WINTER-TERM SENIOR TOPICS IN LITERATURE, 2024-25

While we make an effort to assign students to one of the courses that most interests them, there are many factors in scheduling, so there are no guarantees that you will be placed in one of the courses you indicate on your survey. No changes will be made to course assignments. 

The Anti-Hero – Mr. Aceves 

The term “hero” is often used as a synonym for “protagonist.” Indeed, many of the iconic characters in Western literature, film, and television--from Beowulf to Luke Skywalker--are remembered for how comprehensively they embody the virtues we value most in our society. Those guys are lame. We like stories that carry a flashlight into the dark corners of the human soul. We like characters who don’t quite fit in, characters defined by their all-too-human imperfection. In this course, we will explore the antihero archetype in its various manifestations by studying three celebrated works of literature (Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,  Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son, and Toni Morrison’s Sula) and the first season of a highly-acclaimed television series (Breaking Bad). We will become closely acquainted with four exceptional misfits: a young Mississippi rascal who doesn’t see much value in being “sivilized,” a drifter caught in the dizzying cycle of addiction and recovery, a fiercely independent young woman who becomes the bearer of an entire community’s scorn and self-hatred, and a desperate chemistry teacher whose scientific expertise take him into an unexpected line of work. These characters will remind us that the primary function of art is to ask questions, not to answer them. And they will make us feel far less guilty about our own transgressions.

American Empire – Mr. Friend

“The Constitution follows the flag…but doesn’t quite catch up with it.”

— Elihu Ross, United States Secretary of War (1899-1904)

United States expansion beyond mainland North America in the 19th and 20th centuries brought into question how the country would govern these overseas lands and peoples. The distinction in 1901 between “incorporated” and “unincorporated” territories is one that still determines the lives of residents of Puerto Rico, the US Virgin Islands, Guam, American Sāmoa, and the Northern Mariana Islands. In this course, we’ll look at contemporary work across genres by authors from these areas and Hawai‘i to explore how imperialism impacts and is impacted by questions of nation, militarization, diaspora, and where/who is considered America(n).

Horror Fiction – Mr. Hines

In this course, we will read a variety of genres--ranging from poetry, to plays, to novels--in order to deconstruct existing mythologies of masculinity and femininity and marginalization that were introduced by and now perpetuated and/or challenged through horror literature and film. We will begin by defining the horror genre, exploring its roots in Gothic literature, and then track its evolution through the ghost stories of the Victorian era and on to contemporary manifestations of its kind. Ultimately, we will observe how society uses horror tropes such as ghosts, psychopaths and zombies as well as “helpless heroines” and token minorities either to reinforce existing stereotypes and ideologies of subjugation and disempowerment or to challenge them. 

My Generation – Mr. Hines

Nearly ten months to the day after Barack Obama was inaugurated as the 44th president of the United States, Lady Gaga dropped her album Fame Monster, which would go on to sell over 40 million copies worldwide, making it the second best-selling album of the century. That same year, Suzanne Collins released Catching Fire, the second installment in the Hunger Games trilogy, and Stephanie Meyer completed her blockbuster Twilight series. In the theaters, Harry Potter, Transformers, and Avatar dominated the box office, suggesting once again that the public prefers big budget cinema to the more intimate indie fare. The question is, however, what does this say about society and those who live within it? 

In so many ways, what and how we read seems entangled with what and how we listen and with what and how we view things. This “thing” that we find in literature, music, and visual media is a kind of rhythm, a rhythm that seems to connect directly and immediately to the human heart, the human mind, and the human spirit. In fact, the theory of a persistent and defining “spirit” shared by those who inhabit a particular cultural milieu in a particular historical time is known as a “zeitgeist,” or “spirit of the age.” According to this hypothesis, we are bound up in this “spirit,” shaped by the various artistic, political, and socio-cultural rhythms that arise from a particular historical period. In this light, books, film, and music are not only mirrors that reflect existing cultural trends, but also tools that shape and define social behaviors, tastes, and beliefs. In this class, we will examine various texts -- novels, music, and film -- to determine whether there actually exists such a thing as a “zeitgeist” and if so, when does a particular Zeitgeist begin and end? And is it possible for literature and other cultural artifacts (such as music and film) to capture it?

Secrets and Lies: Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea – Dr. Hynes

In this course we will look at the lasting legacy of Charlotte Bronte's classic gothic novel, Jane Eyre. Bronte’s book follows Jane’s evolution from a sharp-tongued orphan to a sharp-witted governess working for the Byronic Mr. Rochester in the mysterious Thornfield Hall. Jane seeks acceptance, truth, family, love, God, and, most importantly, self, but in order to find them, she will be tested time and time again. We will then read Jean Rhys’s 20th-century Caribbean response to Bronte, Wide Sargasso Sea, which tackles many of the same questions about love, life, identity, secrets, and lies.  In addition to addressing questions of genre (the gothic, the romance, the bildungsroman, and the modern/postmodern), we will interpret the texts with special attention to themes of madness, captivity, marriage, imperialism, sexuality, and economics. We will also read literary criticism and look at film adaptations. 

Richard Powers – Mr. Tschurr

Richard Powers is one of the most exciting contemporary novelists, winning the Pulitzer in 2019 for The Overstory, and the National Book Award for The Echo Maker. In this class, we will read two or three of Powers’s novels: Plowing the Dark, his newest novel Playground, and maybe The Echo Maker. We will discuss themes arising in his work: technology, AI, environmentalism, social construction, truth, and knowledge, and read some secondary sources that tie into the concerns of his work or explicitly deal with his texts. 

Bad Boys and Mad Girls – DVK 

We are living in a moment when much of what constitutes gender is more broadly acknowledged as a social construct in the political landscape and cultural discourse. In terms of culture, the creation and perpetuation of two figures, the “bad boy” and the “mad girl,” have simultaneously enforced and challenged gender norms as tropes that appear over and over again in novels, movies, and songs. One particularly fascinating element of those archetypes is how aggression (“bad”) and mental illness (“mad”) are used as fundamental tools for determining what  “boys” and “girls” are or should be, while at the same time carrying the seeds of the demise of these seemingly strict dichotomies. This course aims to explore this tension in texts such as Fight Club and The Bell Jar (to name two) in which bad boys and mad girls start as one thing but end up as quite another.