When John Locke declared (in the 1690 Essay Concerning Human Understanding) that knowledge was derived solely from experience, he raised the possibility that human understanding and identity were not the products of God’s will or of immutable laws of nature so much as of one’s personal history and background. If on the one hand Locke’s theory led some to pronounce that individuals could determine the course of their own lives, however, the idea that we are the products of our experience just as readily supported the conviction that we are nothing more than machines acting out lives whose destinies we do not control. This course will track the formulation of that problem, and a variety of responses to it, in the literature of the “long eighteenth century.” Readings will range widely across genre, from lyric poetry and the novel to diary entries, philosophical prose, and political essays, including texts by Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, Mary Astell, David Hume, Laurence Sterne, Olaudah Equiano, Mary Hays, and Mary Shelley. Topics to be discussed include the construction of gender identities; the individual in society; imagination and the poet’s work. There will be two essays, one 5-6 pages and one 8-10 pages in length, and required presentations.

The 12th grade learning experience consists of 7 mostly month-long units aligned to the Common Core State Standards, with available course material for teachers and students easily accessible online. Over the course of the year there is a steady progression in text complexity levels, sophistication of writing tasks, speaking and listening activities, and increased opportunities for independent and collaborative work. Rubrics and student models accompany many writing assignments.Throughout the 12th grade year, in addition to the Common Read texts that the whole class reads together, students each select an Independent Reading book and engage with peers in group Book Talks. Language study is embedded in every 12th grade unit as students use annotation to closely review aspects of each text. Teacher resources provide additional materials to support each unit.

Students will consider the different ways that humor can be used by a writer to criticize people, practices, and institutions that he or she thinks are in need of serious reform. Students will read satirists ranging from classical Rome to modern day to examine how wit can be used to make important points about culture.

ACCOMPLISHMENTS

Students research an aspect of modern life that they would like to lampoon.
Students read from satirists across history to absorb the style and forms of humor and institutions satirized.
Students write their own satire, drawing on techniques of famous satirists to criticize their targets.

GUIDING QUESTIONS

These questions are a guide to stimulate thinking, discussion, and writing on the themes and ideas in the unit. For complete and thoughtful answers and for meaningful discussions, students must use evidence based on careful reading of the texts.

What is satire, and when is it too harsh?
How can humor and irony make you more persuasive?
What do you think is funny? How far would you go to satirize it?
Who gets more reaction—satirists or protestors?

In this lesson, students continue to prepare their presentations for the next lesson. You can assign what’s left to do for homework.

In this lesson, students will begin to study Swift’s famous essay “A Modest Proposal,” and answer the question, what is Swift really arguing?

In this lesson, students will look at how a writer discusses poverty. Everyone knows poverty is devastating, but how can a writer most effectively create a response from his or her audience so people want to take action? And what kinds of evidence are most persuasive?

In this lesson, students will examine stereotypical figures in three pieces of classic literature that often emerge in settings that serve as microcosms for the society at large. They will determine the intent of the satirical nature of each piece as well as the means of achieving it.

In this lesson, students will finish and share their cartoon characters and spend some time analyzing each other’s creations. They’ll look specifically at whether their classmates took a more Juvenalian or Horatian approach.

Great Writers Inspire presents an illuminating collection of Jonathan Swift resources curated by specialists at the University of Oxford. It includes audio and video lectures and short talks, downloadable electronic texts and eBooks, and background contextual resources.

This section brings together resources from the across the Great Writers Inspire site to illustrate how these can be used as a starting point for exploration of or classroom discussion about the political aspects of literature. The 'Approaching Political Literature' essay introduces a series of topics and questions and gives examples of resources to explore. It is aimed at teachers, students and anyone who is interested in literature who wants to put text into context and be inspired by Great Writers.

This section brings together resources from the across the Great Writers Inspire site to illustrate how these can be used as a starting point for exploration of or classroom discussion about genre. The 'Questions of Genre' essay introduces a series of topics and questions and gives examples of resources to explore. It is aimed at teachers, students and anyone who is interested in literature who wants to put text into context and be inspired by Great Writers.

This edition is derived from the Project Gutenberg edition of A Modest Proposal.

Great works of fiction often take us to far-off places; they sometimes conduct us on journeys toward a deeper understanding of what’s right next door. We’ll read, discuss, and interpret a range of short and short-ish works: The reading list will be chosen from among such texts as “Gilgamesh,” Homer’s Odyssey (excerpts), Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress (excerpts), Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Saleh’s Season of Migration to the North, Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, John Cheever’s “The Swimmer,” Coetzee’s The Life and Times of Michael K, Irving’s “Rip Van Winkle,” Toni Morrison’s Jazz, H. G. Wells’ The Time Machine, Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Beckett’s How It Is, Calvino’s Invisible Cities, Forster’s A Passage to India. As a CI-H class, this subject will involve substantial practice in argumentative writing and oral communication.

Taught by William Flesch at Brandeis University, this course offers a survey of poetry that’s out of favor. But it turns out to be among the most skillful, brilliant, witty, invigorating, funny, sometimes dirty poetry ever written. (The dirty poetry is definitely NSFW. It may not even be safe for consenting adults.) Coverage goes from the urbane civic poetry of Dryden and his contemporaries to the beginnings of the intense subjectivity of Romanticism, with attention to the continuities between these wildly different schools. It’s helpful to have a complete Pope and the Penguin Dryden. We also use the Oxford Anthology of English Literature, ed. Martin Price.

Jonathan Swift's 1729 pamphlet "A Modest Proposal" is a model for satirizing social problems. In this lesson, students complete multiple readings of Swift's essay: a guided reading with the teacher, a collaborative reading with a peer, and an independent reading. The online Notetaker tool helps students restate key ideas from Swift's essay as they read and elaborate upon these ideas postreading. After independent reading, pairs of students develop a mock television newscast or editorial script, like those found on Saturday Night Live's "Weekend Update," The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, or The Colbert Report, including appropriate visual images in PowerPoint.

The “small wonders” to which our course will attend are moments of present time, depicted in the verbal and visual media of the modern age: newspapers, novels and stories, poems, photographs, films, etc. We will move between visual and verbal media across a considerable span of time, from eighteenth-century poetry and prose fiction to twenty-first century social networking and microblogging sites, and from sculpture to photography, film, and digital visual media. With help from philosophers, contemporary cultural historians, and others, we will begin to think about a media practice largely taken for granted in our own moment.