Students will receive an overview of American literature from the founding of the nation to contemporary pieces. Literary study will be infused with historical applications for a better understanding of the social and historical context of the readings. Literary terms and elements of poetry will be discussed throughout this course. Vocabulary will include literary terminology as well as general terminology important for high school students to learn. Grammar instruction will be given through various writing assignments. Writing assignments will include Responses to Literature journal entries, a Reflective Essay, a Poetry Explication Essay, a Rhetorical Analysis, a Persuasive Research paper, and a final writing project with a Literary Analysis. Students will have a few novels assigned for outside class reading. Chapters will be selected and assignments given with a deadline of the end of the week. This will help students practice meeting deadlines and it will help us move through more of the literature available to us.

Week 1 - 4: Short Stories: The Earth on Turtle’s Back (Onondaga), When Grizzlies Walked Upright (Modoc), Navajo Origin Legend, Young Goodman Brown (Hawthorne), The Legend of Sleepy Hollow (Irving), Rip Van Winkle (Irving), The Fall of the House of Usher (Poe), The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County (Twain), How to Tell A Story (Twain), An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge (Bierce), To Build A Fire (London), The Open Boat (Crane), The Story of An Hour (Chopin), The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (Fitzgerald), Old Man At The Bridge (Hemingway), The Jilting of Granny Weatherall (Porter)

Week 4-8:  Poetry: To My Dear and Loving Husband (Bradstreet), Prologue (Bradstreet), Huswifery (Taylor), Thanatopsis (Bryant), Old Ironsides (Holmes), The Tide Rises, the Tide Falls (Longfellow), A Psalm of Life (Longfellow), Stanzas on Freedom (Lowell), The Raven (Poe), The Tell-Tale Heart (Poe), Annabel Lee (Poe), I Hear America Singing (Whitman), A Noiseless Patient Spider (Whitman), I heard a Fly buzz – when I died (Dickinson), The Soul selects her own Society (Dickinson), Hope is the thing with feathers (Dickinson), I measure every Grief I meet (Dickinson), Learning to Read (Harper), Do not weep, maiden, for war is kind (Crane), The River-Merchant’s Wife: A Letter (Pound), Birches (Frost), The Road Not Taken (Frost), Mending Wall (Frost), Any Human to Another (Cullen), Traveling through the Dark (Stafford), Morning Song (Plath), Blackberrying (Plath), The Writer (Wilbur), Boy at the Window (Wilbur), We Real Cool (Brooks), Still I Rise (Angelou)

Week 8-12: Letters/Essays/Speeches: To The Right Honourable William, Earl of Dartmouth (Wheatley), Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God (Edwards), Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death (Henry), Gettysburg Address (Lincoln), I am alone (I am the last of my family) (Cochise), I Will Fight No More Forever(Chief Joseph), Ain’t I A Woman? (Truth), Solitude of Self (Stanton), Is it a Crime For A Citizen of the United States to Vote? (Anthony), The Negro Artist and The Racial Mountain (Hughes), I Have A Dream (King), Letter from a Birmingham Jail (King)

 Novels: The Scarlet Letter (Hawthorne), The Red Badge of Courage (Crane), My Antonia (Cather), To Kill A Mockingbird (Lee)
Selected Readings: Of Plymouth Plantation(Bradford), A Model of Christian Charity (Winthrop), The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin (Franklin), The Crisis (Paine), Nature (Emerson), Self-Reliance (Emerson), Solitude (Thoreau), Civil Disobedience (Thoreau) . Texts may include William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, Athol Fugard’s Master Harold…and the Boys, Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, Bryce Courtenay’s The Power of One, William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, Homer’s The Odyssey, Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun, and J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye.