English 11 Honors Course Requirements
Students are responsible for the historical, literary, and biographical background for all units and time periods. Students are also responsible for identifying, describing, and analyzing all poetical and literary techniques used in literature. The exam includes objective questions and an essay. Every student is required to complete one research paper.
First Semester Units and Readings:
The Anglo-Saxon Period
Beowulf, translated by Seamus Heaney
The Exeter Book (riddles and poems such as "The Wife's Lament," "The Seafarer," and "The Wanderer." (additional materials)
Literary techniques: kennings, alliteration, caesuras, and epithet
The Middle Ages
Medieval Ballads
The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer; The following prologues and tales are required reading: "The General Prologue," "The Pardoner's Prologue," "The Pardoner's Tale," plus at least one other teacher-selected piece.
The Arthurian Legend: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Idylls of the King (Tennyson), OR Morte d'Arthur (Malory).
Literary techniques: iambic pentameter, heroic couplet, medieval romance, ballad stanza
The Renaissance
Queen Elizabeth: "On Monsieure's Departure," and "Speech to the Troops at Tilbury"
Edmund Spenser: Sonnets 75 and Sonnet 54
Christopher Marlowe: "The Passionate Shepherd to His Love"
Sir Walter Raleigh: "The Nymph's Reply"
John Donne: "Meditation 17" and Sonnet 10
Aemilia Lanyer: "Eve's Apology"
Ben Johnson: "On My First Son," and "Song to Celia"
George Herbert: "Easter Wings"
Robert Herrick: "Delight in Disorder" and "To Virgins, to Make Much of Time"
Richard Lovelace: "To Lucasta, Going to Wars" and "To Althea, from Prison"
Katherine Philips: "A Married State" and "Upon the Double Murder of King Charles"
Mid-term Exams
Second Semester Units and Readings:
Shakespeare
Hamlet OR The Taming of the Shrew, OR Henry IV
The Age of Reason
Jonathan Swift: "A Modest Proposal"
Alexander Pope: The Rape of the Lock
Samuel Johnson: Excerpts from A Dictionary of the English Language
James Boswell: "The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D."
Thomas Gray: "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard"
Richard Steele and Thomas Addison (Students should understand the historical importance of these two literary figures. Optional readings are left to the teacher's discretion.)
The Romantic Age
Anna Letitia Barbauld: "Washing Day"
William Blake: "The Lamb, "The Tyger," and two additional songs; students will also be able to define and analyze Blake's theory of contraries.
William Wordsworth: "Tintern Abbey" and one teacher-selected sonnet
Samuel Taylor Coleridge: The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" and "Kubla Khan"
Lord Byron (George Gordon): "She Walks in Beauty," and "When We Two Parted,"; students will also be able to define and analyze the concept of the Byronic hero.
Percy Bysshe Shelley: "Mont Blanc" OR "Ode to the West Wind"
John Keats: “Ode to a Nightingale”
The Victorian Age
Elizabeth Barrett Browning: Sonnet 22, Sonnet 43, and Book 1 of Aurora Leigh
Robert Browning: "My Last Duchess"
Elizabeth Gaskell: "The Old Nurse's Story"
Christina Rosetti: "Promises Like Pie Crusts"
Oscar Wilde: "The Harlot's House"
The Twentieth Century
Thomas Hardy: "A Broken Appointment," "The Convergence of the Twain," and "Ah, Are You Digging on My Grave"
William Butler Yeats: "Wilde Swans at Coole" and "In Memory of Major Robert Gregory"
Virginia Woolf: A Room of One's Own
D.H. Lawrence: "The Horse Dealer's Daughter"
Katherine Mansfield: "The Garden Party”
James Joyce: "Araby" plus one other teacher-selected option from Dubliners
Final Exams