English

–Advanced Studies Ethnography as Literature 

Prerequisite: Department approval of a writing portfolio. The portfolio will include samples of the student’s work from English II (for rising juniors) or English III (for rising seniors). Admission is at the discretion of the English Department Chair and the reading committee. (Grades 11 & 12)

Ethnography as Literature is an exploration of ethnography as both an anthropological method and a literary form. Students in this course will examine how early 20th-century anthropologists represented and constructed non-European cultures for their domestic audiences, with a particular focus on what the form and word choice reveal about the anthropologist’s particular subjectivity and their view of foreign cultures. Alongside literary analysis, students begin the year by engaging with the complex ethical history and colonial legacy of anthropology, before moving on to modern ethnographies in which the historical “other” now has a voice within academia and on global social media platforms. Each student engages in a longitudinal ethnographic interviewing project with an LJCDS parent volunteer, transcribing their interviews, conducting rhetorical analysis, and providing a final ethnographic case study for their classmates, which will be evaluated based on its empirical, literary, and ethical qualities.


–Advanced Studies Modernist Literature 

Prerequisite: Department approval of a writing portfolio. The portfolio will include samples of the student’s work from English II (for rising juniors) or English III (for rising seniors). Admission is at the discretion of the English Department Chair and the reading committee. (Grades 11 & 12)

Modernist Literature investigates the work of, as well as the historical and intellectual currents that conspired to launch and evolve, the global cultural phenomenon known as “modernism.” While fundamentally a literature course, students “close read” across disciplines, from the visual arts and theater to film, music, dance, philosophy, psychology, and beyond, to explore the compulsion to “make it new” as a cultural and historical event. Students trace the origins of this sensibility to the metropolises of 19th-century Europe and the United States and study the parallel evolution of “modernism” and “modernity.” Across continents, they track various challenges to convention in artistic and cultural production, from the birth of the avant-garde at the turn of the 20th century, through the “high modernism” of the Roaring Twenties, and to the political-mindedness of the 1930s. The course will culminate in an examination of the persistence of modernist attitudes after World War II in their “postmodern” and postcolonial articulations. This course helps students think critically about the sensibilities, impacts, and “difficulty” of the modernist project and encourages them to form their own beliefs about the purpose and possibilities of art.


–Advanced Studies Native American Literature 

Prerequisite: Department approval of a writing portfolio. The portfolio will include samples of the student’s work from English II (for rising juniors) or English III (for rising seniors). Admission is at the discretion of the English Department Chair and the reading committee. 

This course offers a comprehensive exploration of the impact of the historical and contemporary cultural realities for the First Peoples’ communities in four regions of the United States: East Coast (Cherokee, Iroquois), Midwest (Ho Chunk, Sioux, Ojibwe), Southwest (Navajo, Apache), and West Coast (Kumeyaay, Washoe, Makah). Using the lens of storytelling–from ancient to contemporary–students engage in research and lessons that provide chances to investigate social, environmental, political, literary, and cultural histories of Native Americans. The course combines lectures, presentations, Socratic circles, discussions, and critical reading (and writing) with guest speakers and occasional field trips to teach students from a myriad of voices and approaches. Students are expected to critique existing historical and literary scholarship in the field with empathy and a sophisticated understanding of language and the human experience.


–Advanced Studies Philosophy 

Prerequisite: Department approval of a writing portfolio. The portfolio will include samples of the student’s work from English II (for rising juniors) or English III (for rising seniors). Admission is at the discretion of the English Department Chair and the reading committee. (Grades 11 & 12)

How do I live a good life? What can I know for sure? Does God, beauty, or evil exist? And really, how do I know that the earth is round and the moon is not a delicious wheel of provolone cheese? This class engages with life’s most compelling and vexing questions by analyzing and critiquing philosophers’ musings from antiquity to the present. Moreover, each student interrogates, evolves, and refines their own thoughts on such questions. All the while, students resist pat answers and conventional thinking, aware, as Slavoj Zizek reminds us, that “the task of philosophy is not to provide answers, but to show how the way we perceive a problem can itself be part of the problem.” The class follows the progression of the “Western” philosophical tradition that emerged in Ancient Greece and traces its global dissemination.