Upper School Curriculum

Grade: 12
Fall

PREREQ: Teacher recommendation advised 

Literature has been an important mode of human understanding and expression for thousands of years. You have been required to study it every year of your education, which has emphasized the primacy of reading with skill. But what is literature for? Who decides what books are “good” or worthy of study, and how do they make those determinations? These questions are the basis of literary theory — the scholarly consideration of the art of literature, its purposes, and its impacts. In this class, you will join in that scholarly consideration and weigh these questions and the various answers to them for yourself. To do this, we read both pieces of literary theory — nonfiction treatises on the nature and forms of literature — and literary works including poetry and novels. Students in this course can expect a high level of complex reading, frequent writing assignments, and high expectations for class discussion engagement.