English
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Each OHS English course is designed to create a cohesive, collaborative community of learners who read to understand writing and write to understand reading. Instructors draw on the full range of literature in order to develop students’ attention to the possibilities of language. Through the sequence of courses students master ever more challenging literature and develop increasingly complex modes of writing. By the end of the sequence, students can employ language effectively in a wide variety of contexts, with intention, precision, and passion.
By analyzing texts and writing frequently, students learn how ideas are formed through language. OHS English courses teach students to pay close attention to how a piece of writing creates meaning at the level of the word, the phrase, the sentence, and the paragraph or verse. Because they can understand and articulate how an author uses language to achieve certain effects, students can then apply these same strategies in their own writing.
Students learn to write and speak with precision and control in order to create the effects they wish to achieve. Through formal and informal writing assignments, discussion-based class meetings, and oral presentations, students become adept at expressing their ideas clearly and concisely, and begin to establish their own unique authorial personas. At the same time, they learn to take into consideration audience and genre, so that they are able to write and speak in more than one style and for more than one audience.
OHS English courses expose students to multiple genres, writing styles, arguments, and methods or theories of analysis. Students learn to synthesize works written in different time periods, for different purposes, and addressed to different audiences, and they master different and sometimes competing theoretical approaches to interpreting language. As they progress through the sequence of courses, students become more and more able to shape and articulate their own ideas about texts, their intrinsic meaning, and their significance to the world at large.
The skills of critical reading and writing that students master in OHS English courses make them habitual critical thinkers who are mindful of the world around them and the ways in which ideas are generated and communicated by and to them. Students become critical readers not only of texts but also of the world around them.
Division Head of English: Meg Lamont, Ph.D.
Middle School
JE001 - Fundamentals of Expository Writing
Fundamentals of Expository Writing introduces students to the nuts and bolts of critical writing and reading. Through comprehensive grammar instruction, students build a shared vocabulary to understand and describe language. They apply their grammatical knowledge to decode complex works of literature, and build on their understanding of the mechanics of the sentence to consider more abstract topics such as audience expectation and authorial persona. They also master the basic essay form. Prerequisite: Placement Syllabus 
JE002 - History & Literature: Gilgamesh to Shakespeare
History and Literature: Gilgamesh to Shakespeare turns from a focus on the micro-level—the grammar of the sentence—to the macro-level. Students trace themes such as the relationship between humans and the divine, the concept of justice, and attitudes toward violence through works spanning the entire globe across four millennia. They read works against one another with attention to differences in cultural and historical contexts as well as attention to genre (including lyric poetry, epic, and drama), and articulate meaningful variation in a single theme across several works. They move beyond the basic essay format to create arguments that build from paragraph to paragraph, and craft thesis statements that address the question “so what?” Prerequisite: Fundamentals of Expository Writing (JE001) or placement exam Syllabus
High School
OE010 - Textual Analysis and Argumentation
Textual Analysis and Argumentation provides students an American literature survey in a global context that complements and expands the temporal reach of the world literature survey. Students master close reading for form in thematically related clusters of texts (such as the captivity narrative) and learn to create precise thesis statements based on these readings. Throughout, students pay close attention to how writing constructs authorial identity, and to self-presentation—their own and those of the authors they read—through language both written and spoken. They learn to structure their essays with increasing sophistication and are introduced to, and become competent in, MLA style. Prerequisite: History and Literature: Gilgamesh to Shakespeare (JE008) or placement Syllabus
OE011 - Modes of Writing and Argumentation
Modes of Writing and Argumentation builds upon the argumentative structures and generic terminology covered in TAA to introduce students to literary terms and more formalized theoretical approaches to literature, including narrative, genre, intertextuality, and metaphor. Students continue the work of reading texts in conversation and competition with their predecessors and, in longer essays that require more sophisticated argumentative structures to support complex claims, they begin to articulate their own theory of intertextuality in action. Students solidify their mastery of MLA style, and continue to develop oral presentation skills to complement their skill in writing. Prerequisite: Textual Analysis and Argumentation (OE010) or placement Syllabus
OE020 - AP English Language and Composition
