Upper School Curriculum Guide

The study of English at RCDS is the study of the art and power of storytelling. Students explore how literature shapes imagination, comments on culture and society, and illuminates the complexities of human experience. They engage a wide range of voices, genres, and literary movements, from ancient drama to contemporary global fiction, learning to situate texts within historical and cultural contexts while attending closely to craft, structure, and style. At every level, the program emphasizes close reading, analytical writing, seminar discussion, and creative expression. Students are expected to craft analytical essays; to experiment with various modes of writing and expression; to read challenging works of literature; and to come to class prepared to contribute to discussion every day.

English 9 and English 10 establish a foundation in literary analysis, rhetoric, research, and academic writing. Building on that foundation, students move into Honors Seminars that demand greater independence, sustained inquiry, deeper critical literary analysis, and more sophisticated research. The English program seeks not only to develop perceptive readers and fluent writers, but also to cultivate thoughtful cultural critics and empathetic citizens who can interpret complexity, engage difference with nuance, and understand the enduring power of storytelling.

Course Selection Guidelines

Honors English 10: American Identity placement is based on the following criteria:

1. Recommendation of English 9 teacher
2. Year-end grade of B+ or higher in English 9
3. Written statement of interest, if requested
4. Approval of the department

Students currently enrolled in English 9 who hope to enroll in Honors English 10: American Identity should have a conversation with their current teacher about their commitment to the expectations of an advanced course and should demonstrate performance reflective of B+ level competency (as evidenced by first semester, projected third quarter, and exam grades).

The English Department will meet to discuss the candidacy of all students seeking admission to Honors English 10: American Identity. In making placement decisions, the department will consider all criteria in determining readiness for advanced study.

If approved for Honors English 10: American Identity, students will receive an email advising them to confirm the appropriate placement. Final placements will be reviewed again in June before schedules are made permanent for the following year.

During the course of the year, a student’s standing in an Honors section may be subject to review if performance is consistently below the B- mark.

Requests to Enroll in Two Honors Seminars in One Semester

Junior and Senior students are expected to enroll in one Honors Seminar per semester. In rare cases, a student may request permission to take a second Honors Seminar within the same semester.

Enrollment Process:

• A student seeking to enroll in a second Honors Seminar in one semester must submit a written request to the English Department Chair explaining their academic reasoning and motivation.
• Requests will be reviewed only after all students have been placed in their first Honors Seminar, as the department’s priority is equitable placement in initial seminar assignments.
• Once initial placements are finalized, the English Department Chair may provide the student with a list of Honors Seminar sections that have available space and that align with the student’s schedule.

Clarifications:

• Not all requests can be accommodated due to seminar capacity limits and the department’s commitment to placing students in their first seminar whenever possible.
• Students must be enrolled in an English course every semester. Taking two Honors Seminars in one semester may not be used to replace English enrollment in a future semester.
• All requests will also be considered in consultation with the student’s advisor, Dean, and college counselor to ensure that the overall academic load is appropriate and sustainable for the student. 

Grade 9	Grade 10	Grade 11	Grade 12
English 9	English 10: American Identity	Honors Seminars	Honors Seminars
English 9	Honors English 10: American Identity	Honors Seminars	Honors Seminars

The English Department offers a year-long and several semester-long Honors English Seminars during junior and senior year. These courses range in topic and focus and are described below. 

• Classes include a mix of eleventh- and twelfth-grade students, allowing students the opportunity to interact with and learn from a greater diversity of peers.
• While the focus of each class is different, the English Department Chair coordinates with teachers of Honors English Seminars to standardize the workload across classes.
• None of the seminars are AP-branded, and in both skills and ideas they push beyond the current scope of the AP curriculum. 
• The Honors Seminars allow all students to access classes that are advanced, compared to typical high school English curricula. 

