Mrs. Shepard’s English 10 Honors Class Syllabus September 2015-June 2016
First Quarter Goals/Introduction to The Heroic Code: Our Evolving Sense of Heroes
and Justice
The Odysseys, Homer’s ancient epic (circa 8th century B. C. ) and your modern author’s
novel (your summer reading choice)
Joseph Brodsky’s “Odysseus to Telemachus” and Edwin Muir’s “The Return of Odysseus”
Excerpts from Beowulf by anonymous (Anglo Saxon period, circa 8th century A. D.) and
portions of John Gardner’s Grendel (1971 )
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (circa 1375)
Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights (1847) [We will begin reading this novel in the first
quarter and complete it in the second quarter.]
Concepts to introduce/review:
Epic Poetry (structure of, invocation, muse, bard, epic hero, Homeric or epic simile,
epithet, kleos, nostos, hubris)
In medias res
Bildungsroman
Hero’s Journey Archetype (See Chapter 1, How to Read Literature Like a Professor)
Communion and Vampire motifs (See Chapters 2 and 3 of HTRLLP)
Intertexuality (See Chapter 4 of HTRLLP)
SIFT acronym and Figurative Language: metaphor, simile, personification
Elegy
Anglo-Saxon terms: thane, scop, wyrd, wergild, kenning
Anglo-Saxon Prosody (patterns of rhythm and sound in poetry): its distinctive meter, use
of caesura, alliteration
Medieval English Prosody: rhyme (the French and Italian influence) including the “bob
and wheel” techniques, strophe and stanza
Narrative Structure: frame structure, multiple narrators, first and third person point of
view
Byronic Hero and Anti-hero
Research Skills: creating a rhetorical stance in a thesis and topic sentence claim,
supporting claims by embedding quotations into grammatically and mechanically correct
sentences and paraphrasing, using internal citations (also known as parenthetical
references) correctly according to MLA style
Paragraph structure and development: topic sentences (TS), concrete details (CD),
commentary (CM), the 1:2 ratio of CDs to CMs, culminating insights (CI)
Grammar: Parts of speech and parts of sentences
Mechanics: Apostrophe and Comma Use
Usage: Active Voice, Pronoun Case and Number
Periods to Cover:
Ancient Greece, Anglo-Saxon England, Medieval England
2nd Quarter Goals/The Romantic Code: The Quest for the Ideal and for Love, the Power
of Nature to Inspire
Geoffrey Chaucer’s late medieval period (1386 - 1400) General Prologue to The Canterbury
Tales, “The Wife of Bath’s Tale” and “The Nun’s Priest’s Tale”
Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights (1847)
“The Passionate Shepherd to His Love” (1599) by Christopher Marlowe,
“The Nymph’s Reply to the Shepherd” (1600) by Sir Walter Raleigh, and
the modern free verse poem “Raleigh Was Right” (1940) by William Carlos Williams
English Medieval, Renaissance, Metaphysical, and Romantic poetry (anonymous balladeers,
Shakespeare, Donne, Wordsworth, Bronte, Keats)
Concepts to introduce/review:
Narrative Structure: frame structure, multiple narrators, first person point of view
Medieval English Prosody: couplet, iambic pentameter, heroic couplets
Courtly love tradition
Metaphors, conceits
Tone (attitude), author’s use of details, allusion, imagery, etc to create tone
Satire, mock heroic style
Logical fallacies
Foil
Types of English Medieval Poetry: ballad, romance (or quest)
Aspects of poetry: Quatrains, Compression, Syntax (typical and inverted)
Metrical feet: iamb, trochee, dactyl, anapest, spondee
Types of Renaissance Poetry: sonnets (Petrarchan and Shakespearean), carpe diem
poems, pastoral poems, lyrics
Structure/Meaning link
Feminist Theory of Literature
Research Skills: using relevant literary criticism on a literary work, annotating,
paraphrasing, and summarizing the ideas expressed in the literary criticism; using MLA
format for the works cited page; writing a short literary analysis comparing three poems
and arguing to support a claim, addressing counterclaims
Grammar: phrases (appositive, prepositional, and the verbals: participial, gerund, and
infinitive) and introduction to clauses (independent, dependent), types of dependent
clauses (adjective, noun, adverb, elliptical)
Mechanics: semi-colons, and colons
Usage: proper placement of modifiers
3rd Quarter Goals/ The Moral Code: The Relationship of Human Beings to Family
Members, Government, and Society
Sophocles’ Antigone (5th century B. C.)
Chaucer’s “The Pardoner’s Tale” and D. H. Lawrence’s “Rocking-Horse Winner”
Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal” (1729)
George Orwell’s Animal Farm (1945)
William Shakespeare’s Macbeth (1605)
William Blake’s poems from Songs of Innocence and Experience (1789)
Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Ozymandias” (1818) and “England in 1819” (1819)
Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations (1861) (continues into fourth quarter)
Concepts to introduce/review:
Tragedy (from Aristotle’s Poetics) terms include tragic hero, catharsis, anagnorisis,
peripeteia, metabasis, catastrophe, and other elements of tragedy)
Blank verse
Satire (more aspects)
Pathetic fallacy
Narrative Structure: Unreliable Narrator
Freudian and Marxist Theories of Literature
Research Skills: using an internet data bases to search for relevant literary criticism on an
author, annotating, paraphrasing, and summarizing the ideas expressed in the literary
criticism; using MLA format for the works cited page; writing a short literary research
paper on a literary work’s theme
Grammar: more on clauses, sentence types for effect, coordination and subordination
Mechanics: More on commas, semi-colons, and colons
Usage: pronoun reference, troublesome pairs
Periods to Cover
Renaissance and post-Renaissance England
The Age of Romanticism
The Victorian Age
Modern
4th Quarter Goals: The Modern World View
Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations (1861) (continuation from the third quarter)
William Golding’s Lord of the Flies
Katherine Mansfield’s “The Fly” and “The Garden Party”
Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s “A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings”
Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery”
Ursula LeGuin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas”
Nadine Gordimer’s “Once Upon A Time”
Seamus Heaney’s “Digging” and “Blackberry Picking”
More works to be determined
Concepts to introduce/review:
Allegory
Free Verse
Stream of Consciousness
Magical Realism
All previous terms and skills
Grammar: more on varying sentence types for effect, coordination and subordination,
parallelism, pronoun reference
Mechanics: More on commas, semi-colons, and colons
Usage: more troublesome pairs
Periods to Cover: Renaissance, Victorian, Edwardian, Modern