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 * English 11-AP Literature: Visions and Revisons **


 * “Vision is the art of seeing what is invisible to others.” –Jonathan Swift **

=== Juniors will learn to understand English literature as a dynamic series of perspectives, visons and subsequent revisons of the human story. They will explore fundamental visons of the English tradition -- linguistic, aesthetic, historical -- and then put those traditions in conversation with contemporary voices that variously question, further, and revise the perspectives of the past. These conversations will grow out of the juxtaposition of traditional and contemporary authors. Some possible pairings are Charlotte Bronte and Jean Rhys, Joseph Conrad and Chinua Achebe, William Shakespeare and Tom Stoppard, Virginia Woolf and Michael Cunningham, or W.B. Yeats and Derek Walcott. === ===Juniors will join these conversations through both class discussion and written responses to the texts, potentially considering questions like these: If Shakespeare were alive today, how would he respond to Stoppard’s plays? Would Yeats and Caribbean-born Walcott agree about what makes a poem great? Would Woolf approve of Cunningham’s fictional telling of her life story? Would Achebe let his children read Conrad? ===

//**Chimamanda Adiche's 2009 "Ted Talk" entiled "The Danger of the Single Story" was not an explicit inspiration for this course, but her work speaks to the importance of approaching literature and narrative as a series of "visions" and "revisions."**// [|Adichie's "Danger of a Single Story"]