Buxton School - Williamstown, Massachusetts

ENGLISH IV (full year)
Seniors will choose one of two electives offered each semester, each taught by a different teacher. These courses will continue to develop, on a more advanced level, many of the theoretical and aesthetic ideas explored in the previous three years. Student writing, class reading, and discussions are at the center of the courses.

The Family and Its Discontents (one semester)
As Tolstoy famously wrote at the beginning of Anna Karenina, “All happy families are alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” This may or may not be a true statement, but it is certainly one that authors like to explore. Literature is full of unhappy childhoods and the complicated adulthoods that result from them. We will read some books—both fiction and nonfiction—that have odd, unhappy, messy, messed-up families at their center. We will start with The Poisonwood Bible, Barbara Kingsolver’s best novel about a family of missionaries in the Belgian Congo on the eve of its complicated and incomplete independence. We will then read a range of other books, possibly including Fun Home, Alison Bechdel’s graphic (as in “using graphics”) memoir about coming of age and coming out; Running with Scissors, Augusten Burrough’s bizarre memoir about being raised by his mother’s psychiatrist; Beloved, Toni Morrison’s best regarded novel about an escaped slave and her daughter; and Room, a brand new book about a son being raised in very unusual circumstances. We’ll try to watch some movies, as well, although the logistics are always tricky. And we’ll be writing both creative and analytical snippets, stories, and papers as a way of thinking about and absorbing the techniques, artistry, and themes of these authors and their works.

The Russians (one semester)
This course is a survey of a few of the major voices in Russian literature from the end of the 19th Century to the present. Part of what accounts for the Russians’ great popularity you already know from War and Peace, and this course seeks to round out that understanding, particularly by focusing on the work of Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy’s darker, brasher counterpart. We will start with Dostoyevsky’s novella Notes from Underground, which follows a tumultuous unnamed man on a rant about the difficulties he has with “living life,” and then we’ll move onto the baggy and brooding Crime and Punishment, which centers on another alienated man who takes it upon himself to test the results of a terrible act. Thus aware of the moral themes that dominate the stormy landscape of Russian fiction, we’ll move onto the work of Anton Chekhov and Isaac Babel, short story writers who offer intimate pictures of daily Russian life, from the farm to the battlefield. We will finish the term with a glimpse into the realities of Soviet and post-Soviet Russia with Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, which takes us into a Soviet work camp, and Victor Pelevin’s “A Werewolf Problem in Central Russia,” which employs magic-realism and satire to depict the surreality of life in the former USSR. The course will touch on the important aspects of Russian history, but its main focus will be on the intense, soul-searching themes that dominate its major writers’ stories.

(one semester)
Poetry is the art form that most asks us to stop and be still. To read a poem is to slow down and focus your intellect, senses, and emotions onto a small group of words and to let their meaning work on and through you. To write a poem is to think about language, sensation, and feeling in a distilled and deliberate manner and to translate experience into precise and economical language.

Throughout the term, as both readers and writers, students will practice the demanding skills of poetry. The study of poetry will be approached through a series of poetic forms as a way of exploring what poetry is, what makes it different than prose (or any other art form, for that matter), and what different formal structures do to language and experience. Because free verse has become the default setting for most poetry writing, of particular interest will be the more structured poetic forms and the effect they have on reading and writing of poetry. What can you say with a sonnet? How does rhyme affect meaning? What makes a villanelle powerful? Members of the class will look at and experience the constant tension between powerful emotion and disciplined expression that defines poetry through reading new and old poems, and writing and sharing their own. This elective is open to all grades.

Seniors will choose one of two electives offered each semester, each taught by a different teacher. These courses will continue to develop, on a more advanced level, many of the theoretical and aesthetic ideas explored in the previous three years. Student writing, class reading, and discussions are at the center of the courses.

Going to Extremes (one semester)
This course will look at the attraction and use of extremes in storytelling and in life. We’ll look at stories, books (and the occasional movie) that use bizarre scenarios (like those in Kafka’s “A Hunger Artist” and “Metamorphosis”), out-there storytelling techniques or language (as in Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange), or otherworldly events or characters (as in Tony Kushner’s play Angels in America) to create or bolster their themes or concerns. We will also examine nonfiction works (such as Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild) that feature situations or people with intemperate reactions to the world. As a class, we will think, talk, and write about the reasons authors, readers, and people in general are drawn to or driven to extremes. What do unrealistic scenarios allow authors to express? What is the function of outrageous set-ups or stories? What does the vicarious experience of reading risky writing do for us as readers and thinkers? In addition to analyzing the texts for the class, we will also try our hand at writing our own “extreme” narratives.

