Students read diverse literature by great authors, through which they develop their interpretive and imaginative skills. The course emphasizes frequent writing, both analytical and creative, as well as vocabulary study and a thorough grammar program. Lively class discussion helps to shape students’ verbal skills. Representative authors include Dickens, Hinton, Achebe, Shakespeare, and London.

This course extends the study of literary forms and explores themes such as identity, displacement, and change. The study of grammar and vocabulary continues, and frequent writing assignments support students in the transition from narrative to analytical writing. The Junior School curriculum fosters a smooth transition to the challenging upper school curriculum. Representative authors include Cather, Hansberry, and Draper.

This course establishes a foundation for students’ close reading habits, analytical writing process, and discussion skills. Engaging a theme of ‘imagining society’ through studies of works by authors such as Golding, Gyasi, Ishiguro, and Shakespeare, the course helps students move from observation to interpretation through a variety of assignments and activities that promote a deeper understanding of themselves and their society through our shared literature.

Introduced to increasingly sophisticated literature, students continue to develop and sharpen their reading and analytical thinking skills. The Grade 10 curriculum emphasizes the technical and critical vocabulary of literary forms: poetry, short story, and stage plays. Frequent writing allows students to develop and polish skills through analytical and creative assignments, bridging these compositional approaches to studying and appreciating literature. Students end the course by returning to studies of a novel, applying their evolved literary skills to a familiar form within the English curriculum at Hopkins. This course surveys a range of representative authors and texts, from the ancient to the contemporary, across each literary form.

Required for all 11th Graders, Term I, ½ credit.
This course is a concentrated study and practicum in writing. Students write often and much across multiple expository forms. For models, we turn to a department-curated collection of essays from a diverse range of classic and contemporary writers. Rhetorical theory and practice alongside additional ancillary texts expands writers’ range and opportunity to hone their craft.

Grade 11 & 12. Term II, ½ credit.
The fastest-growing genre of writing in the United States today, creative nonfiction ranges from memoir to long-form journalism, from the travelogue to the diary. It takes factually accurate material and applies the craft of literary style and technique, rendering it in more dynamic and compelling prose. In this literature-based elective, students will explore a wide range of forms of creative nonfiction, including works by such writers as Woolf, Angelou, Didion, Dillard, Capote, Rankine, Baldwin, Smith, Talese, Hurston, and Fadiman. They will develop a portfolio of their own creative nonfiction writing, interrogating the nature of “truth” while considering its relationship with language.

Grade 11 & 12. Term II, ½ credit.
If I cannot inspire love, I will cause fear… from Frankenstein to more modern creations, Dark Romanticism has delighted and disturbed audiences through its representations of the spectral, the sublime, and the uncanny. Students will learn conventions of the Gothic across literary forms, studying innovators such as Byron and Coleridge, the Rossettis and the Shelleys. Thereafter, students will explore contemporary recreations of the Gothic, resituating Dark Romanticism’s early, western European foundations within works of Ward and Glover, among others.

Grades 11 & 12. Term II, 1 credit. ½ credit English, ½ credit History
Students receive both English and History credit for this team-taught, interdisciplinary course.
Each class meets for a double-block period.
African-American experiences are explored through literary texts and historical documents alike, with the critical examination of primary sources and articles providing a backbone for studies in literature. The course begins with the complex histories of the peoples of the African subcontinent before turning to address slavery, Reconstruction and Jim Crow, the Harlem Renaissance and Civil Rights Movement, and the present. Representative authors have included Frederick Douglass, Richard Wright, Alice Walker, August Wilson, James Baldwin, Langston Hughes, Yaa Gyasi, and Toni Morrison. In addition, art, film, and music will inform our study. Assessments are jointly given and graded and consist of essays, research presentations, creative assignments based on research, and a collaborative, capstone analytical project. Through the interdisciplinary examination of literature and history, students have the opportunity to reach a deeper understanding of the circumstances, challenges, contributions, and resiliency of African Americans from the days of slavery to our current moment. [This course counts as two academic courses in Term II.]

Grade 11 & 12. Term II, ½ credit.
This course examines how literary texts engage in questions of moral choice and action in an ambiguous world. In addition to focusing on texts from across the globe, this course also demands engagement with moral philosophy, including concepts such as moral relativism, utilitarianism, and the ethics of the other. Authors include Baldwin, Butler, Camus, Coetzee, and Ibsen.

Grade 11 & 12. Term II, ½ credit.
To read Native American literature is to engage in decolonization. This course opens with a look at historical, political, and legal documents before shifting to novels, short stories, and poetry that focus on reservation life and Native urbanity. Our representative authors— Diaz, Erdrich, FastHorse, Nagle, Orange, and Silko— craft metafictional and metahistorical stories that tear down American exceptionalism and celebrate the truth that Native Americans “are still here.”

Grade 11 & 12. Term II, 1⁄2 credit.

Some view their relationship to nature as conquerors,
others as collaborators, and some as the conquered. This
course explores how writers inhabit those relationships
and investigates our own connections to natural spaces.
We will explore the ways in which nature transcends
setting and becomes a character in literature of the past
and present. Students will live the connections between
characters and place by investigating their own natural
spaces, including some around the Hopkins campus.
Representative authors include Camille T. Dungy,
William Shakespeare, Wangari Maathai, David Orr, and
Robin Wall Kimmerer.

