Noble and Greenough School Course Catalog

The Class IV English curriculum prepares students for the future demands of upper school courses by encouraging them to build toward mastery in fundamental critical thinking, reading, writing, and speaking skills. Students strive to hone the precision and power of both their written and oral language over the course of the year. By learning distinct strategies for pre-writing, drafting, and revision through creative and analytic assignments, students come to understand writing as a process. To bolster confidence in their public speaking voices, all Class IV students prepare memorized declamations. Students also review grammar and study vocabulary throughout the year. In conjunction with skill-building, students explore a diverse and challenging reading list across a variety of genres with a focus on the adolescent experience and the evolution of identity and voice: selected poetry from our curated collection, selected short stories fromInterpreter of Maladies (Lahiri), The Catcher in the Rye (Salinger), The Odyssey (Homer), Persepolis (Satrapi), and Their Eyes Were Watching God (Hurston).

English III focuses on American literature and the diverse perspectives of those who have sought, embraced, or survived the American experience. From various regions and in various genres, American writers have contemplated what it means to be an American citizen, and how the tension between our longing for the past and our desire for progress and reinvention affects communities and individuals. Our national literature is often fraught with conflict, contradiction, and pessimism, but it is also full of hope, optimism, and inspiration. Students will continue to build on the skills developed during freshman year, especially the focus on close critical reading, as they push toward longer, analytical essays.Literature may include: The Scarlet Letter (Hawthorne); A Mercy (Morrison);The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (Douglass); The Great Gatsby (Fitzgerald); Fences (Wilson); Sweat (Nottage); poetry by Whitman, Dickinson, Hughes, Frost; and short stories.

English II focuses on world literature and writers across cultures who have sought to make sense of the human condition. Over time, writers have addressed the problem of how we understand, connect with, and engage in a diverse and complex world. While literature often reflects the conflict and pessimism that history has provoked, writers also use their art to offer hope and inspire change. Responding to a variety of literary genres, students will continue to build on the skills developed sophomore year as they strive to become more independent critical thinkers and writers. They will work to sustain longer analytical essays, and in the second semester, they will pursue a research project on an independent reading project and complete a personal narrative project. Literature may include: Things Fall Apart (Chinua Achebe), Heart of Darkness (Joseph Conrad), Hamlet (William Shakespeare), The God of Small Things (Arundhati Roy) and selected short stories and poetry.

Students in Journalism I will study all aspects of news gathering and dissemination in preparation for the creation of the school's monthly newspaper,The Nobleman. Throughout the year, students will collaboratively brainstorm ideas for articles that are meaningful to the Nobles community and reflect student voices. These topics include world and local events, significant school topics, features related to student concerns, and contemporary satire. Students will gain foundational skills such as brainstorming, interviewing, and lede writing. Students are responsible for writing articles and creating multimedia features incorporating photography, video, text, and animation to communicate their content. Classes focus on the practicalities of creating a newspaper, including journalistic processes and principles, writing and multimedia assignments, layout design, and production schedules. The end product of this academic pursuit is the monthly edition of The Noblemanas well as its online presence. Please note that this course does not fulfill the English requirement.

This course is designed for students who have successfully completed the Journalism I class and who wish to continue their contributions to our school newspaper, The Nobleman. Similar to Journalism I, students will brainstorm, write, and edit articles, take photos, and make videos for all three of the Nobleman platforms (paper, website, and social media). With a focus on editing, managing, and leading a paper through the production process, students will have a hands-on opportunity to further hone their skills and take the lead in the production of The Nobleman. Lessons cover journalistic integrity, layout design for impact, and organizational leadership. Besides writing, multimedia, and layout design and production, this class will include leadership opportunities for Class I students in the areas of editorial management. By the school year's end, students will have developed comprehensive journalistic skills and experience. Please note, that this course does not fulfill the English requirement.

How do we tell the truth? How do we access and research our world, organize and structure it, verbalize and express it? How far can we stretch the truth for the sake of story and still call it nonfiction? This course will explore multiple subgenres of creative nonfiction, from the nonfiction novel to the magazine profile, from the autobiography to personal narrative, from immersion journalism to memoir. Students will examine and respond to nonfiction as an art form as well as craft their own personal essays, articles, and profiles. They will confront our texts both as writers of nonfiction and as readers of literature, creating their own stories and responding analytically to others'. Works will include In Cold Blood, Into the Wild, Between the World and Me, and Autobiography of a Face,, as well as nonfiction essays, both classic and contemporary.

Structured as a writing workshop, this course will allow students to explore the foundations of fiction (character, setting, conflict, and emotion) and experiment with different forms and styles. Throughout the second half of the course, students will draft, workshop, and revise a short story and participate in a Coffeeshop Reading, a celebration of writing in the form of a public reading of their final work.

Some books refuse to stay in the past. They resurface in moments of crisis, demanding that readers reckon with history, power, and memory. This senior elective course pairs two influential twentieth-century novels: George Orwell’s 1984 and Toni Morrison’s Beloved. We will focus on how fiction engages with personal and collective memory, historical experience, and narrative form. Students will practice close reading, comparative analysis, and formal literary criticism while developing college-level writing and discussion skills.