Year-Long Courses

ENGLISH 9
Readings in English 9 provide an introduction to literature, including poetry, drama, the novel, and the short story, with many of the texts addressing the tension between individual and community. Core texts include works such as Sophocles’ Antigone, Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus, Shakespeare’s Macbeth, and Yang's American Born Chinese. The writing program in English 9 is designed to improve all basic writing skills, with special attention given to the formation of thesis statements, the organization of ideas and paragraphs, and the clarity of sentences. Students also submit creative pieces of writing and collaborate on various projects with their classmates. (1 unit; Grade 9; required)

ENGLISH 10: AMERICAN IDENTITY IN LITERATURE AND HONORS AMERICAN IDENTITY IN LITERATURE
In this required course, students use literature as a lens to examine the formation of American identity in its many dimensions. Over the course of the year, students engage with literature that examines racial, gender, and socioeconomic identity at points in American history, from colonization to present day. The curriculum—including The Crucible, The Line Becomes a River, contemporary Native American poetry, A Raisin in the Sun, Interpreter of Maladies, and Everything I Never Told You—invites students to examine how political, economic, and cultural systems shape individuals’ sense of identity. In tandem with their reading, students write in a variety of modes: literary critical essays, research essays, personal narratives, poems, and podcasts. The course emphasizes close reading, nuanced literary analysis, and the development of clear, well-supported arguments. In addition, the course fosters engagement with contemporary issues, civil dialogue, self-reflection, and interdisciplinary connections, especially to History. Students develop as analytical thinkers and cultural critics who are deeply invested in the world around them. The Honors sections of this course require additional readings and have more demanding writing and speaking requirements. (1 unit; Grade 10; required) 

HONORS ENGLISH SEMINAR: EXTENDED INQUIRY
Honors English Seminar: Extended Inquiry is a yearlong seminar that allows students to pursue sustained, in-depth study of a single literary focus. Over the course of the year, students engage in extended reading, research, and iterative writing, culminating in a substantial original project and public presentation. Designed for students eager to commit to long-form inquiry, the course emphasizes independence, revision, and the creation of meaningful scholarly or creative work. Each year features a distinct theme; this year’s topic is Labyrinths in Literature & Architecture.  Admission to Honors Seminar: Extended Inquiry requires a statement of interest, a writing sample, and approval of the department. (1 unit, Grades 11, 12)

LABYRINTHS IN LITERATURE & ARCHITECTURE
What does it take to make a world real, and how do you navigate that space? What is the relationship between space and self? This course will focus on intersections of architecture, narration, creation, and deception. We will investigate literature from across the world, looking at structures both physical and mental. “What matters is that both the dwelling and the dweller be monstrous,” writes Jorge Luis Borges; taking this as our motto, we will explore texts by Borges, Italo Calvino, Susanna Clarke, Luigi Serafini, and others, alongside films such as Guillermo del Toro’s El laberinto del fauno, and Christopher Nolan’s Inception. We will study architectural history to establish a common vocabulary for discussing constructed worlds, and use interactive fiction games to learn systems thinking, metacognition, and how text works as an interface. This year-long seminar is designed to promote interdisciplinary engagement with students’ individual areas of interest. All readings will be in English; students with relevant language proficiency may choose to read texts in their original languages. (Admission to Honors Seminar: Extended Inquiry requires a statement of interest, a writing sample, and approval of the department.)

Honors English Seminars (One-Semester)
Honors English Seminars are advanced, semester-long courses that invite students to engage deeply with focused literary topics, themes, or movements. Through close reading, seminar discussion, and varied writing assignments—including a research paper in the fall semester—students develop sophisticated analytical and creative skills while exploring a range of perspectives across multiple seminars. The program emphasizes depth of inquiry, intellectual curiosity, and the study of literature as a dynamic and evolving field. (½ Unit, Grades 11, 12)

