Curriculum Guide

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US English

  • All the World's a Book

    ALL THE WORLD’S A BOOK US1465
    (Offered second semester) (1 SEMESTER/0.5 credit) Grades 11-12

    After reading Shakespeare’s King Lear, one college student wrote, “There is nothing in the whole world that is not in this play. It says everything, and if this is the last and final judgment on this world we live in,then it is a miraculous world. This is a miracle play.” Is there a book says everything—or as close to it as one might get—about the whole world? And what would it be like to read only that one book—closely, slowly—over the course of a semester? What would happen to us as individual readers—and to us as a community of readers—if we invested deeply in a single work of great literature?

    The text we’ll read this semester is Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy.

  • American Literature

    AMERICAN LITERATURE US1315
    (1 YEAR/1.0 credit) Grade 11

    This course invites students to participate in the richness and variety of American language, literature, and culture. It begins with aspects of the American character, emphasizing the development of collective habits and the persecution individuals suffer when they challenge those habits. Following our global work in Grade 10, in Grade 11 we study and listen to the work of some of America's distinctive literary authors, writing our own poetry, prose, and drama suggested by the ideas and strategies of these works. Another concern of the course is the problem of belonging in America.  We look at poetry, fiction, drama, film, and essays that explore the search for meaning, humor, and dignity in a land that makes us feel our difference.

    Works studied may include various nonfiction works (Native American speeches; articles; videos; essays by Hurston, Solnit, Kimmerer, Davis, Douglass, Baldwin, Bourne, Biss, and Thoreau); Beloved, Something Wicked This Way Comes, The Great Gatsby, Buried Child, The Crucible, There There, Fun Home, If Beale Street Could Talk, and Trash; short fiction by Cisneros, Baldwin, Kernan, and Hawthorne; and poetry by Wheatley, Harjo, Dickinson, Cullen, Whitman, McKay, Hughes, Diaz, Corressi,  Hoagland, and the Hansell visiting poet.

  • Beauty and the Body

    BEAUTY AND THE BODY US1455
    (Offered second semester) (1 SEMESTER/0.5 credit) Grades 11-12

    In her personal memoir, Lucy Grealy writes, “Beauty, as defined by society at large, seemed to be only about who was best at looking like everyone else.” If this is true, how does the literature that surrounds us help us to reinforce or reject this idea? In this course, we will consider what images and texts have shaped our society’s narrative of what makes someone beautiful. Using critical works, essays, memoir, novels, and visuals, we will approach each text with a critical, intersectional lens, asking ourselves how these messages are still relevant (or not) today. Students will respond in myriad ways, including written analysis, creative responses, and other multi-genre projects.  

    Possible works include Lucy Grealy’s Autobiography Of A Face, Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis, Claudia Rankine’s Citizen, Carmen Maria Machado's Her Body and Other Stories, and Melissa Fabos’s Girlhood.  Additionally, we’ll study visual texts, including films, advertisements, and television. 

  • Creative Nonfiction

    CREATIVE NONFICTION US1595
    (Offered second semester) (1 SEMESTER/0.5 credit) Grades 11-12

    “It’s about making facts dance.”
    – Ben Yagoda

    In this course we’ll discover how nonfiction—whether the personal essay or memoir, the profile or travel piece, or any of a number of other genres rooted in fact—can be as literary, as imaginative, as significant, and as formula-defying as poetry or fiction. This workshop-centered writing course is open to all students seeking to improve their craft and explore both themselves and the world around them—and to those curious minds interested in the boundaries and possibilities (truth? post-truth?) that creative nonfiction continues to explore. We will compose long-form stories like these: “Auditioning for Clown College,” “The Life of a Staten Island Ferry Bagpiper,” and “The Pleasures of Hating.” And we will read more than we write.

    Readings and writers may include Eula Biss, Elissa Washuta, Claudia Rankine, Sedaris, Baldwin, Dillard, Nabokov, Didion, Bauby’s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Kingston’s The Woman Warrior, Richard Rodriguez, Foster Wallace, E. B. White, Hurston, John Jeremiah Sullivan, Rakoff, Orwell, Saunders.