The period of the 1920s and 30s was extraordinarily dynamic and replete with powerful—and often competing—ideas. Described by scholars, journalists, and critics as roaring and depressed, repressed and free, democratic and fascist, these interwar years witnessed the birth of some of the most important ideas of the 20th and 21st centuries. Alas, this epoch will end in violence and as we explore its ideas, zeitgeist and cultural milieus, we will grapple with how they contributed to the cataclysm we call World War II.

Literature from the Margins is a semester-long English elective designed for seniors. This course aims to explore diverse narratives that are often relegated to the periphery of mainstream literature. Through the examination of texts such as Yellowface by R.F. Kuang, Oranges are Not the Only Fruit by Jeannette Winterson, and She of the Mountains by Vivek Shraya, students will engage with themes of identity, resistance, cultural conflict, and personal discovery from various marginalized perspectives.

Magic realism is a literary style popularized by authors from Latin America. In this course, we will consider the lines between reality and fantasy. We will also discuss who defines what is real and what is fantastical. Here is a point from Gabriel Garcia Marquez that refutes the idea of his work being Magic Realism: “It always amuses me that the biggest praise for my work comes for the imagination while the truth is that there’s not a single line in all my work that does not have a basis in reality. The problem is that Caribbean reality resembles the wildest imagination.” The course might include the following texts: short stories by Gabriel Garcia Marquez,Chronicle of a Death Foretold by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Pedro Paramo by Juan Rulfo, House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende.

This course will examine the function of satire and humor as a vehicle for criticizing, protesting, and mocking societal conventions. Through a variety of critical reading and writing exercises, we will discuss the following questions: What is the definition of satire in relation to other literary forms? What literary techniques do satirical writers employ? Why do groups in positions of authority often view satire with scorn and condescension? Is it possible for satirical writing to change the world? Readings will include, but are not limited to, A Modest Proposal (Jonathan Swift), Candide (Voltaire), The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, George Saunders, and excerpts from The Daily Show, and Saturday Night Live. As part of the course, students will have the opportunity to write satire and develop satirical projects and presentations.

Music is one of the oldest forms of artistic expression, evoking a range of emotions both personal and universal. Often, songs and albums can exist as background, as something consumed like popcorn mindlessly tossed into one’s mouth in a dimly lit theater. This class will explore music, artists, literature, and songs in deep, academic, and substantive ways, to look at albums and songs as essays and literature in and of themselves. To this end, we will read albums and songs collectively and individually while also reading a number of fictional and non-fictional books centered on music. We will become producers and critics as we consume, critique, discuss and listen. The music podcast entitled Dissect will be one central text, alongside Jennifer Egan’s A Visit From the Goon Squad, and Hanif Abduraquib’s They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us. Below find the essential questions: What makes an album or song canonical, timeless, or universal? How do writers capture the emotions, ideas, and moods evoked in music and in literary texts through the written and spoken word? How have authors explored and utilized music as a thematic and symbolic tool in their literary works? How can an album or song construct a larger narrative arc akin to a novel or short story? This class is structured around two major goals. The first is to help you refine the communication skills (writing, reading, speaking, listening) necessary in college, the workplace, and daily life. The second is to prepare you to think critically about questions and works that shape our world.

Though literary accounts of the world of chefs have fascinated home cooks at least since the publication of Anthony Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential in 1999, our most recent cultural curiosity about the world of professionally made food centers on the rarefied arena of fine dining - historically, a realm of white tablecloths, tweezer-assembled micromeals, and unreasonable hospitality. By examining an a multimedia array of recent fictional narratives, this course will ask why stories, not just of food or cooking, but of high-pressure upper-crust food service have captured the popular imagination of late, enabling conversations about class conflict and wealth inequality; environmental change and its inequitable effects; economies of care, service, and emotional labor; perfectionism and burnout; pragmatism and artistry; ego and selflessness; the cultural politics of "fine" and fusion food; and systemic barriers facing the marginalized in historically white- and male-dominated industries. Texts may include Lee Lai's Cannon, Asako Yuzuki's Butter, Kwame Onwuachi's Notes from a Young Black Chef, and C. Pam Zhang's Land of Milk and Honey.

This course explores foundational ideas concerning humanity, morality, justice, and citizenship in democratic societies. Through an examination of literature, poetry, philosophy, memoir, plays, and political rhetoric, this elective challenges students to wrestle with the Holocaust, the internment of Japanese-Americans, the problem of bystanders, and important ethical issues that may be not only historical but also contemporary. Some of the authors we read are Jean Améry, Hannah Arendt, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Charlotte Delbo, Primo Levi, Abby Mann, Julie Otsuka, Kay Ryan, John Roth, and Simon Wiesenthal.

