says YES!)  In this course, we’ll study poets—Gwendolyn Brooks, Walt Whitman, Morgan Parker, Anne Sexton, Natasha Trethewey, Terrence Hayes, and many others—who have written explicitly, intentionally, activist poetry—to explore identity, to protest, to grieve, to rejoice, and to transform language itself. In the process, we’ll learn about how poetry works and what it can do, and we’ll write a lot of it ourselves in our own attempts to shape the world. So doing, we’ll explore the limits and possibilities of political artistic expression.

A Sampling of Likely Poets: 

Elizabeth Alexander, Maya Angelou, Wendell Berry, Elizabeth Bishop, Lucille Clifton, Carolyn Forché, Ross Gay, Allen Ginsburg, Amanda Gorman, Terrance Hayes, Garrett Hongo, Langston Hughes, Eugene Jolas, June Jordan, Sarah Kay, Yusef Komunyakaa, Li-Young Lee, Audre Lorde, Porsha O, Frank O’Hara, Morgan Parker, Marge Piercey, Adrienne Rich, Anne Sexton, Tracy K. Smith, Gertrude Stein, Natasha Trethewey, Ocean Vuong, Walt Whitman.

What is my voice as a writer?

How can close attention to grammar and style help me to capture that voice on paper?

How can I learn to give better feedback to fellow writers?

How does sentence length communicate feeling, from frenzied enthusiasm to controlled disdain?

 When does punctuation do more than tell a reader to take a pause? 

What makes the transition from one paragraph to the next poignant or hilarious or heartbreaking? 

Voice & Style is a one semester English course that aims to help you become a more creative and confident writer, someone who sees the big picture and understands the value in details. While writing and revising personal essays, we will study grammar, punctuation, and usage; in each assignment, we’ll work to master a new skill or style. Revisions will happen through large and small group workshops, providing an opportunity to learn with and from your peers (and see the world through their eyes). We will draw our example texts from a wide spectrum of published writers, including R. Eric Thomas, Nora Ephron, and Roxane Gay. Our hope is that in this course you will learn what makes writing a flexible, powerful, and even exuberant tool for self-expression.

Shakespeare’s great play Henry IV, Part One opens with King Henry IV uniting squabbling factions in England by calling them together on a crusade to the holy land: a Christian mission to take back Jerusalem from the (according to him) “pagan” Muslim usurpers. Though the plan is quickly aborted, it raises several questions that resonate across Shakespeare’s career as Renaissance England’s finest playwright. What role did Christian religion play in shaping a distinct sense of national identity and unity in the long wake of the Protestant Reformation? To what extent was Shakespeare’s England an imperial nation, employing religious rhetoric to expand its ideological and economic power? What role did Shakespeare’s theater itself play either in promoting or in pushing back against the imperial and religious agendas of the nation?

But perhaps more interesting than these questions is the use that King Henry IV makes of imagined “outsiders”: the “pagan” Others who threaten the stability of the nation from afar. Indeed, Shakespeare’s plays as a whole reveal a broader interest in the status of all sorts of “marginal” or “outsider” characters and experiences, from Falstaff to Othello to Caliban. The status of the theater itself in Shakespeare’s time was somewhat marginal: existing in the “Liberties” outside the traditional city limits, theaters were tucked in on the south bank of the Thames river alongside taverns, brothels, bear-baiting arenas, and other places of ill-repute (and, it turns out, great fun too). Part of Shakespeare’s accomplishment as a poet-playwright was to make the marginal experiences of the theater more mainstream, to center the experience of the fringes. An outsider to the city of London himself, Shakespeare was persistently interested in the role that outsider-ness—the experience of existing on the fringes—can play in enriching & re-shaping dominant cultural, social, or political discourses and assumptions. In attending to the discourse of outsider-ness and “othering” in three of Shakespeare’s plays—Henry IV, Part One, Othello, & The Tempest—we’ll ask what marks one as an “outsider” or “other” in Shakespeare’s plays? How are religious, national, ethnic, and social “others” depicted in Shakespeare’s plays? By whom are they depicted and for what purpose? What power do marginal voices have in shaping their own narratives, telling their own stories?

What are gender norms, where do they come from, why do they persist—and what happens when women and men resist them?

What is a heroine’s journey, and how does it serve and/or challenge society?

What spaces can women make or find for themselves in a patriarchy?

In this course, we’ll investigate what a “woman” is, and we’ll hear about (and from) several women who live on the edge of what various societies recognize as normal, right, or sane, exploring the reasons why these women might seek or resist that edge, and why society might want to draw them back or keep them on the margin.  Through class discussions, written analyses, and fiction exercises, students will explore the danger and charm, the limits and freedom of radical behavior for women.  We’ll also explore the degrees to which gender identities themselves can be both restrictive and freeing. 

