C1 syllabus

This unit will introduce learners to the rich world of Native American literature through poetry, speeches, creation accounts and modern fiction and nonfiction.

Questions: What are the techniques of oral literature? What was/is the native American view of the relationships between humans and nature, and humans and the deity? How did Native Americans explain natural phenomena? How do Native American creation accounts compare to accounts from other cultures?

Qee’ esh Indian; “Funeral Oration” Naudowessie Indian; “Deer Poems” Taos Pueblo Indian; “Earth Making” Cherokee Indian; “Good Twin & Evil Twin” Yuma Indian; and “The Returning” by Daniel de Paola.

Skills and knowledge: Students will learn key terms of poetry such as imagery, personification, simile and metaphor. They will be able to distinguish between a writer and his “persona.” They will also be able to articulate the theme of a work of literature and describe its mood.

Students will learn about the PSAT and the SAT 1 tests, including the structure of the tests, their timing and which tests are necessary for college. The will learn tips and techniques for success on the Critical Reading and Writing portions of the PSAT and SAT 1.

Questions: What was Puritanism? What were the Puritans’ key beliefs? What type of literature did they write and why? What is the Puritan legacy for 21st century America?

Understandings: Puritanism has had a continuous and ongoing influence on American thought. Their religious beliefs influenced every aspect of their lives, including literature and education. Different eras have had had different answers to the question, “Do humans have free will?”

Skills and knowledge: Students will learn literary terms like rhyme scheme, extended metaphor, couplet and analogy. They will study techniques of persuasion.

Questions: Are humans perfectible? Is the universe an orderly and harmonious system and is it understandable to humans? What does it mean to be an American? Is America a melting pot? Can the written word change the world?

Understandings: Students will understand key beliefs of the Enlightenment: the paramount role of rational thought in human affairs, the perfectibility of humans, and the orderly nature of the universe. They will also understand how the literary forms of an era reflect its beliefs and interests, and how the written word has the power to change history.

Readings: DeCreveceour’s Letters from an American Farmer, Franklin’s Autobiography and aphorisms, Wheatley’s poems, Abigail Adams’ letters, and Paine’s “The Crisis.”

Skills and Knowledge: Students will comprehend concepts from this era such as rationalism, free will and clean slate. They will be able to recognize and employ literary terms such as allusion, aphorism, the literary letter (epistle), the almanac and the autobiography.

Questions: What was Romanticism and how has it influenced modern thinking? Is it more important to trust your heart or your mind? Is the individual more important than the group? Is innovation in art more important than tradition?

Understandings: The students will understand the Romantic world view, including their belief in the importance of nature and the value of imagination, their respect for the “common man and for native peoples, and their desire to challenge authority and tradition.

Readings: Poems by William Cullen Bryant, Poe, and James Russell Lowell; selections from Moby Dick by Melville; “Dr, Heidigger’s Experiment” by Hawthorne and “The Devil and Daniel Walker” by Washington Irving.

Skills and Knowledge: Students will know the beliefs of the Romantic Era, be able to identify the Romantic style, and the difference between romantic with a small “r” and a capital “R.” They will be able to identify and explain satire and the “tale tale” story. They can describe both the tone and the theme of a story or poem. They will be adept at spotting symbols and foreshadowing.

Questions: What is the importance of nature in the lives of humans? What is pantheism? What is the oversoul? What is self-reliance? Is it ever justifiable to break the law? What does Thoreau mean when he says, “Simplify! Simplify!”? Do most people “fritter away their lives”? What is “essential living”?

Understandings: The Transcendentalists believed that the universe is a projection of the universal spirit which they called the oversoul. There is a unity of all things in the universe. Each individual is a unique manifestation of the oversoul. They believed that life should be lived on a transcendent level, one must try to “live deep and suck out all the marrow of life.”

Readings: selections from the essays “Nature” and “Self-Reliance” by Emerson, his poem, “The Rhodora,” and his selected quotations; selections from Walden and “Civil Disobedience” by Thoreau.

Skills and Knowledge: Students will remember the key beliefs of the Transcendentalists. They will also be familiar with the conventions of the formal and informal essay and methods of persuasion and argumentation.

Questions: What is a poet’s voice? Is it what is said or how it’s said? How did these poets change the way people look at poetry? In what ways is each poet’s style distinctive? How were these poets forerunners of modern poets?

