Phillips Exeter Academy

English

Theater of War
English

Representation matters. Representation on the page and on the stage – paired with power — have material consequences. This course examines representations of race and religion in the context of war and empire in classical, early modern and...

Page to Screen: Film Adaptations
English

Students read novels, short stories, essays and plays and study their transformation into films. Through these comparisons and a short study of key film techniques and perspectives such as auteur theory, students learn how to “read” a film. The...

Shakespeare Now
English

Poet Ben Jonson said of Shakespeare that he “was not of his age, but for all time.” But what does a poet playwright, dead now some 400 years, have to say that speaks to this moment of the human experience? In this class we will read and discuss...

Documentary Poetics
English

Documentary poetry is the poetry of witness, of weaving together public and personal history to give voice to the silenced, a reckoning to the dead and disappeared, and to honor and celebrate human joy and struggle. It is a poetry that captures historical...

Jane Austen
English

In this course, we will study Austen’s novels with a focus on her use of language to show the universal tension between raw desire – for money, power and love – and the restrictions placed on that desire by social conventions and internal...

James Baldwin
English

If ever there was a time to celebrate Baldwin, it is now. “Only an artist can tell what it is like for anyone who gets to this planet to survive it,” he said. This course will explore Baldwin’s early life in Harlem, New York City, in the...

Samuel Beckett
English

Nobel Prize-winning Irish author Samuel Beckett once said, “Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness.” And yet his words have proven central – necessary even – to the way many have come to experience and...

9th-Grade English
English

In this sequence of courses, the English Department introduces 9th-graders to the reading practices, discussion principles and writing strategies they will use and on which they will build throughout their four years of English study at Exeter. Students read,...

10th-Grade English
English

In this sequence of courses, readings introduce broader and more complex personal and social issues. The writing assignments – ranging from personal narratives and personal essays to letters, editorials, poetry projects and responses to the readings...

11th-Grade English
English

In this sequence of courses, written assignments tend to shift from personal narratives and essays to various forms of analysis in which the exploration and articulation of ideas increasingly influence content and structure. Readings continue to grow in...