This one semester course will examine the lives of revolutionary girls and boys in literature— it promotes the idea that Joan of Arc, Malala Yousafzai, Chris McCandless and other young folks envisioned a world that was beyond their immediate grasp. This course will also examine the evolution of the adolescent mind, using literature that explores the physiological, psychological, and sociological reality of the modern teenager.

What does “American” mean?
What are the contingencies that shape history?
How can literary texts help us to read the past, and vice versa?
Who narrates history?
How and to what extent can we shape history?

America is a country, but it is also an idea. The American Studies course is devoted to the study of that idea and the country that produced it—where both began, and how both have changed. In this course we will study 200+ years of American thought. How did the United States become "America"? What ideas form the bedrock of this idea of America? What makes America different, and for that matter, what do we believe makes us different that isn't really different at all?

The purpose of this co-taught, double-credit course is to encourage students to become independent learners and thinkers as well as thoughtful, engaged citizens. We hope that students will be able to draw from their classroom learning to understand what they see outside the classroom. To that end, we explore many questions of power, identity, and justice, with a particular focus on the histories of race and gender in the United States. With an eye toward college preparation, this course fosters reading, writing, discussion, and research skills. Coursework will culminate in a research essay and walking tour located in New York City, as well as a double-period final exam.

What questions does one ask oneself in order to interpret a work of art?
How does historical context influence the progression of artistic style over time?

In this course, students will build the necessary skills that will allow them to analyze any piece of artwork to which they are exposed. As they learn to identify a core set of masterpieces from each period, and explore the evolution of styles through the ages, the main objective will be to develop an “art language” as a method of visual analysis and interpretation. Throughout the course, we will be visiting various museums and galleries around New York City. The art history course offers a chronological survey of art from the beginning of civilization to the present time, including the most modern trends and ideas in the ever-changing world of art. The course combines proper historical techniques and procedures with an emphasis on the role played by the artist and the work of art, its context, and the critic. Special attention is given to our interpretation of a work of art based upon its intended use, audience, and role in a particular society. As a survey course, the material is approached as an introduction to the discipline. The study of Art History will change the way one looks not only at paintings and statues, but also advertisements and any visual phenomenon.

Consider the craft of fiction writing as your passport to new worlds. Whether the trip is an extended journey in the pages of a novel or a stroll around the block in a short story, when you come to the last page you will have been to a place previously unknown. Over the course of the semester, be prepared to take trips with authors like Andrea Lee, Flannery O’Connor, Raymond Carver, Jamaica Kincaid, and many others. Through these trips you will learn to craft new worlds and cultivate your own literary voice and style. During in-depth craft lessons we will learn how to develop necessary elements of craft. This course will require students to produce a significant amount of new, creative work both inside and outside of the classroom. We will also dedicate significant time to the revision process so that by semester’s end, each student has a strong portfolio of his or her work. As part of the revision process students will be expected to participate in regular writing workshops where they will have the opportunity to provide and receive thoughtful criticism from their peers. Ours will be a classroom where fear has no place, only passion and a willingness to travel.

Where can self-reflection lead me?
How much help can I get with my writing, and how much am I self-taught?
How does an audience shape my writing?

Most Berkeley Carroll seniors have written dozens of literary critical essays; this course offers students a chance to write more personal essays. Students will read and write narrative, definitive, and exploratory essays, paying particular detail to voice, detail, and structure as they pull together comprehensive writing portfolios. All students who join this class must be willing to read their work aloud and willing to give and receive constructive criticism.

In History and Literature of the American West, we will use our previous knowledge from American Studies as a launching pad to engage further with the key themes of the American West. Rooted in expansion, resource management, and the intersections of American identity and the lived reality of marginalized groups in the west, we will tackle the true legacy of the American West. Using the interplay of literature and history, we will develop a clear understanding of western culture, exploring in particular the themes of rugged individualism and femininity. Manifest destiny, the American Indian Wars, and the reclamation of water in the western United States will serve as touch points throughout the course as we engage with the question of who is seen as the narrator of truth. We will critically interrogate the significance of historical narratives in contemporary society through the emergence of counter-culture in San Francisco and how the west coast played an integral role in shaping modern day dissent. Using the pliable terms that shaped the founding of our country — freedom, liberty, justice, equality — we will work together to better understand the impact of the Western United States on the country’s past and present.

After releasing a series of tweets and an Executive Order regarding the use of critical race theory in training programs for federal employees, Donald Trump culminated his feelings on the subject during the Presidential debate by saying:

“…they were teaching people to hate our country, and I’m not going to allow that to happen.” 

But… what actually is critical race theory teaching?  Does it teach you to “hate” America?  Or, is it a more complex and nuanced way to examine American culture? CRT provides insight into questions such as: 

• Why are there so many more white quarterbacks than black quarterbacks in football?
• Why is it so hard for black artists to win Album of the Year at the Grammys?
• Why does Disney World appeal to the white American middle class? 

