Literature, Rhetoric, and the Examined Life (Part 1)

A full-year capstone course in which seniors read complex literary and informational texts across genres and centuries, epic and dramatic tragedy, satire, existentialist and absurdist fiction, foundational American and British nonfiction, and contemporary argument, while producing sustained literary analysis, rhetorical analysis, and research-based argument. The course treats each unit's texts as a sustained conversation about how individuals justify their choices, obligations, and beliefs against competing authorities (fate, state, reason, self, tradition), culminating in an independent research-and-argument project and a synthesis unit pairing a full-length novel with public argument. Building on English 11's work in sustained argument and rhetorical analysis, the course foregrounds close reading of increasingly ambiguous texts, structural comparison across works, and the composition of arguments that must survive counterargument. This volume holds units 1 to 4: Tragic Form and the Question of Fault; The Architecture of Argument: Ethos, Logos, Pathos, and the Counterargument; Shakespearean Tragedy: Interiority and Persuasion on Stage; Satire: Weaponized Irony.

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