June 8, 2007

To: Rising Juniors and Seniors
From: Don Fried, Mark Burns and Bernadette DePaz
About: 2007-08 English and History Courses

Summer Reading

EM Forster - A Passage to India (English)
Monica Ali - Brick Lane (English)
Virginia Woolf - A Room of One's Own (History)

We are giving you copies of the summer reading books. You should record reactions, questions and observations about the texts in a reading journal every time you read, even if it is only for a short time. Each entry should only take a few minutes to complete; while entries do not have to be long, they should be thoughtful and enable you to recall your ideas about the reading. You will be referring to these entries after school starts, and you will be using the journals throughout the year in connection with your literature studies. More specific information about the reading is on the reverse of this letter.

We are also giving you a vocabulary list for next year. Many students have found it useful and stress relieving to do their vocabulary work over the summer. Even if you complete only a portion of the list, that will be helpful. For each word, write down a definition, a note on etymology and a sentence in which you use the word idiomatically.

Your English course for next year is British Literature. We will read selections from the Romantic poets (Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley and Keats); As You Like It (Shakespeare), The Importance of Being Earnest (Wilde) and Arcadia (Stoppard), as well as the following novels: Pride and Prejudice (Austen), Mrs. Dalloway (Woolf) and Saturday (McEwan).

Your history course for next year is Modern European History. In this course we will examine some of the major social, economic, political, religious and intellectual questions that constitute modern European history from the age of the Enlightenment to the era of the European Union. During this period, Europe experienced a series of revolutions - economic, intellectual, socia, and political. This course will identify and analyze the revolutions that shaped modern Europe. Texts: Noble, Thomas, Western Civilization: The Continuing Experiment, Vol. 2, 3rd ed. Wiesner, Merry, Discovering the Western Past: A Look at the Evidence, Since 1500. Perry, Marvin, Sources of Western Tradition: From the Renaissance to the Present. Levi, Primo, Survival in Auschwitz.

Read a lot, write a lot, run around a lot and have a great summer. Below is the assignment.

British Literature

EM Forster (1979-1970), an English novelist and essayist, graduated from Cambridge in 1901 and traveled abroad in Greece, Italy, Egypt, where he served as a Red Cross volunteer during World War I, and India, which he visited for the first time in 1912. He began A Passage to India soon after, but it wasn't finished and published until 1924; India was to remain the jewel in the crown of the British Empire until 1947. A liberal and anti-imperialist, Forster was sensitive to both the Muslim and Hindu cultures he observed and deplored the unsympathetic views of the 'native' population held by many of the British civil servants who governed India.* This novel presents the collision of those cultures in the India of the 1920s

*Imperial India comprised the contemporary nations of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan and Sikkim.

Monica Ali is the daughter of English and Bangladeshi parents. She came to England at the age of three and, after schooling where she lived in Manchester, attended Oxford University. Her first novel, Brick Lane (2003), is an epic saga about a Bangladeshi family living in the UK and explores the British immigrant experience. It was short listed for the 2003 Man Booker Prize for Fiction. She lives in London and was named in 2003 by Granta magazine as one of twenty 'Best of Young British Novelists'.
These novels, written about 75 years apart, both deal with the the clash of cultures between the British and the Indians, though from obviously different perspectives.

As you read, you should be thinking about how the relationship between these two cultures has evolved.

Modern European History

Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) was educated at home, having uncensored access to the large library of her father, Sir Leslie Stephen, editor of The Dictionary of National Biography. After his death in 1904, she, her older sister and two brothers moved to the then down-at-the heels London neighborhood of Bloomsbury, where they were joined by a number of her brothers' friends from Cambridge, one of whom she married in 1911. Bloomsbury became a meeting place for a circle of writers, artists and political figures, who broke with the traditions of their parents' generation in art and in life.

In her novels, Woolf experimented with narrative techniques, such as stream of consciousness; she was also a prolific essayist. In A Room of One's Own, she explored the differences of time, space and educational opportunity offered to men and women writers.

While reading this book, be sure to take notes on the following topics. You will use these notes to write your first essay during first week of school and again when we discuss this work in class later in the semester.

o Economy: lifestyles / competition / class relationships
o Politics: power sources / power struggles / class structure
o Gender: roles / relationships / structures

Junior class only: European geography assignment. On the Portal page for Modern European History, click on "Lecture Materials"; under "Summer Assignment" folder, you will get instructions for geography assignment. Any problems accessing the assignment, please e-mail Bernadette Condesso.