Scholars' Seminar: Competing Identities

Full-year course. Scholars’ Seminar in Literature is designed to engage advanced rhetoric-stage students in critical reading, literary discussion, and literary analysis. This year’s seminar focuses on exploring themes of identity and society. Students will examine how one’s private identity often competes with their public persona. We will explore how both kinds of identities are constructed, challenged, and represented in literature. Through critical reading and analysis, students will engage with a diverse array of classic and contemporary works, analyzing how authors from different backgrounds and time periods address similar themes of the inner and outer self. This course encourages critical thinking, deep reading, and thoughtful discussion, fostering an understanding of the complex interplay between individual and societal identities.  Each week’s sessions will be oriented around the essential question, “How do literary works depict and respond to the construction and challenges of personal and public personas?”

"My child is working independently at this point, but I can say that whenever I've pulled up an assignment she's done for Scholar's Lit, I have been BLOWN AWAY! My goodness, I cannot believe the insights my child is seeing in the works she's reading. I love the comparative literature angle...taken with this class, and I love the [reading] selections. I KNOW my child has become a deeper thinker and writer because of this class. She already loved reading, but this class has really allowed her to reach beyond her usual, favorite genres and blossom in her deep-reading skills." - Parent Course Evaluation 2021-22
"In the seven years I’ve been here, this is the best class I have ever taken at WTMAcademy.... I love this class so much and the friends I’ve made from it. The selected books were great. I loved the way we focused on different subjects throughout the semesters, starting with feminism and ending with war history. I highly encourage WTMAcademy to continue to make this class available." - Student Course Evaluation 2021-22

    This course requires students to read multiple texts in advance of the weeks that are spent discussing them in class. As such, students will develop the ability to manage cognitive load as they practice daily reading and notetaking habits for one set of readings while working through in-class discussions and assignments on the previous set of readings, a valuable skill set for further academic success.

    Please note: This course is designed for high-school students. Several of these readings contain topics, scenarios, subjects, and themes that younger and/or more sensitive readers may find upsetting or unsettling. While these texts are appropriate for most mature high school students, students and parents should be aware of the complexities and intensities of these readings in advance. If you have any concerns we encourage you to check the texts out at the local library before enrolling your student.

    Alternates with Scholar’s Seminar: Literature at the Limits.

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    Scholars' Seminar: Competing Identities Information

    • Example Syllabus
    • Class meets twice per week for 50-55 minutes.
    • Class cap: 15 students.
    • Designed for grades 11-12.
    • Students in grades 9-12 may be awarded 1 Language Arts credit upon completion of this course.
    • Taught by Jennifer Roudabush

    Course Materials

    • Course texts to be posted by June 2025.
      • Previous course texts:
        • How to Read Literature Like a Professor: A Live and Entertaining Guide to Reading Between the Lines, Revised Edition by Thomas Foster (Summer Reading)
        • The Odyssey by Homer (trans. Emily Wilson) (Summer Reading)
        • Circe by Madeline Miller (Summer Reading)
        • The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
        • The Testaments by Margaret Atwood
        • Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
        • Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys
        • Selections from The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan (link provided on Blackboard)
        • Selections from This Bridge Called My Back ed. Cherríe Moraga (link provided on Blackboard)
        • The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman (link provided on Blackboard)
        • The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
        • Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
        • Life After Life by Kate Atkinson
        • Hamlet by William Shakespeare
        • Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell
        • Selections from The Hero with a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell (link provided on Blackboard)
        • The Road by Cormac McCarthy
        • Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs
        • The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead
        • Beloved by Toni Morrison
        • Selections from Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination by Toni Morrison (link provided on Blackboard)
        • Selections from Notes of a Native Son by James Baldwin (link provided on Blackboard)
        • Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
        • Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates
        • Down and Out in Paris and London, George Orwell
        • Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, Barbara Ehrenreich
        • All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr
        • Atonement by Ian McEwan
        • A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
        • The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien
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