AMERICAN RHETORIC (FALL)
In this semester-long course, students will be introduced to the study and the practice of rhetoric. Students will engage in the art of persuasive writing and will practice building arguments and analyzing the arguments of others. Students will study how speakers and writers persuade an audience to adopt their point of view. They will also explore and analyze rhetorical structure and style with the goal of developing their own writing style and voice. Students will read and analyze the works and rhetorical styles of such contemporary and historical thinkers and writers as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., John F. Kennedy, Jr., Jhumpa Lahiri, Anna Quindlen, David Brooks, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Toni Morrison, and others included in the course’s text, The Norton Reader. Current articles and opinion pieces will be used as supplementary texts, as well. (1/2 unit)

AMERICAN SHORT FICTION (SPRING)
In this semester-long study of the American short story, we will take seriously the power of brevity, the way a single moment, a single voice, or a single unsettling image can reveal an entire world. The short story is not a “practice form” for the novel; it is its own disciplined, deliberate genre, one that demands precision from both writer and reader. Together, we will slow down, read closely, and learn to notice how structure, silence, symbolism, and point of view do the heavy lifting in a compressed space. As we move from the late nineteenth century to the modern era, we will consider how historical context, cultural shifts, and literary movements shape the stories we read and how these writers, in turn, reshape the American canon. Students will engage with works by James Baldwin, Gabriel García Márquez, John Updike, Shirley Jackson, Kate Chopin, Ernest Hemingway, and Zora Neale Hurston, examining how questions of identity, power, gender, race and belonging animate their work. Through thoughtful discussion and sustained analytical writing, students will strengthen their interpretive skills and develop the confidence to grapple with complexity, because in this course, every word matters. (1/2 unit)

THE ANTI-HERO IN LITERATURE & MEDIA (SPRING)
This course is an introduction to the anti-hero, exploring this figure from ancient Greek tragedy to the present day across literature, graphic novels, and cinema. Students will study the array of forms the anti-hero can take and consider why this figure retains such a powerful place in our culture and its artistic productions. The curriculum will allow students to practice the comparative analysis of literary archetypes and the development of arguments across diverse media forms, with possible texts including Euripides' Medea, Oyinkan Braithwaite’s My Sister, The Serial Killer, and Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns.

ART AND ARTISTS IN LITERATURE (FALL)
In this semester-long course, our muse will be literary artists and artworks, and we will ask ourselves: why do writers draw inspiration from paintings, drawings, sculptures, photographs, and more? We will consider what writers convey about their own aesthetic visions when they channel other forms of creative expression or feature protagonists who are visual artists. We will also engage in experiential learning to try out some of the unconventional artistic techniques portrayed in the fiction we read, reflecting on how and why these fictional visual artists use particular approaches, and what these literary authors aim to express about the power of art through their depiction of these experimental artistic methods. Possible readings may include works by Celeste Ng, Tayari Jones, and Anita Desai. As our culminating project, you will create an original visual interpretation of one of the texts we read and share it with the class during our own “gallery opening.” You do not need to be an artist to enjoy this class: you just need to be willing to look at the world with creativity and curiosity.  (1/2 unit)

BLACK MAGIC: MAGIC REALISM IN AFRICAN AMERICAN LITERATURE (FALL)
In Black Magic: Magical Realism in African American Literature, the “magic” is never decorative, it is deliberate. It is how Black writers recover what history tried to erase, how they make the invisible visible, and how they challenge us to reconsider what we call truth. This semester-long seminar examines the ways magical realism becomes a vehicle for surfacing untold histories and unsettling dominant historical narratives. Through a novel by Toni Morrison, short stories by Randall Kenan, and drama by August Wilson, students will explore how folklore, memory, haunting, and the supernatural function not as escape, but as societal critique.As we move through questions of race, class, and power, we will also interrogate the construction of gendered space, the generational toll of injustice, and the fragile boundary between the real and the imagined. Students will engage in thoughtful discussion, sustained close reading, and purposeful research, strengthening their analytical writing while developing the intellectual confidence to wrestle with complex texts. In this course, the magical is not fantasy, it is a lens, a method, and a reclamation. (1/2 unit)

