Ap Eng Lit - Society & Self

Prerequisites

• - {'type': 'grade_level', 'allowed_grades': [12]}

Course Description

• Society and Self is a year-long course focusing on the ways that individuals define themselves in the context of wider social forces - religious, cultural, political, economic, and technological. We’ll read books to help us think about ways stories help shape our sense of our selves and of what is possible in the world. While there are a million books I’d love to have time to read with students, we’re limited to two semesters, so readings will come from a long list of potential novels, plays, poems, and works of nonfiction. Some are quite old (like the folktales of One Thousand and One Nights and the moral challenges of John Milton’s Paradise Lost and William Shakespeare’s Hamlet), some quite recent (like Ta Nehisi Coates’s memoir Between the World and Me and Mohsin Hamid’s magical-realism refugee novel Exit, West). We’ll read stories about monumental historical moments (like Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, J. M. Coeztee’s Disgrace, and Beowulf - the story of a heroic kingdom facing monstrous threats). We’ll read some books that focus on the development of the self (like Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, Helen Oyeyemi’s Boy, Snow, Bird, and Jeffrey Eugenides’s Middlesex). We’ll read books that challenge us to think about our moral choices (like Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, William Maxwell’s So Long, See You Tomorrow, and Jeanette Winterson’s The Passion). And we’ll read some books that push our expectations about what writing can do (like David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, Julian Barnes’s A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters, Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy, and Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy). We’ll write in a variety of styles. Sometimes we’ll write analytical papers to help understand and challenge the works we’re reading. Other times we’ll write as a way to emulate the books we’ve read, or as narrative explorations of the ideas raised in our texts and conversations.