Class XI English Electives

HOME AND MEMORY (Fall): Our readings are Zamora’s Unaccompanied; Walcott’s White Egrets; and Castillo, Joseph, and Lin’s Here to Stay: Poetry and Prose from the Undocumented Diaspora. Poets from countries ravaged by colonialism and imperialism often reckon with the exile that empire effects. In this elective, we will examine how these poets invoke memory, nature, and family to write their way back home.

THE MOTHER WOUND AND MIGRATION (Spring): While immigration to the United States is typically viewed through the lens of enhanced opportunities, often overlooked is the possibility of resultant identity anxiety. Among many twentieth-century writers seeking to illuminate this fraught space are Amy Tan and Jamaica Kincaid. In Tan’s The Joy Luck Club, four women flee China to escape war and poverty. Their American-born daughters abide in wealth and safety. However, these daughters also end up estranged from their mothers, mother tongues, and mother countries. Similarly, in Kincaid’s Lucy, the eponymous protagonist undergoes distressing familial and cultural alienation upon immigrating from Antigua. These two novels offer us insights into the traumas that can ensue from identity confusion and prompt us to consider how the narratives by which we live can widen or mend such separation.

“LOVE IS NOT LOVE”—AUDEN, BISHOP, RICH, AND BROWN (Fall): Poets delight in paradox, and the subject of love lends itself to multiplying paradoxes. In this course, we read four poets from different personal and social contexts—Wystan Hugh Auden (1907–1973), Elizabeth Bishop (1911–1979), Adrienne Rich (1929–2012), and Jericho Brown (1976–)—for their original approaches to romantic love. In pursuing this perennial subject, students will consider how these authors recast old tropes, activate fresh sensations, and break new ground. There are opportunities for both creative and critical writing.

THREE SHORT STORY WRITERS: LAHIRI, YAMAMOTO, AND MUNRO (Spring): In Jhumpa Lahiri’s short story, “The Interpreter of Maladies” (which is also the title of her story collection), the protagonist translates, or interprets, between a doctor and his patients. The interpreter, who knows the responsibilities and the limits of her job, is an intriguing figure for any short story writer. By closely examining the work of Jhumpa Lahiri, Hisaye Yamamoto (Seventeen Syllables), and Alice Munro (Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage), students discover the uses and the beauties of the short story form in diagnosing the maladies of the modern condition.

ECOPOETRY (Fall): Ecopoetry generally refers to poetry about ecology, ecosystems, animals, agriculture, climate change, water, food, and the like. Now it also includes crises, catastrophes, and apocalypses. Scholars who study this kind of literature engage in “ecocriticism,” a term for how we learn to read and write with explicitly ecological concerns in mind. In this elective, we will read a range of ecopoetry, in which metaphors abound, as generators of that which is uneasily perceived, and forms range from the oppressively rigid to the wildly experimental. Students will explore ideas related to the interdependence of all things and the insatiability of our appetites, always with difference and inflection. Class time will be spent in regular, albeit intense, close reading of the poetics, occasional flourishes into abstraction, and communal reflection on what can be done. At the very least, we will read poetry by William Wordsworth (1770–1850), John Ashbery (1927–2017), and Louise Erdrich (1954–).

DANTE’S INFERNO (Spring): In 1321, a mostly irrelevant Italian living in Ravenna completed the final cantos of his long poem, The Divine Comedy, and then promptly died. Seven hundred years later, the poem is still read, revered, even worshiped, despite its arcanity and, to a not insignificant degree, its absurdity. We will read the first third of Dante’s Divine Comedy, an account of the poet’s journey into hell, or inferni—the place of the shadows, shades, and partial selves. Other traditions have chosen other nomenclature, each with a subtle inflection on the basic idea: that after death we may be praised or rewarded, reviled or punished, depending on the content of our character. We won’t be able to determine, of course, whether any of that is true, but we will be able to use the proposition as a point of entry to the moral, religious, and cultural history of the West, and how we tend to think about the irredeemable and the unredeemed.

CHILDHOOD IN BLACK POETRY: INNOCENCE, EXPERIENCE, AND IDENTITY (Fall): Childhood at times serves as a trope within literature, representing an idyllic period of innocence and play. While innocence and play are central to the early experiences of Black children, we will explore how Black poets temper their depiction of childhood innocence through the lenses of history and experience. Writers whom we will explore include Gwendolyn Brooks, Eve Ewing, Audre Lorde, Safiya Sinclair, and Danez Smith, among others.

TRANSPORT: BORDER CROSSINGS IN BLACK LITERATURE (Spring): Trans/port: (v) to carry across. Transport is a critical framework for approaching African diasporic literature and the concept of diaspora more broadly. The idea of “carrying across” brings into view the border crossings that inform diasporic experience—crossings of geographic borders, social borders, dimensional borders, temporal borders, and beyond. Black writing often explores border crossing as a fundamental aspect of diasporic experience. Our readings will take us from the seemingly fixed points of the triangular trade to the tense social constructions of the early twentieth century to the discourse around borders in our contemporary moment. Authors whose writing we will explore include Nella Larsen, Saidiya Hartman, and Kiese Laymon, among others.

POETRY AND THE MODERN ERA (Fall): In the early years of the twentieth century, many poets experimented with radically new verse forms to represent and grapple with shifting worldviews. War, religious doubt, political upheaval, inequity, and industrialization all contributed to an era characterized by uncertainty and resistance. Marianne Moore (1887–1972), Langston Hughes (1902–1967), and Muriel Rukeyser (1913–1980), brilliant poets in their own right, offer insights into how poetry can help us better understand and respond to the larger social forces of their—and our—time.

MONSTERS AND US (Spring): Monsters fascinate and terrify us. In her novel Frankenstein (1818), Mary Shelley depicted a scientist who creates life and then must face the consequences of doing so, as his “monster” demonstrates a humanity, love, and need for companionship far beyond his expectations or understanding. In Franz Kafka’s novella Metamorphosis (1915), a person suddenly, inexplicably, transforms into a giant insect. In Isaac Bashevis Singer’s novella The Golem (1969/1982), a being is created from clay to rescue a man unjustly charged with a crime. In these texts, the concept of the monster, or the monstrous, helps us grapple with all that is unknowable and uncertain about human society, from new technologies to large-scale cultural changes to questions of fairness and equity. Encountering monsters helps us, or forces us, to encounter ourselves.