BRITISH CLASSICS (SPRING)
The 19th Century is often considered the golden age of British literature. In one sense this was a time of great wealth when Britain was an unparalleled global superpower. Yet, it was also a time of great social and political change. Writers of the period sought to illuminate the questions surrounding these changes, such as: How does the simple, individual love story fit into the powerful and complex political story of the British Empire? Do older institutions like the aristocracy matter any more? How has money and ambition changed the way people interact with each other? Examining works like Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, Joseph Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness, and Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, this course will investigate the changing place of the individual in British society. (1/2 unit)

COMPLICATING THE SOUTHERN MYTH (FALL)
The American South has long been imagined as a mythic landscape—steeped in nostalgia and romanticized visions of the “Old South.” These myths have often upheld systems of oppression and shaped a cultural narrative that continues to influence popular culture and politics. Southern writers have both perpetuated and challenged these stories, revealing the region as complex, contested, and continually evolving. In Complicating the Southern Myth, students examine how literature from and about the South has constructed, reinforced, and dismantled the narratives that define Southern identity. Moving from the antebellum era through Reconstruction, Jim Crow, the Civil Rights Movement, and into the contemporary moment, the course explores how race, gender, class, and power operate within Southern cultural memory. Students engage a range of genres—autobiography, fiction, drama, poetry, and literary criticism—while situating texts within their historical contexts. Canonical writers such as Frederick Douglass, Mark Twain, William Faulkner, Zora Neale Hurston, and Tennessee Williams are studied alongside contemporary voices including Jesmyn Ward, Natasha Trethewey, Jericho Brown, and Percival Everett. Through analytical writing, research-based argument, and a culminating creative project, students develop a nuanced understanding of how storytelling shapes regional identity and national memory. (1/2 unit)

CREATIVE WRITING (SPRING)
This semester-long course will introduce students to the literary conventions of fiction and poetry. The course will explore the elements that set the genres apart, the elements they share, and the relationship between reading and writing literature. The learning objectives of this course are for students to situate their writing in a contemporary literary context, hone their artistic vision, craft significant revisions, and be able to respond to the work of their peers constructively. Texts will be taken from the two genres and used as models for students’ creative writing. Discussions, essays, and creative work will focus on a wide range of literary traditions. In conjunction with other seminar courses in the department, this course will promote student voice and offer opportunities for robust creative expression. Students will be required to complete three essays over the course of the semester. Each essay will also be accompanied by a student-generated creative response. In addition, students will complete a multi-genre creative portfolio. (1/2 unit).

ENVIRONMENTAL LITERATURE (FALL)
Who is most hurt by environmental degradation and abuse and who benefits? In this course we’ll examine what contemporary world literature has to say about environmental racism, ecofeminism, and toxic colonialism. We will be attentive to such issues as the social construction of nature, globalization, and urban ecological issues. We will ask: What is the role of art in the struggle for social change? Our study will focus on the intersection of environmental issues and various systems of social injustice, especially racism, sexism, and economic inequity. Materials for this course—novels, poems, stories, films, documentaries, art— come from diverse racial and national locations, including South Africa, multicultural U.S., India, China, Iraq, and Guatemala. (1/2 unit)

GHOSTS & MEMORY IN ASIAN AMERICAN LITERATURE (SPRING)
What does it mean to be haunted—by memory, history, or family—and how do these hauntings shape who we are? When is remembering an ethical obligation, and when does it become a burden? This course explores the spectral and the uncanny in Asian and Asian American literature, examining how writers use ghosts and other traces of the past to develop themes of intergenerational memory, cultural inheritance, and trauma. We will examine how narratives use silence and absence to create meaning, and how disrupting linear narrative time can serve as a way to counter the archive of history. Possible texts include Human Acts by Han Kang and A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki, alongside graphic novels like The Magic Fish by Trung Lê Nguyễn and Displacement by Kiku Hughes. Together, we will consider how literary hauntings provide a lens for understanding transformation in Asian American and diasporic experiences.

