2012-13 English Electives

 

Winter Trimester

CREATIVE WRITING WORKSHOP: The purpose of the workshop is to give seniors an opportunity to dedicate a full semester to exploring and applying the narrative skills they’ve been honing over their previous years at Cate, with a clear emphasis on creating fiction. Also we want to give students a taste of how such workshops are run at the undergraduate, graduate, and post-graduate levels. To that end, all students will be asked to submit original work to the group on a consistent basis, and to respond to the work of others in a manner that is critical, constructive, and supportive.

THE SCHOOL OF HARD KNOCKS: Oliver Twist and Great Expectations. Orphans and convicts; pickpockets and murderers; love, hatred, ambition, and revenge: all is captured in two of Charles Dickens’ most compelling novels. We will follow Oliver and Pip—the young heroes of these books—as they struggle to make their ways in a confusing world.

WAITING FOR EXISTENTIALISM: SARTRE, CAMUS, BECKETT. "Hell is other people." "To be happy, we must not be too concerned with others." "We are all born mad. Some remain so." In this course, we will read ground-breaking literature from the second half of the 20th century. Together we will examine the ways that authors tried to cope with the insanity of living after two world wars. Texts will include Camus’ The Fall, Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, and something by Sartre.

RUSSIAN STORIES: Between 1825 and 1910 Russia experienced a cultural transformation that resulted in much of the world's favorite literature, music, and dance. In this course we'll read some of the most well-known stories, poems, and novels from this period -- works by Pushkin, Gogol, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Chekhov -- and then we'll talk about the events that led to the collapse of the country and its artistic heritage.

MODERN GOTHIC: Well, maybe not quite modern, but the Late Victorian era saw several of its most esteemed writers occasionally lend their skills to "analogous" literature, employing unusually outsized, fantastic, and even paranormal subject matter as a way of investigating the darker truths of human nature. This course will consider four such efforts: Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, Henry James's The Turn of the Screw, and finally Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Justifiably credited with having prepared the way for the work of high-minded modernists such as Joyce, Woolf, Faulkner, etc., our authors also, by dint of the titles under question, managed to spawn a line of far more popular bastard children with names like Bradbury, Serling, Leguin, Barker, and King. We will explore and apportion our gratitude accordingly.

WRITING LA: Is Los Angeles a glittering city by the sea or the seamy setting for hard guys and blonde molls? Is it a disaster of sprawl or a new sort of megalopolis for the 21st century? In this course we will read fiction, poetry, essays, and literary journalism as we explore various portraits of Los Angeles.

CONTEMPORARY FICTION FROM VENUS: Strong and curiously varied female protagonists appear in these three novels and one collection of short stories: Love Medicine by Louise Erdrich, White Teeth by Zadie Smith, The Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys, and The Three Button Trick by Nicola Barker.

THE PLAY'S THE THING! This course will be devoted to reading and watching plays written since the turn of the century. We'll look at influences on the theater (cultural, economic, sociopolitical, etc.) and we'll examine how we feel in regard to these seminal works.

STROLLING DOWN 135TH STREET: THE HARLEM RENAISSANCE. The Harlem Renaissance flowered in New York City in the 1920s and 1930s. In this multi-media course, we will examine the fiction, the poetry, the music, and the art of one of the most exciting moments in American cultural history.

WAIT! YOU HAVEN'T READ THAT? We read a wonderful variety of novels and plays during the four years a student spends in the study of English at Cate, but, inevitably, we miss a few of the landmark works along the way. Depending on student interest, this course will introduce pieces by either American or English authors; we'll draw from a list that includes Twain, Faulkner, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, McCullers, Didion, Vonnegut, Erdrich, and McCarthy; or Austen, Bronte, Dickens, Eliot, Trollope, and Hardy. The focus of the course is on reading and discussion; we'll be covering a lot of ground quickly.

Spring Trimester

THE 20TH-CENTURY AFRICAN AMERICAN EXPERIENCE: An Historical and Literary Study. In this advanced course we will analyze the 20th century African American experience through both a historical and literary lens. The reading list includes but is not limited to Isabel Wilkerson's Pulitzer Prize-winning The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration and Toni Morrison's National Book Critics Award-winning Song of Solomon. The value in applying both a historical and a literary lens to a time period rests largely in the access it provides to both the rational and the emotional. History tells us that between 1915 and 1970 nearly six million African Americans left the South for more northern and western cities, and the better lives they were sure awaited them there. Literature tells us about the complex emotions and struggles (physical, financial, familial, and social) that resulted. When taken together we can better understand the impetus for such a migration and the impact it had on, as Wilkerson states, "our cities, our country, and ourselves."