  • Detective Fiction

    DETECTIVE FICTION US1318
    (Offered second semester) (1 SEMESTER/0.5 credit) Grades 11-12

    Detective fiction, a wildly popular genre, also has literary depth, and in this course we will revel in the suspense and mystery while also examining the form of the genre.  Good detective fiction is indicative of time and place, revealing the sentiments, anxieties, and projections of the society out of which it is born.  In Arthur Conan Doyle’s work, Sherlock Holmes is certainly a brilliant sleuth, and can be read simply as that, but the stories become even more interesting when we examine the relationship between fictional characters and historic and social realities. How do the values of the detective (the hero or antihero) illuminate a society’s notions about morality? Similarly, how do the tragic flaws (and oftentimes identity status) of the perpetrator illuminate society’s notions about the accepted social order?

    Possible authors and texts include: Sophocles, Edgar Allan Poe, Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, G. K. Chesterton, Raymond Chandler,  Harini Nagendra, Paco Ignacio Taibo, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and modern film/ television homages to different eras of detective fiction, like Knives Out and BBC’s Sherlock Holmes.

  • Drama as Literature

    DRAMA  AS LITERATURE US1581
    (Offered first semester) )(1 SEMESTER/0.5 credit) Grades 11-12

    Drama as Literature is a course that will provide a survey of the wide range of dramatic literature and will explore plays as both literary texts and live performances.  Students will read, perform, and analyze a number of plays, from classical to more experimental and contemporary works; discuss the context that gave rise to the plays and the various approaches to staging them, as well as exploring how plays have changed and evolved over time; create a set and design costumes for a scene or play; stage a scene from one of the plays we read; write and direct an original one-act play; and attend a live performance.  We will read works by several of the playwrights in this list: Samuel Beckett, Martin McDonagh, Tom Stoppard, Lorraine Hansberry, Bruce Norris, Henrik Ibsen, Lucas Hnath, Sarah Ruhl, Lynn Nottage, and David Hwang, among others.  

  • Literature & Censorship

    LITERATURE AND CENSORSHIP US1565
    (Offered first semester) (1 SEMESTER/0.5 credit) Grades 11-12

    It has been said that if you want to learn about a society, you should take a look at the people that society puts in jail. This course takes for its premise the idea that we can likewise learn about a society by studying the literature that it blacklists, bans, and otherwise censors. Why do we challenge a book? Why do we self-censor? What do these reasons tell us about our culture and ourselves? Throughout history, societies have repressed books, ideas, and authors they’ve found inflammatory, sacrilegious, or otherwise objectionable. Artists, after all, tend to push social and political norms, and societies tend to push back. This course seeks historical understanding of this tension, as well as the cultural anxieties, desires, and prejudices it reveals. By reading banned literature of all kinds, we will explore the stunning beauty, variety, and creativity of the language and images that have so unnerved—indeed, outraged—individuals and governments over the course of human history.

    Possible works include: Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Brecht’s Galileo, Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me and The Message, Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, Everett’s James, Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Achebe’s “Images of Africa,” Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues, Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, Nabokov’s Lolita, Puig’s Kiss of the Spider Woman, Dorit Rabinyan’s All the Rivers, Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice and Othello, Spiegleman’s Maus, as well as a selection of poems (Lorca, Whitman, Ginsberg, Espada, Mosab Abu Toha, Tariq Luthun, Nasser Rabah, Lena Khalaf Tuffaha, Dareen Tatour, Joseph Brodsky, Swift, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Tafolla, Duffy, Finney), shorter fiction (Diaz, Cisneros, Alexie, Munoz, Proulx, Kureishi, Valenzuela, N.K. Jemisin), and essays (Gadsby, McWhorter, Mill, Milton, Nabokov, Bourne, Orwell, Lukianoff, Haidt, Schlott).

  • Newspaper Production

    NEWSPAPER PRODUCTION US1588
    (1 YEAR/ 1.0 credit. This course does not count toward the four-year English requirement)
    Grades 9-12

    NOTES: The course may be taken more than once for additional credit. Schedule: four times per week (Arts Ensemble: Days 3, 4, 7, 8). Students with conflicts during one or more of those periods will be expected to make up absences in Clubs periods or 7:15am sessions.

    This workshop course is designed to aid students in the successful production of a quality newspaper, The Weekly. Students will be involved at every level of the process—from generating and pitching story ideas to reporting, writing, and editing to photography, layout, and print and online publication. The main objective is to accurately and insightfully report on the year as it is experienced by the entire JK through 12 community, with an emphasis on the Upper School, from which the newspaper’s staff is composed. Participation in the class is a requirement for being on the staff of The Weekly except with permission of the instructor. Participation is also one of various factors to be considered during appointments of staff and editors. 