INDIAN LITERATURE (SPRING)
Salman Rushdie famously coined the term “chutnification”—the process of becoming a chutney or a mashup—to describe living in Bombay/Mumbai, a city where 22 million people from all across India and the world live today. In this course we will study literature, art, and film from the bustling metropolis and ask how the city has become the epicenter and testing ground for an Indian commitment to secularism, socialism, and a pluralistic society. Home to Bollywood cinema, a powerful far-right political class, and the extremes of income inequality, we will ask what special “mixture” of culture, blood, money, and language it takes to become a “Bombayite” or a “Mumbaikar.” Material may include work by Salman Rushdie, Arun Kolatkar, Jeet Thayil, Anita Desai, Bollywood cinema, Mira Nair, M.F. Husain, Cyrus Mistry, Nissim Ezekiel, Dom Moraes, Naresh Fernandes, and Katherine Boo. (1/2 unit)

LATINE LITERATURE: MOVEMENT, TRADITION, AND FORM (FALL)
This semester-long course will survey contemporary Latine literature, focusing on the connections between contemporary works and their influences. In this seminar, students will engage with the inventive and life-sustaining traditions that Latine writers honor and revise to respond to an ever-evolving world. Discussions and essays will focus on a wide range of traditions, from the tradition of lectores (readers who were paid to recite stories to factory workers) to classical poetic forms and global mythologies. The seminar will also respond to various diasporas, celebrating the myriad experiences of Latine people in the United States. In response to the class reading, students will hone their analytical writing and research skills. (1/2 unit)

MODERN BRITISH LITERATURE (FALL)
This course introduces students to the politics of minority British cultural production. In the afterlife of the British empire, Black, Asian, and Minority Ethnic writers have dismantled and reinvented what it means to be “British.” In this course we will trace some of the major fault lines of the racial and national politics from the 1950s, when mass migrations from the Caribbean and South Asia brought “cheap labor” to England, to the current moment of Brexit and renewed xenophobia. Authors and texts may include Hanif Kureishi, Sam Selvon, John Akomfrah, Meera Sayal, Kazuo Ishiguro, Bend it Like Beckham, Anita and Me, My Beautiful Launderette, and The Stuart Hall Project. (1/2 unit)

MYSTERY AND MEANING (FALL)
What makes a mystery story? In this course, we’ll study and write about the nature of narratives. We will look at the way stories hold together, the desire and fear that drive their characters, and the secrets those characters tell—or try to keep hidden. Taking the classic mystery story as a starting point, we will also study Gothic and horror tales, psychological thrillers, neo-noir stories, and postmodern mystery parodies. Potential authors include Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, Edgar Allan Poe, Shirley Jackson, and Raymond Chandler. Particular focus will be given to studying narrative structure and organization, as well as the methods that authors use to build suspense or add ambiguity. 

NEW YORK, NEW YORK: THE MYTH AND REALITY OF NEW YORK IN LITERATURE (SPRING)
New York City has been called “The Big Apple,” “The City That Never Sleeps,” “Gotham,” and even “The Center of the Universe.” But how true is Frank Sinatra’s claim that “If you can make it there, you can make it anywhere”? In this course, students will explore both the myth and the reality of New York across time, examining how writers have imagined, challenged, and redefined “The City.” We will read novels by luminaries such as F. Scott Fitzgerald and Toni Morrison, alongside poetry and prose drawn from major literary movements rooted in New York, including Modernism, the Harlem Renaissance, the Beat Generation, the New York School of Poetry, the Black Arts Movement, and the Nuyorican movement. Throughout the course, we will ask: How does New York operate in literature—not merely as setting, but as symbol, metaphor, or even protagonist? In what ways does the city’s literature illuminate or complicate the myth of the American Dream? How have writers used New York to interrogate identity, ambition, migration, inequality, reinvention, and belonging? Why has this particular city generated so many influential literary and artistic movements across time? Through close reading, analytical writing, seminar discussion, and creative work, students will sharpen their interpretive skills while exploring how literature captures both the promise and the pressures of city life. They will also craft a personal narrative that captures their own version of New York. (1/2 unit)

