• English 7
• Electives
• English Course Selection

Stuyvesant seniors have one foot in the past and one foot in the future; the Writing in the World curriculum is meant to honor and reflect this unique crossroads. The course includes literature that expands upon the European and American traditions of sophomore and junior years, and writing assignments that prompt seniors to reflect upon their four years at Stuyvesant and to look towards college and beyond. During the semester, students will read major works of literature that enter into conversation with each other and with historical events. While some of the works studied may revisit the European and American canons of sophomore and junior year, syllabi will focus on works from beyond Europe and America, and much of the literature will move beyond the canon. For instance, a more traditional text like Jane Eyre may be paired with Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, a postcolonial prequel to Bronte’s novel, or Patricia Park’s Re Jane, a Korean-American retelling of the story. Writing assignments are intended to consolidate and reinforce the skills that students have acquired over the previous three years, including research and citation, and to provide opportunities for taking stock of those years and contemplating what lies ahead. Students will write pieces that ask them to join the larger academic and cultural conversations of our time, from college-level academic writing to other forms that exist outside of academia. Seniors taking the class in the fall term will complete a personal/college essay as a first assignment; seniors taking the class in the spring will complete a comprehensive culminating assignment that prompts them to reflect on the semester and/or their years at Stuyvesant.

Major questions discussed may include:

• How and why do we adapt classic stories?
• What do the stories we remember and choose to retell reveal about us?
• How do contemporary authors draw on the literature and events of the past and adapt them to comment on their present?
• How can we use writing to join the larger academic and cultural conversations of our time?
• How are people shaped by the loss of power? By the pursuit of power? By the act of dominating or being dominated by others? What happens to a people when they are colonized, and what happens after the colonizer leaves?

Works studied may include:

Beowulf

Grendel, John Gardner

Canterbury Tales, Chaucer

Hamlet, King Lear, The Tempest, Henry IV, The Winter’s Tale, Richard II Shakespeare

Selected poems by Shakespeare, Jonson, Donne, Marvell, et.al.

Gulliver’s Travels, A Modest Proposal, Jonathan Swift

Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte

Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys

Heart of Darkness/The Secret Sharer, Joseph Conrad

Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf

The Hours, Michael Cunningham

The Orwell Reader, George Orwell

Midnight’s Children, Salman Rushdie

Disgrace, J.M. Coetzee

White Teeth, Zadie Smith

The Metamorphosis and Other Stories, Franz Kafka

Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov

Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell

The New York Trilogy – Paul Auster

Catch 22, Joseph Heller

A Confederacy of Dunces, John Kennedy Toole

The House of the Spirits, Isabel Allende

The Passion, Jeanette Winterson

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Rebecca Skloot

Goodbye Columbus, Philip Roth

Re Jane, Patricia Park

Never Let Me Go, Kazuo Ishiguro

Middlesex, Jefferey Eugenides

A Tale for the Time Being, Ruth Ozeki

Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates

The Sellout, Paul Beatty

Half of a Yellow Sun, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Our Country’s Good, Timberlake Wertenbaker

Exit West, Mohsin Hamid

Homegoing, Yaa Gyasi