Courses
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10th-Grade 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 – encourage awareness of audience and exploration of perspective. In the spring term, students are likely to produce a […]
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11th-Grade 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 complexity of subject matter and style. In the winter term, most students produce a piece of narration […]
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12th-Grade English
In the final course in the required English sequence, writing assignments continue to focus on various forms of essay writing, culminating in a sustained exploration of a topic or theme–the Senior Meditation or an equivalent capstone assignment. Readings continue to grow in complexity of subject matter and style.
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9th-Grade 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, discuss and write about poems, short stories, novels and plays designed to introduce them to the […]
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American Political Literature
Seniors participating in the spring term Washington Intern Program may elect to enroll in this English seminar which focuses on political literature and American culture.
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Art of Protest
From the grittiness of rap to the density of civil disobedience, this course examines a variety of literary-artistic protests. The approach is multicultural and interdisciplinary. Possibilities include poets of color, gay playwrights, feminist novelists and foreign films. Students write extensively in journals and present a collaborative project. This class may include a service-learning component or […]
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Baseball: the American Narrative
A. Bartlett Giamatti, former president of Yale and commissioner of Major League Baseball, believed that this game is “the plot of the story of our national life.” In this course we will look at how baseball reflects, embodies and illuminates modern American history, culture, politics and myth. We will also examine the game itself as […]
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Beats, Rhymes and Narrative
Hip-hop music’s influence on popular culture, literature, entertainment and politics is undeniable. This course will examine the relationship between hip-hop and storytelling. Course texts will consist of weekly listening sessions, scholarly articles on hiphop theory and definitive text on hip-hop culture. We will listen to selected songs by a diverse array of artists and analyze […]
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Children’s Literature
How did you come to be the reader you are? What ideas about the world and its characters did you gain from the stories you read as a child? Why did you read and reread some books? How did illustrations work with words to create the stories you saw and read? What larger issues of […]
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Cormac McCarthy
Cormac McCarthy once wrote, “If it doesn’t concern life and death, it’s not interesting.” Not surprisingly, his novels abandon the domestic in favor of the epic. They explore the inevitability of conflict, the nature of evil and our propensity for violence. His characters meet civilization at its margins – in the backwoods of Appalachia or […]
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Creative Writing: Creative Nonfiction
“The essay isn’t a retreat from the world but a way of encountering it,” writes Leslie Jamison in Best American Essays 2017. Throughout the term, we will explore the art of telling stories – ours and those of others – and learn how to translate personal experience and research into effective pieces of creative nonfiction. […]
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Creative Writing: Multi-Genre
“Multi-genre” is more than just a catch-all for all genres. As Tom Romano suggests in his multi-genre instruction book Fearless Writing, a multi-genre project comprises a carefully choreographed range of genres and subgenres, each constituent piece selfcontained, making a point of its own, yet connected to the others by theme or topic and sometimes by […]
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Creative Writing: Poetry
“Poetry,” wrote Robert Frost, “is a way of taking life by the throat.” From its origins in oral tradition and tribal lore, as well as its role in incantatory spiritual practice, poetry has carried in its rhythms the deep longings of humanity. In this course, students will dip into this current, writing poems with a […]
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Creative Writing: Short Fiction
This writing-intensive course invites students to explore fiction as both readers and writers. The short stories and novels read in class will serve as models for students to create their own fictional work, introducing them to the craft and mechanics of fiction and storytelling. This course traditionally offers an MFA-style workshop model, providing students an […]
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Crime Fiction
This course introduces students to early works in the development of the “detective story” (Edgar Allan Poe, Agatha Christie, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle) and the ways in which those early works help establish the foundations for a variety of “crime fictions” that have steadily grown in popularity throughout the 20th and 21st centuries. Students will […]
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Documentary Poetics
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 moments through an assemblage of different media, ranging from primary resources like […]
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Fictions of Finance
What do we value? The pursuit of profit, surges in wealth and the suspect principles of the financier have intrigued authors since the 19th century. How do language, narrative style, structure and literary production transform with shifts in the marketplace? Through a careful investigation of literature, film and illustration, we will discuss how art imagines […]
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Gothic Literature and Horror
Haunted houses. Vampires. Ghosts. Monsters and the monstrous. Things that scare us and make us question reality are the most notable aspects of Gothic literature and horror. This course will trace the development of Gothic literature from its earliest beginnings to its present-day forms to emphasize its influence on horror in literature and film. Students […]
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Graphic Narrative Literary Comics
In this course, we will explore the literary phenomenon of the graphic novel and other graphic genres that blend visual storytelling and the written word. What happens to narrative when it unfolds in a hybrid form that joins image to text? What can this verbal-visual genre do that other literary genres can’t? How do we […]
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Homer’s Odyssey
In this interdisciplinary class, taught jointly by members of the Classical Languages Department and the English Department, we will read Homer’s Odyssey in translation and then trace its afterlife from antiquity to the present day. The hero Odysseus is a “complicated man,” as Emily Wilson renders the opening line of the epic – a husband […]