Grade 11 & 12. Term II, ½ credit.
Students will explore the origins, types, meanings, and resonances of mythology, folklore, and fable. By considering the structures and presentations of tales of creation, heroes’ journeys, tricksters and devils, wronged women and damsels in distress, and lovers, we will explore the major questions that humans seek to answer via storytelling: Where did we come from? Why are we here? What is our purpose? Where will we go next? We will read full-length works, short prose, and poetry from Ancient Greek and Roman, European, American, and world mythologies

Grade 11 & 12. Term II, 1⁄2 credit.

This course offers an introduction to topics associated
with the creation and, especially, decline of the
British empire. We will read texts from former British
colonies such as India, Nigeria, the Caribbean, Australia,
and South Africa, all of which examine the question of
power: Who has it? Who wants it? And when a former
colony gets it, who gets left behind?

Grade 11 & 12. Term II, 1⁄2 credit.
Offered every other year.
Next offered 2022–2023.

This course offers an introduction to literature that
explores sexualities and gender identities beyond straight
and cisgender. We will read literature by and about
people and communities who identify as LGBTQIA+,
and examine and analyze the ways in which the texts
disrupt, subvert, and challenge socially constructed
sexual, gender, and cultural power dynamics.

Grade 11 & 12. Term II, ½ credit. Offered every other year. Next offered 2022–2023.
This course explores a rich and violent culture through its 19th century golden age and its Soviet Period. Students read works by such authors as Chekhov, Dostoyevsky, Gogol, Pushkin, and Tolstoy, appreciating them first as great literature, and then as windows on a fascinating and turbulent nation.

Grade 11 & 12. Term II, ½ credit.
No literary form studies the pain and the pleasure of the human condition in more depth than the novel. This course will focus on the historical progression of this art form through a variety of lively and poignant works that span from the mid 19th century to the present decade. In doing so, we will explore some of the finest and most evocative prose from brilliant authors such as Dickens, Woolf, Baldwin, and Morrison.

Grade 11 & 12. Term II, ½ credit.
The course focuses on American writers seeking to expose or to change an evolving and often elusive American dream. Students will connect literature to historical, social, and political contexts such as the women’s movement, the civil rights movement, the LGBTQ+ movement, and the protest movement against the war in Vietnam. Students will also consider the original pursuit of the American dream and apply it to a 20th century reality. Representative writers include Fitzgerald, Chopin, Larsen, Gaines, O’Brien, Mamet, and Lahiri.

Grade 11 & 12. Term II, ½ credit.
This course focuses on literature written after the events of September 11th, 2001, with an eye toward better understanding the anxieties and concerns of today. By reading our country’s complex and diverse literature, we will come to know it better. Authors include McCarthy, Gay, Moshfegh, Clark, Vuong, Whitehead, and Machado.

Grade 12. Term I, ½ credit.
This course explores the attributes and character of the ideal (and less than ideal) ruler, while examining the personal sacrifices leaders often have to make as they struggle to maintain stability in their realm. Through a study of Machiavelli’s The Prince and Shakespeare’s history plays, students will critique the tension that exists between being both an effective leader and a moral person.

Grade 12. Term I, ½ credit.
This course focuses on the subtleties involved in a close reading of Shakespeare’s texts and the decisions involved in bringing his words to film and the stage. The class explores Shakespeare in his own context and in modern productions so students can identify artistic choices and interpret their implications. Students will attend area performances to extend their experience beyond the classroom.

Grade 12. Term I, ½ credit.
Shakespeare explores revenge, inaction, and forgiveness as a range of human responses to injustice in relationships and in society. In this course, students will investigate the tension between justice and mercy, vengeance and absolution. Through the study of some of the most beautiful and dense passages in Shakespeare’s “problem plays,” students will learn to distinguish fairness and justice.

Grade 12. Term I, ½ credit.
Shakespeare’s women embody complex identities that invite modern students to challenge and reassess the societal expectations of Elizabethan England and of our own time. While their types—royals, servants, family members, leads, and marginal figures—are stock types, Shakespeare’s writing resists easy labels. Drawing from plays across the many genres of Shakespeare’s oeuvre, students will learn to identify the way that Shakespeare has rendered women in three dimensions and examine why that matters.

Grade 11 & 12. Term I, ½ credit.
In this writing workshop, students develop the technical skills essential to writing short fiction and poetry. Students read and analyze fiction and poetry by contemporary authors to aid in the development of their own creative work. Students also engage in critical analysis of each other’s writing. (This course requires departmental permission and may be taken only as a second English course.)

Grade 11 & 12. Term II, ½ credit. Offered every other year. Next offered 2024–2025.
In this writing workshop, students develop the technical skills essential to writing short fiction and memoirs. Students read and analyze fiction and creative nonfiction by contemporary authors to aid in the development of their own creative work, which is the primary aim of the course. Students also engage in critical analysis of each other’s creative work. (This course may be taken as the primary Term II English elective in Grade 12. This course requires departmental permission when taken as a second English course in Grade 11 )

Grade 11 & 12. Term II, ½ credit. Offered every other year. Next offered 2022–2023.
This course uses small analytical and creative exercises to learn how writing works best for theater, television and motion picture. We study great models and create our own scenes, short plays, and series-length story arcs. Advanced exercises train writers in techniques of backstory, showing a character’s thoughts, showing rather than telling, adapting descriptive prose, and managing multiple storylines. (This course requires departmental permission and may be taken only as a second English course in Grade 11. This course may be taken as the primary Term II English elective in Grade 12.)