English

The goal of the English Department is to help students become attentive readers and clear writers. The curriculum is founded on great works of world literature chosen to introduce students to important literary traditions, to help them learn to develop and defend their own ideas, and to foster a lifelong love of reading.

Middle School Courses

English 6 This course strives to deepen a curiosity and appreciation for language and literature. We will read across the genres and across time and place. Our readings create the core for engagement and conversation and push us to see beyond our own perspective. This class will require you to read closely, look for larger ideas, and make connections beyond the text. Vocabulary is generated by our reading, and grammar begins with student writing.

Representative texts: Selected poetry; cross-cultural creation stories; world fairy tales; mythology; The Birchbark House, Louise Erdich; A Midsummer Night’s Dream, William Shakespeare

English 7 English 7 is an exploration of identity in literature and life, touching on issues of conformity, coming of age, judgment, and the ways identities develop and change. We read short stories, watch short films, analyze pop culture texts (such as print and video advertisements), and explore full-length books ranging from classics to thought-provoking, contemporary young adult novels. Grammar lessons are drawn from the literature, with a focus on building clarity and precision of expression. Students develop a portfolio of analytical, creative, and persuasive pieces as they sharpen their ability to communicate their ideas to a wide range of audiences. Overall, this course is designed to challenge the growing minds of young teenagers while fostering a deep and lasting engagement with reading, writing, and discussion.

Representative texts: Elatsoe, Darcie Little Badger; All American Boys, Jason Reynolds and Brendan Kiely; selected poetry and PIXAR short films; Cyrano de Bergerac, Edmond Rostand, translated by Brian Hooker

English 8 English 8 explores a range of increasingly complex texts and concepts through the lens of “coming of age. ” English 8 serves as the crucial bridge between middle school and high school; students become comfortable tackling challenging works of literature and diving into deeper levels of analysis. Students build their analytical skills to produce rich paragraphs and some longer essays driven by clear thesis statements and carefully chosen evidence. Daily discussion - in large and small groups - allows students to find and develop their own voices. Creative and persuasive writing are also important components of the curriculum, and the study of grammar and vocabulary guides students to greater variety and precision in their use of language.

Representative texts: The House on Mango Street, Sandra Cisneros; The Book Thief, Markus Zusak; When the Emperor was Divine, Julie Otsuka; Everything Sad is Untrue, Daniel Nayeri; Romeo and Juliet, William Shakespeare

Upper School Courses

English I English I travels through texts from both classical and contemporary foundational traditions, all of which have at their core the themes of heroic journeys and the process of self-discovery. The assignments in both semesters provide students with a strong foundation in close textual analysis with an emphasis on crafting strong arguments, along with grammar and vocabulary mastery, as well as presentation design and delivery. All areas of

the course are designed to help students develop their own voices, increase their self-awareness as writers and readers, and hone their analytical, critical, and interpretive skills.

Representative texts: The Samurai’s Garden, Gail Tsukiyama (summer reading); The Odyssey, Homer; The Joy Luck Club, Amy Tan; Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston; A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf; We Should All Be Feminists, Chimamanda Adichie

English II English II provides a strong foundation in the genres of literature: poetry, short stories, drama, novels, and opinion essays. As students study works both classic and contemporary, students continue to develop critical reading and analytical writing skills. Students continue building vocabulary and refining their grammar and usage skills. English II also oers opportunities for students to expand their expressive abilities through creative writing assignments and performance-based presentations.

Representative texts: Macbeth, William Shakespeare; Real American, Julie Lythcott-Haims; Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen; personal essays; opinion essays; selected short stories; and poems

Advanced Topics in English: American Voices The junior-year Advanced Topics in English course encourages students to examine American identity through the study of American literature, continuing their literary education in familiar genres and introducing them to new genres like literary non-fiction. Students explore new genres in their writing as well; assignments include journalistic profiles, personal narratives, style exercises, and creative critical essays. Students will explore their own positionality and their own relationship to American idenitity, and will have opportunities to practice Castilleja's anti-racist competencies in class discussions and in formal and informal writing assignments. They will develop the confidence to write about what they think and what they notice, not just what they think their teacher might want to hear. All students will have the option to sit for the AP English Language exam.

