MAYA ANGELOU once said, “When I look back, I am so impressed again with the
life-giving power of literature. If I were a young person today, trying to gain
a sense of myself in the world, I would do that again by reading, just as I did
when I was young.” It is this sense that literature is important, that
literature can reveal something about ourselves and the world, and that reading
is a practice and lifeway maintained and sustained over time that is central to
this class. In other words, literature is more than just words on a page,
literacy is not a destination or a merit badge, and reading is as much about
rereading as writing is as much about revising. This class will take up reading
and rereading as critical practice by pointedly revisiting literature commonly
taught in high school curricula in the US, literature needing rescue and
revivification from this-is-so-boring mindsets, from the constraints of
teaching-for-the-tests, and from the too easy themes and summaries of notes by
Cliff and Spark. This is not your usual high school novel class. Texts may
include in whole or in excerpt the fiction of Mark Twain, Kate Chopin, Sherwood
Anderson, Franz Kafka, Virginia Woolf, Ayn Rand, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John
Steinbeck, George Orwell, J.D. Salinger, Maya Angelou, and J.K. Rowling.

AS A CLASS, we will engage the techniques and practices of reading and enjoying
literature. We will identify and develop different ways to read different kinds
of texts and understand and develop strategies, habits, and perspectives of
reading, thinking, and writing. Foremost, we will read with pleasure and for
pleasure. We will also rhetorically read, close read, read for analysis. And
lastly, we will read and deploy literature as theory, as dramatizing the
concerns, wonders, struggles, and politics of lived life and experience.

ASIDE FROM READING, students will be assessed on class participation, including
participation on the class web log, weekly one-page response papers, an in-class
readings presentation, and a final ten-page writing project, which incorporates
selected response papers for revision.