Beginning as a method of legal inquiry to better understand the intersections between American law, legal policies, and marginalized identities, critical race theory (CRT) has evolved.  CRT now operates as a framework and foundation for examining many facets of American society and culture.  CRT is a tool that can be applied to help critically analyze a book, a presidential acceptance speech, a TV show, or even an awards show.

This course will begin by examining the scholarship of early critical race theorists such as Derrick Bell, George Lipsitz, Cheryl Harris, and Kimberle Crenshaw. As we progress in defining critical race theory, we will work on using this framework to better understand how institutional racism manifests itself both historically and today.   

Ultimately, this course will ask: how does race embed itself in contemporary American culture?  Which histories, literature, film, music, movies, laws, etc., have informed our racial understanding of America?  How do race, gender, sexuality, and whiteness influence (or create) American pop culture?   Perhaps the most important question we will tackle is: how can we improve America so that all members of society feel equitably seen, heard, and cared for? 

What characterizes horror as a genre, and why has it been read as trashy?
How have horror stories reinforced conservative cultural notions of race, gender, and other aspects of identity & power—and how have they disrupted these same constructs?
How is horror as a genre particularly suited for cultural disruption?

Horror: the genre of ghost stories and sleepovers can also be a sharp political tool. Maybe you saw Get Out and began to understand the genre’s potential as bone chilling anti-racist commentary. Or maybe you read The Power and smiled a tiny smile as teenaged girls began electrocuting their attackers. In this course, we’ll study precisely how horror works, and what about its strange cocktail of menace, outrage, and irreverent humor can make it a particularly brilliant tool of social criticism. Starting with especially gruesome fairy tales and early lesbian vampire fiction, and sampling a wide array of modern short fiction (with a couple of required evening watch parties along the way), we’ll learn to recognize when and how horror can be a tool of anti-racism, feminism, and queer positivity.

How are news, advertising, entertainment, and social media constructed within our current social and cultural context?
What is the individual and cultural impact of implicit cultural messages conveyed through media?
How can we respond to existing media and create new media that responsibly represent our society and values?

How often have you heard that social media is destroying our culture? With each new innovation, a new wave of panic seems to set in. Before we were bemoaning selfie editing apps, we were worried about MySpace. Before that, email and the internet itself. Before that, VCRs, arcade games, television, radio, newspapers, and, yes, even books. Information overload has always been a cultural concern. But since the dawn of literacy, it’s been vital to be able to understand how and why media is created and its remarkable impact on our society. 

In this course, we will examine news, advertising, entertainment, and social media as purveyors and influencers of culture. Engaging with critical texts, we’ll explore how the history of media has led to this current moment of information being so integrated into our lives. We will identify bias in news organizations’ varied coverage of current events and research their corporate structures to hypothesize how these biases are formed. We will investigate how advertisers and entertainment writers appeal to cultural values and reflect upon how those values correspond to our own. We’ll learn how to spot misinformation, product placement, and paid influencers and analyze their impact on individuals and society. Armed with these critical tools, we will create our own media products that better reflect our values and reality. Through class discussions and projects we will regain control of our economic and political decisions and learn to be ethical consumers and creators of media. 

Texts:
Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman
Kill all Normies: Online Culture Wars from 4Chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right by Angela Nagle
It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens by Danah Boyd
An All-Consuming Century: Why Commercialism Won in Modern America by Gary Cross

Is the history of the U.S. a story of humans shaping the earth? Or is the earth shaping us? This course examines the physical, spiritual, and political interdependence of humans and landscapes in the United States. We will trace the evolving attitudes and conceptions of nature as well as environmental policies that have shaped our history. This course, cross listed between the English and History departments, will involve an interdisciplinary investigation of evolving attitudes toward nature--as expressed in art, poetry, American philosophy--and how those shifting attitudes shaped people’s lives and the environmental movement. We will begin with cultural and historical analysis to explore answers to questions like: How have Americans understood the “wilderness”? How have race, gender, and culture shaped our understanding of and interactions with the land? How did the American landscape change during the 19th and 20th centuries? How have those changes affected different Americans? The second half of the course will examine the history and impact of the environmentalism movement in the 20th century, including coalition building and labor movements, like that of Cesar Chavez or contemporary eco-feminism, which have aimed to combat corporate ecological devastation and environmental racism. Throughout the course we will consider how environmentalism is a civil rights issue, and consider how communities of color have borne the brunt of environmental damage, but have also paved the way for intersectional environmentalism in the 21st century.