Representative texts: We Need New Names, NoViolet Bulawayo; The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald; The Bullfighter Checks Her Makeup, Susan Orlean; Hiroshima, John Hersey; The Awakening, Kate Chopin; Sula, Toni Morrison; The Refugees, Viet Thanh Nguyen; The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien; A Raisin in the Sun, Lorraine Hansberry; selected poetry and essays.

Advanced Topics in English: Senior Seminars

Seniors complete the required English sequence with two one-semester courses. Not all courses are oered each year. Seniors may take more than one course each semester, depending on their schedule and availability.

Advanced Topics in English: African American Women Writers An introduction to literature written by African American women from an historical perspective, through a wide range of genres: novels, stories, poetry, and essays; with additional student presentations on a selection of important African American women in the arts. The class will concentrate on thematic connections as well as the dierences and diversity within this rich literary tradition, exploring the ways that authors both represent and disrupt ideas of racial identity, femininity, masculinity, community, and sexuality. Representative texts include: post-slavery narratives by Sojourner Truth and Harriet Jacobs; short stories and novels by Zora Neale Hurston, Octavia Butler, Gloria Naylor, Nella Larsen, Toni Morrison, Ntozake Shange, and Z.Z. Packer; poems by Phillis Wheatley, Gwendolyn Brooks, Maya Angelou, June Jordan, Rita Dove, and Tracy K. Smith; essays by Alice Walker, Audre Lorde, and Claudia Rankine; and a play by Lynn Nottage. As a whole, the course will enrich students’ knowledge base of American literature, as well as oer them valuable tools for analyzing the critical similarities, contradictions, and variations in the representation of African American women’s voices through a social justice lens. All students will have the option to sit for the AP English Literature exam.

Advanced Topics in English: Autobiography & Memoir This literature seminar explores the definitions, origins, and enduring appeal of life writing in several forms and genres. We will narrow our focus on autobiography and memoir through a few key organizing questions: What is the value of “truth” in nonfiction writing? How and why do humans use narrative to make sense of their lives? How do writers’ experiences and identities shape their relationship to autobiography? Does life writing necessarily center the self, or can it articulate broader communal ties? As we consider these questions, we will read and analyze text by historical and contemporary writers, possibly including Maya Angelou, Virginia Woolf, David Small, Frederick Douglass, Jia Tolentino, Sarah Broom, Nicole Chung, Michelle Zaumer, and Ashley Ford. . Alongside our reading, we will also use various prompts and techniques to experiment with putting our own lives into words. All students will have the option to sit for the AP English Literature exam.

Advanced Topics in English: Literature of Immigration In this literature course, we will explore how cultures tell stories about immigration. Reading from several genres, we will study some common features of immigrant narratives: multilingualism, disorientation in time and space, and alternative ways of forming communities and audiences. We will also track common themes like racism, family, intergenerational relationships, alienation and belonging, religion, and more. We will read works that reach towards the archetypal in their portrayals of immigrant journeys, like Shaun Tan’s picture book The Arrival and Mohsin Hamid’s recent novel Exit West. And we will consider works that take us into an exhilarating hyper-specificity, like Americanah. Within this problematic of the universal and particular, we will use several theoretical frameworks to understand the formal innovations and the power dynamics that shape immigrant narratives. All students will have the option to sit for the AP English Literature exam.

Advanced Topics in English: Poetry Coleridge wrote, “Prose is words in their best order; poetry is the best words in their best order. ” This course will sample the panoply of such words from the past millennium, with primary emphasis on the work of the past three centuries. Our focus will be on the poems themselves—how they sound, look, mean, and work—and on the varying contexts in which they may be read. These contexts include: the life and career of the poet; important poetic movements; verse forms ranging from the strictly patterned to the seemingly random; and the social/historical context of the work. Students will write a variety of critical essays on selected poems and a major paper examining one poet’s work in depth. They will also participate in a writers’ workshop throughout the semester, crafting their own work and responding to their peers’ poems. All students will have the option to sit for the AP English Literature exam.

Advanced Topics in English: Shakespeare In this course we will read, discuss, and analyze 3-4 important plays by Shakespeare. The reading will mostly take place during class meetings, and there will be two short writing assignments per play. We will focus on close reading and important themes, as well as directorial and performance choices in selected film versions of each play, analyzing the texts in light of a variety of dierent critical and theoretical perspectives. The reading in recent years has included plays such as The Merchant of Venice, Hamlet, Measure for Measure, As You Like It, andThe Taming of the Shrew. Members of the class also organize and perform in the annual all-school Shakespeare Birthday Celebration. All students will have the option to sit for the AP English Literature exam.

