English Department

The members of the English Department strive to develop in each student the reading, writing, speaking, and critical thinking skills needed to meet the demands of a college curriculum. Novels, plays, short stories, and poems expose students to a rich variety of classic and contemporary world literature and encourage an interpersonal appreciation for literature of other cultures and all genders. Canterbury students practice revision techniques to produce polished essays in different modes, including the narrative, the descriptive, and the analytic. Fifth and Sixth Formers, except students in Honors Race Theory, AP Language and AP Literature, select two semester-long English electives.

English courses are listed below; please download the Academic Guide for a complete list of our course offerings.

Courses

Fifth and Sixth Formers, except students in Honors Race Theory, AP Language and AP Literature, select two semester-long English electives.

LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE

This class is a combined skills course integrating acquisition of and improving on all four skill areas of English: listening, speaking, reading and writing. Students will practice new vocabulary in writing and speaking. This class also focuses on increasing listening and reading skills and strategies with an intensive focus on vocabulary development. Students will develop sentence, paragraph, and essay writing skills. Focus will be on learning grammatical structures and using this knowledge within the writing context. Furthermore, students will have the opportunity to develop strategies to improve their organizational skills and to expand and practice new vocabulary.

THIRD FORM ENGLISH – THE ELEMENTS OF LITERATURE AND COMPOSITION

Studying a variety of short stories, plays, novels, and poems, students look at the ways authors use literary tools to tell moving stories. Readings may include The Old Man and the Sea, The Lord of the Flies, The Penelopiad, and A Raisin in the Sun. Students learn to write effective sentences and paragraphs and have the opportunity to practice writing the above-mentioned essay modes. The study of grammar includes instruction on avoiding the more common writing problems. Honors section available.

FOURTH FORM ENGLISH – AMERICAN VOICES

This course will define the term “American Voice”, as well as explore what it means to write with a unique American voice. We will consider how this definition has evolved since the birth of our nation by tracing its development through literature and nonfiction. Students will explore current issues and high interest topics through the close analysis of literature. The course includes all genres—novel, poetry, nonfiction, drama, short story, and film. The writing curriculum gives students the opportunity to focus on writing organized paragraphs and extended essays while practicing the various essay modes of the English Department writing curriculum. Honors section available.

HONORS RACE THEORY

Students in Honors Race Theory will participate in a complex study of Critical Race Theory in America. This yearlong course will spend time engaging with a variety of text and films authored or produced by the following individuals: Yaa Gyasi, Harriet Jacobs, James McBride, Tommy Orange, Nicole Chung, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Ava DuVernay. This discussion based course will require students to share their opinions and write daily with an emphasis on the personal narrative. For Fifth and Sixth Formers.

ADVANCED PLACEMENT ENGLISH LANGUAGE

This course cultivates the reading and writing skills that students need for college success and for intellectually responsible civic engagement. Students are guided to become curious, critical, and responsive readers of diverse texts, and become flexible, reflective writers of texts addressed to diverse audiences for diverse purposes. The reading and writing students do in the course should deepen and expand their understanding of how written language functions rhetorically: to communicate writers’ intentions and elicit readers’ responses in particular situations. The course prepares the student to take the AP English Language examination in May. For Fifth Formers.

ADVANCED PLACEMENT ENGLISH LITERATURE

This course seeks to help students read, write, and think more carefully and deliberately. As readers, they focus on authors’ use of language to elicit responses from their readers. As writers, they strive to write consciously rather than as an afterthought, seeking to communicate ideas more effectively. By improving their reading and writing skills, the students learn to think more clearly and precisely. In addition, they develop their vocabulary by focusing on bases, prefixes, and suffixes and combinations of those particles in words. The course prepares the student to take the AP English Literature and Composition examination in May. For Sixth Formers.

FIFTH AND SIXTH FORM ELECTIVES

LITERATURE OF THE VIETNAM CONFLICT (FALL)

Of all the American wars and conflicts throughout history, none has inspired a greater volume of literature than The Vietnam Conflict. The emotional trauma and confusion of that war has led to countless novels, nonfiction narratives, memoirs, song lyrics, and poems often written by those who had fought there, but also by those coping with the aftermath of the fighting. The writing continues to this day as many continue to make sense of what once happened in a small southeast asian country over forty years ago. In this semester course we will examine the voice of an American soldier, the voice of a daughter who lost a father to the conflict before she could even meet him, and a voice from the enemy side. This course is offered in honor of Charles L. Bergevin ‘62, David M. Burke ‘65, and Paul M. McGrath ‘62, Canterbury Alumni who lost their lives in the conflict.