“I would hurl words into this darkness and wait for an echo, and if an echo sounded, no matter how faintly, I would send other words to tell, to march, to fight, to create a sense of the hunger for life that gnaws in us all, to keep alive in our hearts a sense of the inexpressibly human.”—Richard Wright, Black Boy [American Hunger] (1945)

“It is the peculiar triumph of society—and its loss—that it is able to convince those people to whom it has given inferior status of the reality of this decree; it has the force and weapons to translate its dictum into fact, so that the allegedly inferior are actually made so, insofar as the societal realities are concerned. . . . The failure of [Wright’s] novel [Native Son] lies in its rejection of life, the human being, the denial of his beauty, dread, power, in its insistence that it is his [societal] categorization alone which is real and which cannot be transcended.”—James Baldwin, “Everybody’s Protest Novel” (1949)

I was somewhat surprised to find Baldwin a small, intense young man of great excitability. [Richard Wright] sat down in lordly fashion and started right off needling Baldwin, who defended himself with such intensity that he stammered. . . . Baldwin defended himself by saying that [Wright] had written his story and hadn’t left him, or any other black writer, anything to write about.”—Chester Himes, The Quality of Hurt (1972)

James Baldwin’s famous critique of Richard Wright’s Native Son not only inaugurated one of the great literary disputes amongst black intellectuals of the 20th century, but it also raised an essential question about the social function of the novel form in general: Should a novel be faithful to the social realities and political conditions it emerges out of, or should it seek to articulate transcendent human emotions and experiences that rise above historical categorization? Baldwin castigated Wright for (in W. E. B. Dubois’s words) “measuring [his] soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.” But Wright was a more complex writer than Baldwin allowed, especially in his desire to find a literary form in which to express “a sense of the hunger for life that gnaws in us all . . . a sense of the inexpressibly human.” And Baldwin himself later noted, “I knew Richard and I loved him. I was not attacking him; I was trying to articulate something for myself.” 

If this is true, then, in addition to revealing an intensely complex relationship—at once artistic and psychological, personal and historical—Wright and Baldwin’s disagreement challenges us to read dialectically: to treat their apparent opposition as in fact a productive disagreement which pushed the novel form to dig for deeper truths, to search for the transcendent within the historical. In this course we’ll embrace that challenge as we explore the cultural and artistic conversations that emerge in the literary works of these two great American authors. We’ll attend to each writer’s shifting sense of self as black artists in relation to each other, to their own communities, and to their country, and we’ll observe how each writer experiments with the formal conventions of the novel to close the existential and historical gap between the self and the world, and to find a language for what Wright calls “the inexpressibly human.”

Works
Native Son (1940), Richard Wright
12 Million Black Voices (1941), Richard Wright
Black Boy (American Hunger) (1945), Richard Wright
Going To Meet The Man (1965), James Baldwin
Tell Me How Long The Train’s Been Gone (1968), James Baldwin
If Beale Street Could Talk (1974), James Baldwin

How and why does a book or other literary work become a threat to a country's political ideology?
Is the political writer's voice the same voice of the disenfranchised?
How does a writer's political identity shape his or her experience in the world?
What does it mean to leave home and never return?

Political: Of or pertaining to citizens; political rights
Exile: Expulsion from one’s native land by authoritative decree. Anyone separated from his or her country or home voluntarily or by force of circumstance.

This course explores numerous accounts of political exile: both voluntarily and involuntarily. Writers and artists who live in exile may be considered the voice of a political or cultural movement that is a threat to a country’s political stability. Oftentimes, his or her voice is valued by the people of the country: namely, the poor and working class. This class examines the exiled voice from all parts of the world and investigates the phenomenon of the refugee in various political and cultural circumstances. Seniors read works of literature that address the relationship between the individual and the country, including Anchee Min's Red Azalea, Shakespeare's The Tempest and Milan Kundera's, The Book Of Laughter And Forgetting. As students learn about the political context of each author, they will develop their own political identity and create writings that give voice to their concerns.

• Why do nations go to war? And even more importantly, why do individuals serve in battle, often willingly giving their lives?
• What pushes humans to violence when spreading ideologies? 
• Is there such a thing as a “moral war”?
• What is the effect of war on those who lead it, those who serve in it, and those who stay at home waiting for news of it? 
• How are stories of social class integrated into stories of war? Who leads, who fights, who runs?
• Where are the women and children in a war story?

This course will examine these questions from a primarily historical perspective, but also a literary and philosophical one. The Roman philosopher and poet Horace wrote that “it is sweet and noble to die for one’s country,” a line so memorable and important that two thousand years later, it is engraved above Arlington National Cemetery. In our study, we will ask whether WWI poet Wilfred Owen is right when he calls Horace’s line about war, “The old Lie.” We’ll analyze the historical nature and value of a wide range of texts about war such as paintings, novels, comics, songs, short stories, documentaries and plays. Those texts will be rooted in the historical context of WWI, WWII, the Vietnam War, and the Iraq War, among others. These wars will serve as touchpoints for grappling with the essential questions of the course and the place of morality and truth in wartimes.