THE AMERICAN WILDERNESS: Essentially a philosophy course with wilderness as a central theme, "The American Wilderness" seeks to explore our relationships with forces largely outside of our control. Discussions will focus initially on the role of wilderness in both past and current American culture using the writings of authors such as Thoreau, Abbey, Stegner, Leopold, and McPhee for reference. Critical writings and readings will shift to more personal introspection with a study of the novel The River Why and creative writing exercises, as we explore how wilderness has shaped various spiritual paradigms found in American society. Finally, there is a strong outdoor component to the course in order to experience the forces of the natural world in a manner less abstract than the classroom. Trips will include an overnight solo backpacking trip, whitewater kayaking on the Kern River, and a week-long river trip in Utah during Exam Week. No outdoor experience is necessary as a prerequisite.

POETRY WORKSHOP: In this creative writing course, our focus will be on student writing. The majority of our classes will center upon workshop critiques of each other’s poems. We will also read and discuss work by major American poets, many of them still working today.

WAIT! YOU HAVEN'T READ THAT? We read a wonderful variety of novels and plays during the four years a student spends in the study of English at Cate, but, inevitably, we miss a few of the landmark works along the way. Depending on student interest, this course will introduce pieces by either American or English authors; we'll draw from a list that includes Twain, Faulkner, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, McCullers, Didion, Vonnegut, Erdrich, and McCarthy; or Austen, Bronte, Dickens, Eliot, Trollope, and Hardy. The focus of the course is on reading and discussion; we'll be covering a lot of ground quickly.

SHAKESPEARE'S BATTLE OF THE SEXES: A close reading of A Midsummer Night's Dream, Measure for Measure, Much Ado about Nothing, and Taming of the Shrew.

"Sigh no more, ladies, sigh no more,
          Men were deceivers ever,
One foot in sea and one on shore,
          To one thing constant never."

WRITING FOR SCREEN: This course will rely for its content on submitted student work in the screenplay or teleplay format. Given the technical requirements and peculiarity of such forms, we will be paying heed to the more rigorous approaches outlined in various different screenwriting programs (such as Mariner), with the idea of producing a serviceable draft of a finished piece by trimester's end. With that in mind, we will also be examining the work of masters past and present -- including the original screenplays, adaptations, and professional reflections of (among others) Robert Bolt, Lillian Hellman, William Goldman, Robert Towne, David Mamet, the Coen brothers, and Charlie Kauffman.

AMERICAN FILM: This course presents the language of critical response to films of quality. Weekly screenings of distinctive and distinctively American films are accompanied by weekly critical essays. The films to be shown will likely include: Bringing Up Baby, Singin' In The Rain, Citizen Kane, The Searchers, Notorious, Strangers on a Train, Pulp Fiction, Seconds, Blade Runner, Taxi Driver, Apocalypse Now, Godfather II, and various documentaries.

SALINGER: Most Cate students will have read Salinger's Nine Stories their sophomore year. This seminar is offered to give them the opportunity to read the rest of Salinger's oeuvre (the bound part anyway), which is brief enough that we should be able to tackle it all by June. That includes The Catcher in the Rye; Franny and Zooey; Raise High the Roofbeam, Carpenters; and Seymour: an Introduction. In addition to Salinger's own work, we will be looking at the dramatic shifts in his critical reception over time, those elements of his biography that are pertinent to his fiction, and also some of the religious ideas and texts that informed his work and artistic process, including Zen Buddhism and The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna.

TOUGH GUYS AND TOUGH TIMES: This course presents a compendium of tough-minded writers and seriously tough protagonists. Ernest Hemingway (The Sun Also Rises), Norman Mailer (The Executioner's Song), Raymond Chandler (The Big Sleep), Cormac McCarthy (Blood Meridian).

WRITING LA: Is Los Angeles a glittering city by the sea or the seamy setting for hard guys and blonde molls? Is it a disaster of sprawl or a new sort of megalopolis for the 21st century? In this course we will read fiction, poetry, essays, and literary journalism as we explore various portraits of Los Angeles.

LOVE IN ALL THE WRONG PLACES: This will be a mixed-media course in the difficulty of having a lasting relationship in this crazy world -- a world of ongoing political crisis and moral outrage. We'll read and watch the work of modern masters such as Nadine Gordimer (Crimes of Conscience), Art Spiegelman (Maus), and Milan Kundera (The Unbearable Lightness of Being).