The Stuyvesant High School Online Course Guide

Overview: This yearlong class is designed for dynamic seniors who are eager to challenge themselves as readers, to experiment with a variety of writing assignments and to contribute to our daily discussions about the literature. It is considered an Advanced Placement course, and students are encouraged to take the Advanced Placement Literature and Composition exam in the spring. Applicants for the class must have at least a 92% English average.

Books: While the syllabus may vary slightly from year to year, Great Bookies should expect to study at least fifteen major literary works over the course of the year. Despite the diversity of cultures, eras and styles that they represent, these books are linked thematically, and we will explore the connections among them. We will also focus on how the Modernist and Post-Modern movements used increasingly sophisticated narrative techniques to convey increasingly complex ideas. While the vast majority of these works were written within the last century, many of them are universally hailed as classics, but several are so new that there is no critical consensus to establish their enduring merit. Over the course of the year, we'll come to our own conclusions about the meaning and value of Great Books, and the role that literature plays in our own lives. Texts studied in the 2006-7 school year included:

• A Portrit of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce (1916)
• Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf (1925)
• The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner (1929)
• All the King's Men, Robert Penn Warren (1946)
• Hamlet, Shakespeare (1600)
• Labyrinths, Jorge Luis Borges (1960)
• Pale Fire, Vladimir Nabokov (1962)
• One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez (1967)
• Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino (1972)
• Midnight's Children, Salman Rushdie (1980)
• White Noise, Don DeLillo (1986)
• Beloved, Toni Morrison (1988)
• The Passion, Jeanette Winterson (1987)
• Gould's Book of Fish, Richard Flanagan (2001)
• The Feast of Love, Charles Baxter (2000)
• Everything Is Illuminated, Jonathan Safran Foer (2002)

Assignments: Great Books writing assignments are both critical and creative, and students should expect to experiment with a variety of genres: literary essays, short stories, personal reflections and multi-genre pieces that resist easy categorization. Many of the assignments include a personal element; several entail literary and historical research. All of the assignments are intended to help students to become more effective and engaging writers and to explore the relationship between form and content. All require a facility with sophisticated language and literary techniques.

Format: The class is largely discussion-based. Students enrolling in the course should expect to complete a substantial reading assignment each evening and to participate in the class discussions on a daily basis.