  • Poetry

    POETRY US1600
    (Offered first semester) (1 SEMESTER/0.5 credit) Grades 11-12

    The poet Naomi Shihab Nye has said, “Poetry [is] more necessary than ever as a fire to light our tongues.” This course will aim to provide that critical space for us to study poems and poetic craft–noticing what most sets that “fire” toward our own creative and academic pursuits. The course will primarily function as a poetry workshop–where we read from mentor poets, write our own poems, and then workshop them.We’ll read and closely study a variety of poetic work, spanning a range of literary periods. Students will write poetry in a variety of styles (in free-verse and in traditional and experimental forms). The school’s Visiting Poet Series will also feature in our course, particularly in our work with the current year’s visiting poet. We will also meet with various local poets and scholars. To culminate the course, students will create a manuscript of their work and will present their work at a final poetry reading.

    Poets studied may include Elizabeth Bishop, Seamus Heaney, Emily Dickinson, Kevin Young, Shakespeare, e.e. cummings, Yusef Komunyakaa, Gwendolyn Brooks, Mary Oliver, Terrance Hayes, Ada Limo´n, and Danez Smith.

  • Reading and Writing Across Genres

    READING AND WRITING ACROSS GENRES US1505
    (1 YEAR/1.0 credit) Grade 9

    This course asks students to explore the various forms through which writers share their passions and ideas with readers and the tools they use to achieve their desired impact. The literary genres studied include drama, poetry, fiction (novel, short story), and nonfiction (personal essay, memoir, literary nonfiction). Within each genre, students will read representative works, analyze their elements and effects, and write their own pieces. The goals of the year are to gain a deeper understanding of literary genres, to evolve as readers and thinkers, and to develop their voices as writers. Students are encouraged to consistently share their ideas and writing with each other. Writers studied may include playwrights such as Wilson, Nottage, DeLappe, and Shakespeare; poets such as Brooks, Komunyakaa, St. Vincent Millay, Olds, Williams, Roethke, Plath, Collins, Finney, Gluck, and Young; novelists such as Chopin, Cisneros, Clemmons, Shamsie, and Steinbeck; short story writers such as Boudinot, Oates, Garcia Marquez, Mahfouz, Allende, Jackson, and Poe; and essayists such as Sedaris, Wolffe, Kingston, and Angelou.

  • Shakespearean Tragedy

    SHAKESPEAREAN TRAGEDY US1415 (Offered first semester) (1 SEMESTER/0.5 credit) Grades 11-12

    Although Shakespeare wrote comedies, histories, and other genre-bending plays, the tragedies are at the heart of his legacy. Each era finds meaning in his plays, and they speak to us, even now, with great relevance. In this course, we will study several of Shakespeare’s tragedies. As critic A.C. Bradley reminds us, “a Shakespearean tragedy is never, like some miscalled tragedies, depressing.” These are thrilling, moving, dynamic works, and that is why they have stood the test of time. We will read each play closely—and strive to see how they work together to form a larger vision of humanity. It is rare in a high school class to study one author in depth; don’t miss this opportunity to explore Shakespeare’s most timeless and enduring works in a single semester.

    Possible works include Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth

  • The Black Voice in America

    THE BLACK VOICE IN AMERICA US1445
    (1 YEAR/1.0 credit) Grades 11-12

    “And in Afro-American Literature, the question of difference, of essence, is critical. What makes a work Black?”
    – Toni Morrison

    “Unspeakable Things Unspoken: the Afro-American Presence in American Literature.”
    – Toni Morrison

    Should literature of any kind have an agenda? What makes a work “Black”? In this year-long course, students will explore various ways Black experiences in America have been, and continue to be, formally and informally documented and chronicled. Students will engage the work of Hurston, DuBois, Morrison, Naylor, Baldwin, and others to answer the aforementioned questions. Through readings, conversations with artists and scholars, community-based writing days, documentary film studies, and more, we will draw distinctions among “literatures.” By using multiple disciplines (sociological, historical, post-colonial) to examine the literature, students will be exposed to the ever-evolving ways the Black American voice serves as a unique way to reread, reframe, and rethink America and the American experience; they will respond to readings analytically, creatively, and personally. Students should plan to finish the course with an expanded knowledge of the history and legacy of Black expression.