HONORS LITERATURE OF EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE (FALL)

Why do we feel the way we do, and more importantly, why does it always feel wrong? This semester course explores feelings and emotions, challenging the convention that emotions are private and personal experiences. Students will investigate feelings such as grief, sympathy, love, happiness, and fear through literature and self-reflection. These texts illustrate emotions as lived experiences that are politically and socially shaped, learned, regulated, and controlled by gender, class, and race. This discussion-based course will require students to share their opinions, engage with popular culture and media, and write daily with an emphasis on personal reflection.

POST-INDUSTRIAL LITERATURE (SPRING)

A century ago leisure time was limited, and life on the farm and in the factory was hard. Over time, the labor movement, the industrial revolution, and the technology revolution have allowed more time for sports and pastimes. As more people watched and participated in leisure time activities, a body of literature inspired by these activities emerged. Our games have given us a rich variety of real and fictional characters as well as a window into the hearts and souls of towns, regions, and nations.

HONORS LITERATURE OF BEAUTY IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIETY (SPRING)

How do we navigate a world in which beauty does not match the appearance of the majority of the population? In order to understand how “beauty” is constructed, regulated, and perpetuated in contemporary society, this semester course will investigate the history, biology, and sociology of beauty through fictional texts, graphic novels, studies, advertisements, video games, and television. This discussion-based course will require students to share their opinions, engage with popular culture and media, and write daily with an emphasis on personal reflection.

SYRACUSE UNIVERSITY PROJECT ADVANCE: CREATIVE NONFICTION WRITING (FALL OR SPRING)

This course focuses on the genre of creative nonfiction. Students explore varieties of creative nonfiction, such as memoir; biography; the personal essay; travel, science, and food writing; and “new journalism.” As its name suggests, creative nonfiction borrows elements from fiction and poetry (e.g., description, scene construction, dialogue, etc.) yet still aims to tell the truth. For a writer to “tell it slant,” however, is to acknowledge the ways in which one’s subjective viewpoint shapes what counts as “the truth” in telling a story about one’s own or another’s experiences. Students will have the opportunity to experiment with style, genre, and subject in a writing studio environment and to read varied examples of contemporary creative nonfiction. For Fifth and Sixth Formers.

SCIENCE FICTION (FALL)

The English word science comes from the Latin word scientia, which means knowledge. Science fiction, therefore, is literally the fiction of knowledge. It's not just about robots, Martians, and flying cars; it's also about how we come to know ourselves and the world around us. Science fiction raises questions about the ethics of scientific experimentation, the limits of exploration, and the nature of personhood. In this course, we will consider those questions through novels and short stories by such writers as Ray Bradbury, Ted Chiang, Kazuo Ishiguro, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Mary Shelley. Students will emerge from the course with a deeper understanding of science fiction's history, themes, and literary conventions.

HONORS SATIRE AND FARCE (FALL)

In this class, we will discuss the appeal of satire in turbulent times and how literary humor has been levied against governments, cultural convention and catastrophe since the ancients held pen in hand. We will explore the structures of humorous writing—irony, wit, parody and others—and the differences between them by making our way through humorous classics. You will work on mapping the literary DNA of satire and considering how the tricks of the forefathers of written humor can be found in modern satire using a variety of optional texts and finish off by drafting and polishing your own incisive satirical essays.

HONORS GLOBAL POETRY (SPRING)

What makes a poem a poem? For an art form Aristotle famously described as 'universal,' the structure and material of poetry have varied enormously across time and space. This course will explore the scope and intricacy of poetry from around the globe, examining poets such as Elizabeth Bishop, Rumi, William Butler Yeats, Derek Walcott and Rupi Kaur, who have imagined poetry within the bounds of their chosen material and structure. In this course you will learn the poetic ingredients—imagery, meter, sound, line and others—and how the ways individual poets have made use of them can either root a poem in time and culture or allow it to transcend them. Students will learn to identify and discuss patterns and arguments in poems and try their hands at constructing an anthology of their own poems according to the styles of the semester's poets.