AP English Language and Composition introduces students to rhetorical terms and structures as a means of analyzing authorial intentions and effects. Building upon readings in TAA and MWA (such as captivity narratives and political speeches), AP ELC provides students with an intensive study of genres of nonfiction, including creative nonfiction and visual rhetoric. Students write many genres of essays and present formal oral arguments, allowing them to experiment with varied authorial personas and to master multiple argumentative structures. By the end of the course, students routinely formulate compelling, unexpected theses, and their essays are executed at the college level. Prerequisite: Modes of Writing and Argumentation (OE011) or placement Syllabus
OE021 - AP English Literature and Composition
AP English Literature and Composition introduces students to advanced theoretical approaches that build upon the foundations in literary and rhetorical analyses provided by MWA and AP ELC. By the end of the course, students will have put together their own approach to literary history, becoming creators as well as consumers of advanced literary theory. Prerequisite: AP English Language and Composition (OE020) or placement Syllabus
Special Topics in Literature
Special Topics in Literature is a sequence of two semester-long seminar courses that explore a specific author, genre, critical method, literary movement, or time period in depth through discussion of primary texts and significant engagement with scholarly criticism. Topics are chosen from the breadth of the discipline and build on the unique expertise of the English Division staff. Students gain exposure to texts and critical methodologies rarely taught at the pre-college level, and learn valuable skills in conducting scholarly research. Prerequisite: successful completion of, or concurrent enrollment in AP English (OE020 or OE021) or consent of instructor
OE025 - Special Topics in Literature I
Fall 2012 Topic: Imagining Nations, Medieval and Modern (Dr. Lamont). This class will examine how ideas about nations and national identities have shaped and continue to shape the political and cultural makeup of the world. At the same time, it will interrogate the claims of competing theories of national identity and nationalism. Following the work of Benedict Anderson, most theories of national identity argue that nations are a specifically modern Western European phenomenon, arising together with the Industrial Revolution. At the same time, scholars of other periods (Renaissance, Medieval, Classical) and other places (China, India, Japan, the Americas) are eager to challenge this restrictive definition. This class will seek to address some of the following questions: What is at stake in the definition of nations? Why is national identity so effective in mobilizing large groups of people? How does national identity stack up against other, competing (or coordinate) modes of identity, such as those based on religion, ethnicity, legal systems, and language? Why is there such competition to control the definitions of key terms in nationalist discourses? Why has the nation-state become a paradigm? What other paradigms are possible, and what are their benefits and drawbacks? Primary source readings will be from the medieval period, supplemented by modern scholarly theories of national identity. The last two weeks of the course will turn to students’ presentations on nationalist literature of their own choosing, from past or present.
OE026 - Special Topics in Literature II
Spring 2013: In development.
University Level
UE030 - Making Moby-Dick (Fall only)
What is Moby-Dick; Or, The Whale? Is it an adventure story, a revenge story against a monster whale? Is it a novel investigating American identity in race and in national promise and revolution? And what about the tragedy of this tale? Only one whaleman lives. Does Melville write a tragedy in the vein of Shakespeare? How does this book matter? ‘Making Moby-Dick’ takes on a series of critical questions in four crucial settings. The first setting is the New England contexts of American literature in the 1840s—seen in the writings of Emerson, Hawthorne, and Melville—while the second setting turns to Edgar Allan Poe’s and Mary Shelley’s model adventure tales, of the sea and of the ‘monster.’ Our third setting is the Moby-Dick itself and our extended reading of the tale. The fourth and final setting lays out the argument that there are actually ‘two Moby-Dicks’ and that Melville’s reading of Shakespeare’s tragedies plays an essential role to deciphering the novel’s composition. Students gain the critical skills needed to interpret, and to answer, what the novel Moby-Dick is, or does. Prerequisite: Consent of instructor Syllabus
UE031 - 20th Century Genre Theory and Practice: Modernist Literary Genres and Photography (Spring only)
This course uses photography and detective fiction to explore how traditional assumptions of genre were challenged and re-written in modernist works. Why did modernists and modernism seek to re-work the cultural idea of genre? How does open genre or cross-genre or anti-genre work seek to demonstrate language and literature in the 20th century? How does such literature look? And what does it do? How does it portray modernity? Interactions and parallels between photography and literature are studied through a survey of the origin of detective fiction, the rise of poetry of the modern city, and the further development of detection and memory in modernist novels. The course introduces a basic history and discourse of photography, which began around the time the first “detective fiction” was invented by Edgar Allan Poe, and explores how photography, a visual genre, was a key prompt for the advent of modernist literary genres. Through an investigation of these, students discover the many ways in which photography and detective literature are linked to the social, historical, and intellectual movements of modernism. To survey modernist literary genre and how literature becomes “photographic” is to enter into the wide range of visual media and literature we see at the end of the 20th and at the start of our 21st century. Prerequisite: Consent of instructor Syllabus