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Still in the thick of long-term planning for my first prep (12th grade literature & composition). I’ve decided to embrace 12th grade as British literature, so I’ve had to scrap my ideas about including some 20th century African American lit (sorry Wright, Ellison, Hurston, Morrison, Hughes, Angelou, Giovanni…). But a college friend gave me a great idea to fill in the gap–a contemporary British lit unit, with Never Let Me Go (Kazuo Ishiguro) as the anchor text. Here’s a rough list of my 7 units for the year:

Unit 1: The Medieval Period (4 weeks)
- The Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer
Project: Write your own tale (fiction narrative)

Unit 2: Anglo-Saxon Period (3 weeks)
- Beowulf, trans. Seamus Heaney
Project: Some sort of persuasive essay, 2-4 pages

Unit 3: English Renaissance (5 weeks)
- Macbeth, William Shakespeare
- “General Macbeth,” Mary McCarthy
- “Sonnet 138,” William Shakespeare
- “Amoretti, Sonnet 18,” Edmund Spenser
- “Death Be Not Proud,” John Donne
Projects: (1) Write a sonnet (Spenserian or Shakespearean) on a theme of your choosing. Label the rhyme scheme and the meter (iambic pentameter). (2) Write and perform a condensed version of Macbeth in groups OR Write a 2-page close reading of one passage from Macbeth.

Unit 4: Romantic Period (6 weeks)
- Frankenstein, Mary Shelley
- “On Frankenstein,” Percy Bysshe Shelley
- Excerpts from Paradise Lost, John Milton
- Myth of Prometheus (Excerpt from Book I of Ovid’s Metamorphoses)
- “Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802,” William Wordsworth
- “Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” Samuel Taylor Coleridge
- “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” John Keats
- Krieger, Murray. “Picture and Word, Space and Time.” Ekphrasis: The Illusion of the Natural Sign. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992.
- Mitchell, W.J. Thomas. “Ekphrasis and the Other.” Picture Theory: essays on verbal and visual representation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995.
Project: Write a persuasive compare and contrast paper on two texts we’ve read in class (one must be a text from this unit; the other can be a text we read in an earlier unit; cannot be a non-fiction essay). 4-6 pages. List of topics will be given out. Deadlines along the way: What’s your topic? What’s your thesis + topic sentences for each paragraph? Outline, including quotes you’re going to use to support your argument. First draft. Final draft.

WINTER BREAK

Unit 5: Victorian Period (3 weeks)
- “My Last Duchess,” Robert Browning
- “Dover Beach,” Matthew Arnold
- “The Windhover,” Gerard Manley Hopkins
- “A Portrait,” Michael Field
- Secondary sources about these poems
- Prof. Joseph Harris’ pieces on Forwarding and Countering
Project: Forward/Counter an existing critical interpretation of one of the poems we read in this unit with your own spin. Use sentence starters: “On the other hand…” “Yes, but…” 2-4 pages. Peer editing will take place after the first draft and before the second draft is due.

Unit 6: Modern Period (6 weeks)
- A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce
- “The Dead,” James Joyce
- Allen Tate on “The Dead”
- Virginia Woolf on modern fiction
- “The Second Coming,” William Butler Yeats
- “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” Wallace Stevens
- “Poem,” William Carlos Williams
- “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” T. S. Eliot
- “Musée des Beaux Arts,” W.H. Auden
- “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night,” Dylan Thomas
Project: Poster about the epiphanies that occur in Portrait of the Artist in groups; OR Poster about the Modernist period: art, political culture, literary culture in groups. Visual component, written component (2 pages), and class presentation component. Minimum 10 minutes to present, + 5 minutes for questions from peers.

Unit 7: Contemporary British Literature (4 weeks)
- Never Let Me Go, Kazuo Ishiguro
- Poems from Tales From Ovid, Ted Hughes
- “Digging,” Seamus Heaney
- “Blackberry-picking,” Seamus Heaney
- Paul Muldoon
- Philip Larkin
Project (Will be introduced earlier in the year): Research paper on a topic related to bioethics. Enrich the paper by referencing your understanding/interpretation of the themes or specific passages from Never Let Me Go. 8-10 pages. Deadlines along the way. 15% of second semester grade.