Advanced Topics in English: Unreliable Narrators This course will focus on narrators who mislead—or hide information from—their audiences and sometimes themselves, substituting their own perceptions for the purported reality of their worlds. We will look at the ways in which the unreliable narrator is not just a device to build suspense and ensure surprising plot twists, but also a potent vehicle for exploring mental illness in symbolic ways that are alternately problematic and transgressive, empowering and suocating. Texts might include Alias Grace, Margaret Atwood; The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Mohsin Hamid; Mexican Gothic, Silvia Moreno-Garcia; My Neighbor Totoro, Studio Ghibli. All students will have the option to sit for the AP English Literature exam.

Courses not oered in 2022-2023

Advanced Topics in English: 21st-Century Literature (not oered in 22-23) The literature of the past millenia comes to us filtered through centuries—or decades—of readers. But what of the literature of today? What are its concerns? And who are its writers? This course will focus on works published since 2000, in America and beyond. Seniors will read essays, short stories, poetry, and novels. Authors will include Samantha Lan Chang, Roxane Gay, Ocean Vuong, Rebecca Solnit, Mosin Hamid, Alison Bechdel, and many more. We will also consider narrative structures new or reinvented in the 21st century: prose poetry, memes, fan fiction, and webcomics. All students will have the option to sit for the AP English Literature exam.

Advanced Topics in English: British Literature since 1900 (not oered in 22-23) The beginning of the twentieth century in England witnessed a profound change in established social order. Writers struggled to give voice to the dissonant nature of “modern” life, breaking away from traditional literary modes and forms. In this course we will examine stories of reaction—to the past, the self, and society—set in a world which no longer seems to function according to established structures of meaning. From the birth of modernism through the beginnings of a new century, we will read fiction and poetry that oer new ways of conceiving identity and culture. Our syllabus will include works by Ford Maddox Ford, Virginia Woolf, Samuel Beckett, James Joyce, Katharine Mansfield, T. S. Eliot, Seamus Heaney, Philip Larkin and others. All students will have the option to sit for the AP English Literature exam.

Advanced Topics in English: Satire & Comedy (not oered in 22-23) This course will explore the social roles of satire and comedy, investigating what makes us laugh and what that says about us and the world in which we live. We will study satire, absurdism, humor, and farce, examining the ways in which funny writing can delight audiences while simultaneously enacting societal change. We will examine the function of hyperbole, irony, and understatement; explore the many sub-genres of comedic writing; and practice finding our own comedic voices. At its core, this course will explore how a range of literary mediums—novels, short stories, comics, Onion articles, and films—have used humor to entertain, heal, and spur change. Texts might include The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams; Cold Comfort Farm, Stella Gibbons; How to Be Black, Baratunde Thurston; The Wangs vs. the World, Jade Chang; assorted short stories (such as those by B.J. Novak and Philip K. Dick) and essays (such as those by Ali Wong). All students will have the option to sit for the AP English Literature exam.

Advanced Topics in English: Short Fiction (not oered in 22-23) Storytelling is a universal occupation, extant in every culture. Yet not all stories are best told at great length. This course will examine the role of short fiction—novellas, short stories, flash fiction, and micro-fiction—in a global context. The course readings will encompass many of the classic short story writers from the American, British, and European traditions, such as Henry James, Kate Chopin, and Albert Camus. However, we will also spend time with writers from shores farther abroad: Jorge Luis Borges, Jhumpa Lahiri, Margaret Atwood, Junot Diaz, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Midway through the semester, we will dedicate a portion of our time to creative writing, focusing primarily on the art of flash fiction. All students will have the option to sit for the AP English Literature exam.

Advanced Topics in English: Unreliable Narrators (not oered in 22-23) This course will focus on narrators who mislead—or hide information from—their audiences and sometimes themselves, substituting their own perceptions for the purported reality of their worlds. We will look at the ways in which the unreliable narrator is not just a device to build suspense and ensure surprising plot twists, but also a potent vehicle for exploring mental illness in symbolic ways that are alternately problematic and transgressive, empowering and suocating. Texts might include Alias Grace, Margaret Atwood; The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Mohsin Hamid; Mexican Gothic, Silvia Moreno-Garcia; My Neighbor Totoro, Studio Ghibli. All students will have the option to sit for the AP English Literature exam.