Designed for students who are good writers and enjoy reading, this challenging course examines literature in greater depth than the regular freshman course, adding classics by authors such as Hemingway, Stevenson, Sandburg, and Arthur Miller. The composition component of the course includes analytical papers, opinion responses, and creative writing.

This course is designed to expand students’ cultural awareness and help create global citizens through the close examination of works of great literature from around the world. Students will engage with the cultural, racial, and religious differences that have bound and divided the peoples of the world throughout history and be encouraged to meet these new perspectives with tolerance and an open mind. Readings will come from the masterworks of authors like Homer, Dante Alighieri, Shakespeare, Orwell, Camus, Voltaire, Calvino, and Beah. Each major work is supplemented with poetry, short stories, essays, and articles.

Students will continue to develop their writing skills with emphasis on formulating a clear thesis, using supportive evidence, and developing clarity of expression.

This course covers many of the great authors in English Literature — poets, novelists, and playwrights — from the mid-16th to the mid-20th century. The fall semester typically focuses on Shakespeare’s plays and sonnets, the satire of Jonathan Swift, and Romantic poets such as Blake, Wordsworth, and Keats.  The spring semester shifts the emphasis to the Victorian Period and the fall of the British Empire.

Students read several great Victorian and early 20th century novels by authors such as Dickens and Coetzee, and short stories and poetry by masters including Joyce, Eliot, and Yeats. Students' writing will continue to be developed through journals and formal essays. All students take the NYS English Regents Examination.

London Seminar is a multi-layered study of the city of London’s evolution through its various literary, cultural, political, historical, artistic, and architectural incarnations.  Primary focus of the course is “literary London,” the examination of how various writers characterized and documented life within this cosmopolitan city.  Of great importance will also be key historical, political and social movements as they relate to the evolution of London and its denizens, dating from Roman times to its status as a post-modern financial and cultural capital.  The course also explores London’s relationship to the larger concept of England’s rise and fall as a major world empire.  Of major focus will be not only London’s role in the world, but the whole of England’s history, culture, and influence – literary or otherwise.  

A major component of this course will be an eight-day trip to London.  The city of London and its surrounding areas will become a classroom for our students, allowing a physical realization of their conceptual work.  They will experience first hand the historical sights, museums, cultural attractions and neighborhoods they study in the course.  By experiencing this course and trip, students will have a greater understanding of the literary and cultural traditions of England, and a greater comfort with a foreign culture and its people.  Students will also come to understand the importance of being a “world traveler,” its implications and responsibilities. 

The course is offered to juniors only.  It will be taught in a seminar format, meeting once per day, as a regular part of the student’s schedule.  It will be on the level of an honors class in both course work and content, and will allow our students to pursue individually designed research and thinking under the direct guidance of the instructor.  The course will count as one full credit in place of a Major British Writers Honors course.