Roshan Ravishankar ’14: The English department has restructured its senior curriculum, lengthening the previously semester long British Literature course to a full year class entitled The Evolution of English Literature.
This course will replace the English electives offered to seniors during the spring semester. During the first semester of this new course, seniors will read Beowulf, The Canterbury Tales and Hamlet, just as they currently do in British Literature. The new curriculum for the second semester will include the novel Jane Eyre as well as a “flex-text” chosen independently by each teacher. The flex text will be a novel that further investigates the evolution and diversity of the English language.
Additionally, the extra semester will provide students the opportunity to write a substantial research paper integrating scholarly criticism, similar to research papers many students will be required to write in college.
Dr. Sheryl Forste-Grupp, Chair of the English Department, stated that the current structure of senior English curriculum is superficial. She believes that the analysis of British literature only offered in the fall semester is much too shallow an analysis for students to fully gain a true understanding of British literature.
Forste-Grupp stated that with only a single semester to work with in the current British Literature course, teachers can “do full justice to neither what we feel British Literature should be [nor to] fully tell the story of the English language.” She believes the course The Evolution of English Literature will provide seniors with a more unified course of study, providing them with a well-rounded understanding of how the English language has transformed since its beginnings.
The course will allow the “texts to breath more,” according to Forste-Grupp, as teachers would have two semesters, instead of one. Alex Dupre’13 stated that the British Literature course “was rather tightly packed.” Overall, the English department hopes that these modifications will create a more unified course of study, which would allow teachers to investigate more thoroughly the history of the English language.
Conversely, Megan Kilcullen ’13, noted, “I think the second semester gives students the opportunity to do something a little more fun and learn about something that any other English class would never touch.” Kilcullen is currently taking the senior spring elective To Live and Die in L.A. which explores different detective novels with plotlines set in Los Angeles.
Kilcullen commented, “I think it’ll be really hard to focus on a hefty book like Jane Eyre during the second semester of senior year…Seniors are usually pretty checked out by that point
She continued, “On the one hand I feel like we crammed a lot of information into one semester of Brit Lit, so it would be nice to spread that information out over the whole year. But I also really like the idea of being able to take a new and different English class in the second semester.”

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