Since the birth of the novel, cities have figured prominently as metaphoric characters in fiction. Cities draw the jaded and the dreamer, the insider and the outsider, the opportunist and the altruist. They are fixed in their hierarchies yet depend on and foster social mobility. They are places of possibility and hope as well as decadence and decay, representing the heights of human innovation and the depths of immorality and corruption. In this course, we will explore how novelists reconcile this multiplicity, examining a variety of cities and the ways in which authors use their cityscapes to reflect on the individual in society and on society at large. We will explore the key role that cities play in embodying and propelling difference—in thought, in philosophy, and in artistic expression. Our literature will take us to New York and beyond, and will include essays from various authors: Whitehead's Harlem Shuffle, Wharton’s Age of Innocence, excerpts from Toni Morrison’s Jazz and Teju Cole’s Open City, Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West, and a city-inspired text of your choice.

With The New Yorker magazine as the central text for the course, students will explore the limitless possibilities of writing creative nonfiction such as personal essays, long-form journalism, profiles, and reviews. We will explore the foundations of storytelling and how the techniques of fiction (structure, word choice, setting, plot, dialogue, and character development) work to create compelling nonfiction. Throughout the second half of the course, students will work together to draft, workshop, and revise a variety of pieces for our own New Yorker style magazine, which we will share with the community.

What does it mean to exist in a world that often seems indifferent? In this course, students will investigate themes of alienation, freedom, and responsibility, while analyzing how voice, perspective, and social context shape human experience. Through close reading, comparative discussion, and critical writing, the course challenges students to think deeply about meaning, identity, and the ethical dimensions of storytelling. Works may include: Albert Camus’s The Stranger and The Myth of Sisyphus, Lispector’s The Hour of the Star, and Bakewell’s At the Existential Cafe.

First introduced in 1931 by the historian James Truslow Adams, the idea of “the American Dream” has fostered inspiration, hope, division, and injustice throughout our country’s history. Through lenses offered by some of America’s greatest writers, we will explore the promises and challenges embedded in this seemingly timeless concept. As students explore how others have contemplated and described the American Dream, they will have a chance to begin to consider what this idea means to them.

What is gained when an event is immortalized in fiction, and what is lost when history is erased, leaving only the fictional behind? To answer this question, this course examines fictional depictions of the AIDs crisis alongside primary and secondary historical sources. We will divide our readings into three eras: that of the initial outbreak; a period marked by available testing, but no cure, as well as widespread misinformation and stigma; and the modern era of AIDS as a serious but manageable health condition with drastically decreased mortality. By examining both contemporaneous and retrospective fictional depictions, we will educate ourselves on evolving attitudes towards the epidemic, how those attitudes affected political and public health responses, and the lived experiences of those affected. By putting fictional depictions side-by-side with history, we will also ask ourselves what the value of historical fiction is, and -- in a world where queer history is being systematically erased and suppressed -- what is lost when a community loses access to its history and fictional depictions of that history are all that remain. Readings may include Tony Kushner's Angels in America, Jonathan Larsen's R.E.N.T., Samuel R. Delany's "The Tale of Plagues and Carnivals," selected poetry, and excerpts from And the Band Played On by Randy Shilts and Dagmawi Woubshet's The Calendar of Loss.

This course will use the study of literature to examine fundamental questions about leadership: What are the characteristics of effective leaders? Why do some leaders succeed while others fail? How do leaders navigate competing ethical obligations? Does power corrupt, and if so, how? Is there such a thing as a "born-leader?" Through the critical reading of novels, short stories, plays, and poems, students will learn to articulate their own definitions of leadership. In addition to fiction, readings will include excerpts from philosophical works and historical narratives. Course assignments will include analytical and creative writing, personal reflections, debates, role-playing exercises, interviews, presentations, and collaborative projects.

The goal of this course is to use literature to unpack the mythologies of the American Frontier. The tropes of rugged individualism, the pioneer spirit, and even the necessity of violence have long dominated our American ethos when considering our understanding of borders, the “West”, and the “country.” This same ethos has profoundly impacted our ideas about both race and gender, and - conversely - our comprehension of race and gender has helped to create this mythology. Moreover, the pervasive narratives of the archetypal cowboy and the classic western have impacted our national discussions surrounding politics, religion, and the arts. In order to understand and to problematize the profound effect of these narratives, we will read three texts that span nearly four hundred years of American history. Each is set in some version of the frontier; each has a young female protagonist, and each is dominated by an overarching sense of loss. These texts will be supplemented by both film studies (such as Campion’s Power of the Dog and Eastwood’s Unforgiven) and works of nonfiction (such as Slotkin’s Gunfighter Nation). Texts may include Lauren Groff’s Vaster Wilds, Charles Portis’ True Grit, and Karen Russell’s Swamplandia!

Since the boom of magic realism on the literary scene in the mid-20th century, fantastical tales from around the world have been labeled magic realism. Through reading some of those books, we will explore what separates magic realism from other similar genres. We will also discuss what might make an author choose to incorporate magic realism into their text. The course might include the following texts: The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Shehan Karunatilaka, Split Tooth by Tanya Tagaq, The Man Who Could Move Clouds by Ingrid Rojas Contreras, .

This team-taught course will examine the power of race as a biological reality and as a social construct that has affected American history, culture, and literature as much as any other human force or entity. Looking at race through the lenses of literature, film, outside speakers, and field trips, we will explore the impact of race on us individually, collectively, and nationally. Texts may include: Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria (Tatum), Between the World and Me (Coates), James (Everett).