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At PCVS Academic and University level English courses are structured to create a web of cultural literacy where students are able to see that books are not merely isolated stories, but are part of a larger cultural conversation that humanity has been having with itself since before the Renaissance, a conversation about what it means to be human, and about how individuals relate to the society into which they find themselves thrown.
Course readings have thus been chosen for their inter-textuality - that is, for the "dialogues" that they have with each other as well as with us. These are books that invite us to see ourselves as part of that larger conversation.
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For example, Grade 11 author Aldous Huxley wrote Brave New World fully expecting that his readers had read Shakespeare's The Tempest (which we read in Grade 10), and that they were already acquainted with the concepts of the Noble Savage, Enlightenment rationality,
Utilitarianism, as well as and the tools of psychological engineering - and how all of these were working to put an end to the humanistic conversation that Shakespeare and his forerunners had commenced: if Humanists such as Thomas More had imagined the utopian perfection of human society and what that might look like (and cost us), Huxley assumed that, to 20th century readers, this conversation still resonated -- if only as a potential dystopian nightmare |
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In turn, Grade 12 author Milan Kundera, writing Unbearable Lightness of Being, in exile from a failed Utopian experiment, (after the Prague Spring rebellion against the Soviet Union in 1968) expects us to understand myth, the desire for reason to destroy myth, the betrayed utopian promise of the French Revolution, as well as how modernity has driven humanity into a kind of philosophical dead-end, as science and philosophy seem to have stolen what we consider to be our essential individuality.
Kundera's innovative narrative style encourages us to engage in the debate ourselves: what does it mean to have a "soul"? How does our conception of our "self" relate to the human body? To what extent does our imagination play a part in
constructing meaning in life, and how is that analogous to artistic creation?
In the end, the most important question (as Albert Camus reminds us) is “To be or not to be?” -- and if the former, How To Be?
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The texts for each year thus stand as intellectual pre-requisites for comprehending the full impact of the texts which follow in the next year - they form the context in which the conversation is furthered and deepened.
For more information about individual grade levels, use the links on the navigational sidebar at the top of the page, on the left! |
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| Last Modified: Jul 28, 2011 |
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© Copyright 2012 Peterborough Collegiate & Vocational School
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