Understandings: Whitman was “the people’s poet” and his unconventional style and subject matter reflected the diversity and energy of America. Dickinson was far ahead of her time in her experiments with style and meaning, and she had the ability to see the miraculous in the mundane. Dunbar was a key poet who drew upon influences from jazz and blues, and who prefigured the Harlem Renaissance writers.

Skills and Knowledge: Students will be able to recognize each poet by their style alone and recognize each poet’s significance. They will also be aware of poetic techniques such as alliteration, parallelism, speaker, rhythm, onomatopoeia, and catalogs.

Questions: What is realism? What is a realistic style? Did the realists undervalue humanity? Are humans simply the products of the forces of determinism? Are humans “at the center of the universe, the fulfiller or frustrater of the grandest dreams of God Almighty” (Vonnegut) or tiny, powerless beings in a cold, uncaring universe?What has been the legacy of the Realists for modern literature and other art forms?

Understandings: Realists rejected Romanticism. Realism was a product of its times, a result of the Civil War, industrialism, and rural and urban poverty. Realism is still the dominant mode of serious fiction, in spite of modernism, postmodernism and the literature of diversion.

Readings: “Disappointment is the Lot of Women” by Lucy Stone; “The Story of an Hour” by Kate Chopin; selected chapters from Huckleberry Finn; and Stephen Crane’s Maggie, a Girl of the Streets.

Skills and Knowledge: Students will know and recognize the realistic subject matter and style. They will be better able to read works in dialect, such as Huck Finn and Maggie. They will understand the three fundamental types of persuasion: logos, ethos & pathos. They will understand how authors use dialect, local color, setting, idioms and colloquial expressions to create a portrait of a world. The will understand the elements of plotting, including exposition, development, and surprise endings. They will also recognize when authors use irony.

Questions: Why did this outpouring of art by African-Americans happen in New York City in the 1920’s? What were the gender and class divisions among these writers? Should authors belonging to social minorities “articulate the struggle” or should they be “in the service of the struggle”? What was the importance of African-American folk traditions for the writers of the Harlem Renaissance? Was “the problem of the 20th century the color line,” as DuBois said. Is it still?

Understandings: The Harlem Renaissance was the first major cultural and artistic awakening of African-Americans. Though centered in New York City, the Harlem Renaissance was in fact national and even international in scope. The Harlem Renaissance marked the end of an era of “compromise and acceptance,” and the beginning of an era of “resistance and confrontation.” They will understand that for many readers the literature of protest is as important as literature for art’s sake.

Readings: Poems by Claude McKay, Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, and James Weldon Johnson. Nonfiction by Dorothy West. Fiction by Zora Neale Hurston. Autobiography by Richard Wright.

Skills and Knowledge: Students will know the major themes of the Harlem Renaissance writers as well as their stylistic devices, such as diction, imagery, and figurative language. They will become aware of the conventions of the personal essay. We will study the sonnet form. There will be a brief unit on word origins, or etymology.

This unit will introduce learners to the important trends, themes and issues in American Literature during the 20th and 21st centuries, with a special unit on Modernism.

Questions: Why do so many writers and artists seem alienated and what is alienation? How has technology influenced the arts? Have recorded music and movies become our most important art forms? How have ethnic minorities, women, and other groups whose voices have been previously suppressed, influenced the arts? Why are so many protagonists in modern novels (and movies) “anti-heroes”? What is an anti-hero? What is Modernism? How does it differ from artistic movements of earlier eras?

Understandings: Students will understand that, in spite of its extraordinary growth and progress in the 20th century, America still suffers from many societal problems and much personal unhappiness, and many of our great writers have pointed out our shortcomings as well as our strengths. Students will understand how the rise of popular culture has influenced and even eliminated what was both the folk and elite cultures of previous centuries. They will understand how the changing roles of women in our society have influenced literature. They will see the significant impact of African Americans, Native Americans, Asian Americans and other groups on literature. They will understand how Modernism has changed all the arts, painting, architecture, and music, as well as writing.

Readings: The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald; Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut; Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer; short fiction by Thomas Wolfe, Dorothy Parker, Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, James Baldwin. Tim O”Brien; poetry by T. S. Eliot, ee cummings, Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, and Barbara Kingsolver; plays by Thornton Wilder and Edward Albee.

Skills and Knowledge: Students will be able to read a nonlinear, nontraditional narrative, such as Slaughterhouse Five. They will understand modern narrative techniques such as stream of consciousness. They will understand the use of allusion, imagery, structure, theme and other techniques in modern poetry. They will be aware of some of the different types of modern drama, including theater of the absurd.