Course Essential Question

Click the "comments" link below to post your answer to this World Lit essential question:

What do you need to know to be a successful citizen and happy human being after you graduate from high school?

World Lit II Course Overview

World Lit II examines the essential question: How do humans express themselves through their political and personal relationships?

Full Class Novel
The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood

War Poetry
“A Song on the End of the World,” by Czeslaw Milosz
“Apathy” by Martin Niemoller
“The Moon at the Fortified Pass” by Li Po.
“Everything is Plundered” and “I am not one of Those Who Left the Land” by Anna Akhmatova
“A Call to Arms” by Callinus paired with Wilfred Owen’s “Dulce et Decorum Est”
“Russia 1812” from Victor Hugo’s The Expiation
“The Diameter of the Bomb” by Yehuda Amichai
“Civilian and Soldier” by Wole Soyinka
“Thoughts of Hanoi” by Nguyen Thi Vinh

Political Short Stories/Excerpts
“Pericles’ Funeral Oration” from History of the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides
“Two Friends” by Guy de Maupassant
Anton Chekhov’s “The Bet”
“Tribal Scars or The Voltaique” by Ousmane Sembene
“The Ultimate Safari” by Nadine Gordimer

Choice Novel Unit
Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
The House of Spirits by Isabel Allende
July’s People by Nadine Gordimer
Nectar in a Sieve by Kamala Markandaya
Waiting by Jin Ha

Political and Personal Relationships Through Drama
Oedipus Rex by Sophocles
Othello by William Shakespeare
A Doll’s House by Henrik Ibsen

Political and Personal Relationships through film (and excerpts):
Lagaan
Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

Love poetry and short stories as time allows.

World Literature I Course Overview

World Literature I examines the essential question: How do science & technology, religion & philosophy and the arts (music, poetry and the fine arts) explain what it means to be human?

Science & Technology Unit

• Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
• Selections from Alexander Solzhenitsyn, W.H. Auden, Shu Ting and Stanislaw Lem

Religion & Philosophy Unit

The guiding question for this unit is: What do religion and philosophy say about birth, life and death?

• Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse
• Short selections from Patterns of Religion, Plato, Blaise Pascal, Dante, Rumi, Albert Camus
• Religious texts--Genesis, Pslams, Upanishads, Rig Veda, Bhagavad-Gita, Koran

Student Choice Unit

Guiding Question: What does your choice novel say about being human in terms of science, religion, philosophy, art, music and poetry?

• Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
• Last Summer of Reason by Tahar Dajout and “Metamorphosis” by Franz Kafka
• Life of Pi by Yann Martel
• Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
• Snow by Orhan Pamuk

During the choice unit, students will also study how music, art and poetry bring meaning to life. Those simultaneous units include:

Music

• Thomas Mann's short story "The Infant Prodigy"
• The story "How Siegried was Slain" compared to Richard Wagner's opera.
• Hip Hop--Bryonn Bain and Ed Bok Lee

Art
A detailed study of the life and works of Pablo Picasso with the film Surviving Picasso and excerpts of Francoise Gilot's memoir, My Life with Picasso, on which the film is based.

Poetry
Chinese Shih, Japanese Tanka and Haiku, Pablo Neruda and the film Il Postino, Sonnets, and Ekphrasic Poems (which intersect art and poetry).