Student Expectations
Live Literature Classes:
Attend a one-hour, weekly, live course session
Complete each week’s assigned reading
Take a short, online comprehension quiz
Answer a weekly, online discussion question each week
Submit two literary analysis papers and one creative project
Self-paced Literature Classes:
All recordings will be available from September - May.
Lit 4: The Modern Era
The tricky part of creating a syllabus for the late 19th and 20th centuries is deciding what to leave out. There's so much to read and so little time, but this is an amazing course with a stunning and challenging syllabus. It's perfect for the literary-minded high school junior or senior.
David Copperfield, our first novel, was the favorite and most autobiographical of all Dickens's books. Whitman's ground-breaking poetry collection, Leaves of Grass, is next. Then we push through some of the greatest novels ever written: Dostoyevski's Crime and Punishment, Hardy's Return of the Native, Twain's Huckleberry Finn, and Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. We look at the poetry of the Modernists and some short stories by Kafka, O'Connor, and Hemingway. We dip our toes into some Faulkner (warning: he's hard to read!) and Orwell's political allegory Animal Farm. We cover classic high school texts The Old Man and Sea, The Crucible, Lord of the Flies, and To Kill a Mockingbird. We finish up with a beloved 21st century novel, Peace Like a River.
Please see the course calendar for meeting time. All class sessions will be recorded.