This course is primarily an intensive and comprehensive study of British Literature. The origins and development of British Literature are explored through a study of British authors from the Middle Ages to the present. Independent reading and research and monthly critical papers are required. An intensive SAT preparation is provided during the first term. We will be addressing the essential questions: "What is the nature of good and evil? How do we deal with the conflict between good and evil, love and hate, in ourselves, with others, in the universe?"
Week I and II: College Application Essay - 500 word essay for the "Universal College Application"
Summer Reading Review
Unit 1:
Anglo-Saxon Literature [The Beowulf poet, Bede, The Seafarer]
Unit 2:
Medieval Literature [Chaucer, The Gawain poet; Medieval Drama-Everyman]
Flim: Becket
Unit 3:
Elizabethan Poet [Wyatt, Sydney, Spenser, Marlowe, Raleigh, Shakespeare]
Jacobean Literature [Donne, Herbert, Herick, Milton]
Oral presentation on poets.
Unit 4:
Elizabethan Drama-Shakespeare: First a discussion of the film of a comedy-Much Ado About Nothing- and then an extensive discussion of a tragedy-Hamlet.
Contemporary Drama-Flim: Robert Bolt, A Man for All Seasons
Unit 1:
Restoration-18th Century
Jonathan Swift, Gilliver's Travels
Oral presentaions on 18th Century authors.
Unit 2:
Romantic Poets [Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley]
Unit 3:
Victorian Literature [Tennyson, Browning B., Browning E.B., Arnold, Austen, Dickens, H.G. Wells]
Victorian Drama-Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest
Unit 4:
Twentieth Century Literature: Short prose, poetry. Oral presentaion on 19th and 20th Century.
Contemporary Novel: Lord of the Flies
Unit 5:
Senior Project