Views of the Border (one semester)
The Southwestern U.S. border holds a distinct place in the American cultural imagination: cowboys and Indians mythically clashed on the same deserts that people now connect with conflicts surrounding drug smuggling, immigration, and globalization. In recent months, many sections of the border have drawn the nation’s attention for various reasons—violence spiraling out of control near El Paso, seemingly discriminatory laws passed in Arizona, scores of bodies found in the desert, military buildup, millions of pounds of drugs caught in transit—all of which are tied into our complex and complicated relationship with Mexico and Central and South America. Following on the heels of our trip to Nicaragua, this course is an introduction to the tangle of issues that keep our border a fraught and fascinating place. We will begin by focusing our attention on two books set in the region—the non-fiction novel The Devil’s Highway by Luis Alberto Urrea and the fictional No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy—and move on to books that depict the journey from Latin America to a new life in the U.S. on a broader scale with the non-fiction novel Enrique’s Journey by Sonia Nazario, which follows a young Honduran boy’s perilous trips on top of rail cars to find his mother in North Carolina, and the funny, streetwise family history of Junot Diaz’s novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Along the way we will watch several films and read essays that describe the history of our southern border and flesh out our understanding of its place in American politics, culture, and history with discussions about citizenship, drug law, and the global economy.

(one semester)
Shakespeare has influenced the literature and language of the past few centuries more than any other writer. This class studies Shakespeare as a key to literary tradition. The emphasis is on understanding Shakespeare through reading the plays aloud. To prepare for an intentional and conscious reading, we use “analysis” and “paraphrasis.” We also examine literary and rhetorical devices used in the Shakespearean canon. The concurrent motivation is getting to spend time with some of the greatest writing in the English language. Plays read may include As You Like It, Two Gentlemen of Verona, Winter’s Tale, Antony and Cleopatra, Hamlet, The Sonnets as well as works by Euripides, Ben Jonson, and contemporary playwrights.

(one semester)
A junior/senior literature elective, this class will explore the big themes that arise in the Twentieth Century. We will discuss the characteristics that define Modernism and Postmodernism. We will also examine how colonialism, the two world wars, the Cold War, and globalization have impacted the questions that literature sought to answer over this 100-year span. This class will address books that hail from all over the world, although more emphasis will be placed on the West (Europe and the U.S.), particularly in the first half of the course.

(one semester)
This class will study traditional Chinese Taoist philosophy as well as Taoist concepts in western literature. We will learn about Taoism through the book The Tao of Pooh, which reads Winnie-the-Pooh through a Taoist lens. The book argues that Winnie–the-Pooh is a Taoist sage. We will also read traditional texts such as the Tao Te Ching and compare these to western sources such as The Marriage of Heaven and Hell by William Blake, which discusses the dualistic possibilities of combining those two Christian concepts. Taoism is a philosophy developed between 600 and 200 B.C. by the sage Lao Tzu. The central Taoist concept is that there is a universal force in nature. This force flows through everything. Like water, it has the strength to carve rock and move earth but also seeks the path of least resistance. There are many other ideas in Taoism, like the balance between feminine and masculine, which lead to a dualistic approach to life. You cannot have one without the other. We will explore all of these concepts and ask many questions ourselves through analytical papers, personal responses, interactive activities, and creative/artistic responses.

(full year)
This course will explore a variety of topics concerning the Third World via a sample of literature from and about nations designated under this label. It will seek to provide perspectives that often remain untold in the West (and will ask why these perspectives do often remain untold). Through the use of novels, short stories, graphic novels, and poetry this course will investigate local traditions: the daily lives, religious rituals, political practices, et cetera of those areas that specific writings address. In so doing, this course will also require students to think about broader patterns common to the Third World: colonization, poverty, cultural imperialism, and emigration, among many others.