  • The Contemporary Novel

    THE CONTEMPORARY NOVEL US1625
    (Offered second semester) )(1 SEMESTER/0.5 credit) Grades 11-12

    This course will be an opportunity for students to read contemporary novels that offer interesting and varied windows into the world we are living in today. What makes a novel contemporary? Perhaps anything written from 2000 onward, or as recently as from the time that you were born. These novels will allow us to examine how writers explore the questions of our time—whether they be personal or political (and, most often, it’s both). Topics encountered might include structural injustice, economic difference, technological advances, familial narratives, and political regimes. Novels may include work by the following writers: Hernan Diaz, Louise Erdrich, Percival Everett, Elena Ferrante, Lauren Groff, Lily King, Kazuo Ishiguro, Daniel Mason, Ian McEwan, Jenny Offill, Richard Powers, Marilynne Robinson, Emily St. John, Miriam Toews, George Saunders, Ocean Vuong, and Colson Whitehead. 

  • The Graphic Novel

    THE GRAPHIC NOVEL US1305
    (Offered second semester) (1 SEMESTER/0.5 credit) Grades 11-12

    The genre of the graphic novel is in the midst of a kind of renaissance. Some of the best graphic novels in the history of the genre are being published right now. It is also a genre that contains many other genres within it, such as literary fiction, science fiction, memoir, biography, autobiography, mythology, history, and historical fiction. In this course we will explore a variety of graphic novels that span many of these genres, discussing why this format might be used instead of more “traditional” prose formats, looking at current trends and unique ways of storytelling in graphic novels, exploring how art and text work together in intriguing and effective ways, and creating graphic stories of our own.

    Texts may include Stitches, Watchmen, Y: The Last Man, Black Widow, and The Hunting Accident, as well as examples of Japanese Manga texts, such as One Punch Man.

  • Women's Literature

    WOMEN’S LITERATURE US1616
    (Offered first semester) (1 SEMESTER/0.5 credit) Grades 11-12

    “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.”
    – Simone de Beauvoir

    Traditionally, the literary and cultural landscape was (is?) shaped by patriarchal values in such a way as to concretize those values. This course exposes students to literature written by and about women that questions the established notions of femininity, gender identity, and gender expression within different cultures and historical moments. With the use of critical texts, essays, and novels, we will examine the meaning of gender and how that meaning has shaped the life experiences of those who identify as female. Through this, we will also investigate the ways in which gendered identity intersects with class, race, and sexuality.

    Possible works include Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex; Edwidge Danticat’s Breathe, Eyes, Memory; Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar; plus selected short stories and poems.

  • World Literature

    WORLD LITERATURE US1405
    (1 YEAR/1.0 credit) Grade 10

    Around the world, across cultures, and throughout history, we tell stories. This course examines these stories, why we tell them, and how we craft them. Building on our genres work in Grade 9, we examine literature from Nigeria, India, Pakistan, Japan, France, Iran, and Greece, among other countries. We consider individual and cultural identity formation and migration, as well as cultural values, mores, norms, and transgressions. We compare and discuss the characteristics of the hero from around the world.

    Works studied may include A Small Place, The Odyssey, The Thing Around Your Neck, after the quake, Exit West, Small Things Like These, The Stories of Eva Luna, Things Fall Apart, as well as a selection of poems from around the world. Other writers may include Brian Friel, Jhumpa Lahiri, Marjane Satrapi, William Shakespeare, and Dai Sijie. 

  • Writing Seminar

    WRITING SEMINAR US 1640
    (Offered first semester) (1 SEMESER/0.5 credit) Grades 11-12

    “The only way to learn to write is to force yourself to produce a certain number of words on a
    regular basis” -William Zinsser

    The primary focus of this class will be to give students the opportunity to write often and to engage in the critical steps of the writing process. Semester one, the focus of the class will be writing in with the audience in mind. Writing modes may include the personal narrative, the opinion-editorial, profile, review, photo-essay. What is it that you want to say and how do you capture the attention of your audience? Whether or not you see yourself as more of a journalistic, creative, or academic writer, writing in these various models will challenge your voice and how you express your thinking.

    Though this is a writing course, students should still plan to read widely and often. The texts explored in this course will serve as “mentor texts.” What can this piece teach me about the craft of writing? What techniques does this writer use that I can employ in my own work?  Students will keep writer’s notebooks for both brainstorming and for moving through the writing process. Students should be prepared to workshop their writing with their peers and in full-class workshops and should plan to engage in writing conferences with their teacher. Furthermore, students will study grammar and style. Students may engage in traditional grammar lessons as well as stylistic lessons tied to sentence variety, use of punctuation, rhetorical strategies, etc. Students will walk away from the course with a variety of written work to showcase their progress. 
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Francis W. Parker School educates students to think and act with empathy, courage and clarity as responsible citizens and leaders in a diverse democratic society and global community.