A TOUCH OF MADNESS (FALL)
This course will explore how writers portray madness in literature as both a personal journey and a powerful response to society. Through close reading and discussion, students will examine how language, form, and narrative voice shape representations of instability and obsession. By reading works by authors such as Mary Shelley, Tennessee Williams, Sylvia Plath, Emily Dickinson, Franz Kafka, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Ocean Vuong, and Edgar Allan Poe, students will investigate how these portrayals reveal the consequences of social expectations, alienation, and confinement. Students will be encouraged to question who is labeled “mad,” who does the labeling, and why. We will also consider how madness is often blurred with creative brilliance, challenging traditional definitions of sanity and genius. Perhaps madness is not something distant or monstrous, but rather a lens for better understanding society—as well as ourselves.

TRUE VOICES: READING AND WRITING MEMOIR (SPRING)
In this semester-long course, students will study and practice the craft of memoir writing. The course will be both a study of literature and a writing workshop. As students read in a variety of genres—including books, essays, and poetry—they will explore the techniques writers use to discover and reveal their identities through storytelling. Course texts may include The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls, When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi, and essays and poems by David Sedaris, Brian Arundel, Michele Leavitt, Sarah Kay, Rudy Francisco, and Phil Kaye. Students will be encouraged to take creative risks as they write extensively, experimenting with voice, tone, meaning, and structure. They will also enhance their literary skills by developing their writing fluency and practicing how to give, receive, and implement constructive writing feedback. (1/2 unit)

YOU ARE WHAT YOU EAT: FOOD, CULTURE, AND IDENTITY (SPRING)
Imagine your favorite meal: a perfectly seared and deliciously greasy cheeseburger. A savory, aromatic serving of lamb biryani. An oven-fired, gooey slice of cheese pizza. A carefully composed salad striking the ideal balance of acidity, saltiness, and sweetness. A zesty, herbaceous taco. What you love to eat says a lot about who you are, and because food can tell us so much about a person, writers have long drawn on culinary inspirations to spice up their work. Starting with Marcel Proust’s transcendent madeleine cookie that unearths a forgotten memory through taste alone, this semester-long course will examine the thematic, social, cultural, and historical meanings writers inscribe through representations of food in literature. The course is organized by genre, including creative non-fiction personal essays about food memories, a food-themed novel, food reviews, and a film unit focused on the theme of one great meal. (1/2 unit)

WHO WROTE SHAKESPEARE'S PLAYS? A STUDY OF ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE (FALL)
For centuries, the question of authorship has persisted: could some other, shadowy figure be the true author responsible for the works of "William Shakespeare"? Students in this seminar will work to shed light on this debate, uncovering reasons for the controversy, tracing the historical and literary questions inherent in the texts themselves, and learning more about the realities of the historical period. We will engage in extensive reading, writing, and discussion, interrogating primary source materials, contemporary work from the Elizabethan period, and examining the works and arguments surrounding the major candidates often suggested as the "true" author, including Francis Bacon, Christopher Marlowe, Emilia Bassano, Edward De Vere, and, of course, the man from Stratford himself. Texts will likely include Shakespeare’s Hamlet, excerpts from Henry VI, Richard II, Richard III, Marlowe’s Edward II, as well as multiple poems, excerpts, and primary sources. 

20TH-CENTURY WOMEN’S LITERATURE (FALL)
In this semester-long course, students will study major women writers of the 20th century. Through close textual readings of poetry, short stories, and novels, students will examine how women during this time period boldly and imaginatively expressed their voices and ideas, often despite social expectations and daunting obstacles. Course texts may include The Bean Trees by Barbara Kingsolver, Sula by Toni Morrison, and short stories and poems by Maya Angelou, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Sylvia Plath, Audre Lorde, Marie Howe, Sharon Olds, Flannery O’Connor, Sandra Cisneros, Virginia Woolf, and Jhumpa Lahiri. Literary analysis will be a major writing focus in the course; in addition, students will have opportunities to express their own voices and creativity, using our mentor texts as inspiration. (1/2 unit)