Embedded Files
Things Fall Apart (1959) by Chinua Achebe
EQ: How do the stories we know affect the decisions we make?
KEY TOPICS: Character, Proverb, Fate, Shame, Guilt, Gender, Violence, Prose, Novel, Independence, Tragedy, Outcasts, Sacrifice, Metaphor.
COMPARATIVE TEXTS: William Butler Yates' "Second Coming" and other poems from the Irish War of Independence, The Book of Genesis (Abraham and Isaac), various African proverbs, Aristotle's Poetics
August 28–September 15 [13 days]
The Thing Around Your Neck (2009) by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
EQ: How many worlds can a person live in?
KEY TOPICS: Short Story, Ethnicity, Globalization, Migration, Identity, Feminism, Gender, Power, Voice
COMPARATIVE TEXTS: Adichie's "The Danger of A Single Story" and exerpts from Invisible Hand: Voices from the Global Economy (2014)
September 18–September 29 [9 days]
Bere Kingston.pdf
The Odyssey (441 B.C.) by Homer [Robert Fagles, translation]
EQ: Can one story makes sense all around the world?
KEY TOPICS: Verse, Epic, Oral Tradition, Poetry, Hero, Myth, Storytelling, Memory, Literature
COMPARATIVE TEXTS: Aristotle's Poetics, Joseph Campbell's Pathways to Bliss, autobiographical writings of Mohandas Gandhi.
October 2– November 3 [27 days]
The Tempest (1609) by William Shakespeare
EQ: Who controls our world?
KEY TOPICS: Drama, Poetry, Freedom, Power, Mortality, Superstition, Magic, Monsters, Family, Colonialism, Racism , Ecology, Heaven, Hell, Fear
COMPARATIVE TEXTS: Shakespeare's Sonnets, Virgil's The Aeneid, Montaigne's "Of Cannibals," Silvester Jourdain's Discovery of the Bermudas, Otherwise Called the Isle of Devils, Dante's Inferno; film: Forbidden Planet
November 6–December 1 [14 days]
The Tempest - Visual Guide.pdf
Personal Narrative of a Journey to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent (1799-1804) by Alexander von Humboldt [Penguin Classics]
EQ: When does scientific inquiry become literary wonder?
KEY TOPICS: Nature Writing, the Picaresque, Ecology, the Environment, Inquiry, Puzzles, Science, Passion, Research, Journal Writing
COMPARATIVE TEXTS: Cervantes' Don Quixote (exerpt) and the Quixotic tradition, Darwin's The Voyage of the Beagle and On the Origin of Species, Ernst Haeckel's Art Forms of Nature, the writings of Simón Bolívar
December 4–December 19 [12 days]
The Periodic Table (1975) by Primo Levi
EQ: When are people pushed outside their world?
KEY TOPICS: Short Story, Bildungsroman, Memoir, Memory, Ethics, Youth, Fascism, Race, Religion, Antisemitism, Dignity, Vocation, Work, Language
COMPARATIVE TEXTS: Sholem Aleichem's short stories, the writings of Albert Einstein, Hannah Arendt's The Human Condition (excerpt), Michael Glowogger's Workingman's Death
January 8-February 2 [19 days]
Research and Persuasive Essay Project: Urge Action on a Global Water Issue
See Syllabus page for assignment details.
A Thousand Splendid Suns (2007) by Khaled Hosseini
EQ: What stories do we create about places we know very little about?
KEY TOPICS: Globalization, Religion, War, Inequality, Feminism, Violence, Family, Freedom, Power, Love
COMPARATIVE TEXTS: the autobiographical writings of Malala, Babur Nama's Journal of Emperor Babur
February 5–February 23 [14 Days]
Persepolis (2000) by Marjane Satrapi
KEY TOPICS: Graphic Novel, Visual Literacy, Bildungsroman, Memoir, Revolution, Judgement, Perception, Religion, War, the City, Maturity
COMPARATIVE TEXTS: The Qu'ran (excerpts), Frans Masereel's The City; film: Persepolis
February 26–March 16 [20 Days]
Rashomon and 17 Other Stories (1914-1924) by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa
KEY TOPICS: Short Story, Style, Truth, Reality, Anxiety, Modernism, Perspective, Existentialism
COMPARATIVE TEXTS: Franz Kafka's short stories, Tove Jansson's short stories and comics, Soren Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling (excerpt); Akira Kurosawa's film adaptation: Rashomon
1984 (1949) by George Orwell
EQ: Why do we write?
KEY TOPICS: Language, Writing, Propaganda, Knowledge, Truth, Lies, Rebellion , Power,
COMPARATIVE TEXTS: Orwell on Language, Office of Strategic Services' Simple Sabotage Field Manual, Wendy Pearlman's We Crossed a Bridge and It Trembled: Voices from Syria (2017)
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