Seniors will choose one of two electives offered each semester, each taught by a different teacher. These courses will continue to develop, on a more advanced level, many of the theoretical and aesthetic ideas explored in the previous three years. Student writing, class reading and discussion are at the center of the courses.

Literature of Colonialism
This course will look at books and movies that explore the far-reaching and long-lasting effects of colonialism in several parts of the world. The texts we will be exploring examine the interplay between the occupier and the occupied—and how they understand themselves morally, ethnically, and psychologically. We will start with Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, a beautiful and ambitious book that takes on the history of Latin America (some would argue that it tackles the entire history of humankind). After that, we will move to Africa, reading Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, set in the Congo at the turn of the last century, followed by The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver, set in the Belgian Congo of the 1950s and ’60s (and up to the present). If we have time, we will also read Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight, Alexandra Fuller’s memoir of growing up in Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe. We will end the course in India, reading books yet to be determined (possibly E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India; The White Tiger, a 2008 book by Indian author Aravind Adiga; or The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy). Along the way, we will watch some related movies, such as Lagaan (a Bollywood epic), Apocolypse Now (Francis Ford Coppolla’s Vietnam movie, loosely based on Heart of Darkness), and others.

Gabriel García Márquez: Tropical Magic and the Structure of Remembered Time
Since the publication of One Hundred Years of Solitude in 1967, critics and readers alike have heralded the Columbian author Gabriel García Márquez as a “master storyteller.” This course will consider the mechanics behind that assessment by focusing on three qualities of Márquez’s work that make him stand out as an author: his use of “magical realism,” his serpentine structuring of narrative time, and his status as a leading voice in Latin American culture for the past fifty years. We will read and study three of his novels—One Hundred Years of Solitude, Love in the Time of Cholera, and The Autumn of the Patriarch—as well as various short stories and critical essays about the writer. In order to understand the global context of Márquez’s innovations, we will also look at two experimental, gothic novels that influenced him immensely: Mexican Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo and American William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying. There will be two analytical essays assigned over the course of the term, and the rest of the writing will consist of short creative responses to techniques we discuss in class.

(full year)
The class will read Tolstoy’s War and Peace over the course of the fall term. Daily discussions will focus on the rich emotional and moral world that Tolstoy uniquely creates. In the first half of the term there will be weekly in-class writing assignments. Later in the fall, students will write an original short story that will include some Tolstoian themes and techniques. A major expository essay on the novel will fall due before the December vacation.  The winter term will focus on a selection of short stories and three short novels by D.H. Lawrence. Again, there will be two major writing assignments. In the spring we will read King Lear, and the year will end with a study of selected poetry and letters of John Keats.

(full year)
Sophomore English is meant to be a time of exposure, discovery, and analysis. Building on the passion for literature that students bring from their freshman experience, students must now start to “look behind the curtain,” to see how writing works. How does an author build a book? How does she create meaning? And how can a student do the same with his or her own writing? The course is designed to expose students to as many different kinds of writing and writers as possible. Plays, poetry, short stories, novellas, novels, and graphic novels are all included in the reading. Authors range from William Shakespeare, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Franz Kafka to Gabriel García Márquez, Art Spiegelman, Jamaica Kincaid, and Barbara Kingsolver. Students also do a great deal of writing in the course, with assignments ranging from short analytical essays to long papers to original short stories to comics to poems. Finally, the course emphasizes engaged discussion, in the process helping students begin to make connections between the books themselves, between literature and life, and between their emerging ideas and their work as writers.

(full year)
This class is intended to serve three functions. First, it is an introduction to the infinite pleasures and possibilities of literature. By looking at a selection of contemporary novels and classic texts, we will begin to consider them individually and in relation to each other. The year begins with a study of short fiction (Donald Barthelme, Carolyn Ferrell, Raymond Carver, Tobias Wolff, Lorrie Moore, and William Carlos Williams) but moves on to various other genres in literature in order to expose the students to a multitude of ideas, styles and histories. Second, the course serves as a preliminary briefing in the language and conceptual frames which contemporary scholars, critics and theorists use to make sense of literature. Third, the class is an opportunity for the student to improve his or her reading, writing and speaking skills. Students will learn to critically interpret and articulate their own ideas effectively in careful analysis and personal response to the topics at hand.