1. Home
  2. Course
  3. English III
Grade 11 – Junior Year

English III

American literature from oral traditions to the present, and the advanced writing skills that go with reading it well.
0.0
(0)
1 Enrolled
Rapid Grad Academy

About Course

English III covers American literature from the oral traditions that preceded
European arrival to writing published in the last decade — and the advanced writing skills that reading
it properly requires.

The course is organised around a question rather than a list: what makes a literature American, and
who gets to decide? That question runs from the eighteenth-century anxiety about having no ancient past,
through the deliberate construction of a national literature, to the canon debates of the last fifty
years.

What you will study

  • Unit 1 — Early American Voices: oral traditions and the problem of the record,
    Puritan writing, Enlightenment prose and revolutionary rhetoric.
  • Unit 2 — Romanticism and Its Shadows: Romanticism, transcendentalism, dark
    romanticism and the slave narrative.
  • Unit 3 — Realism, Regionalism and Naturalism: the reaction against Romanticism,
    dialect and its problems, determinism, and the short story as a form.
  • Unit 4 — Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance: fragmentation and stream of
    consciousness, two opposite American prose styles, and the movement that expanded American voice.
  • Unit 5 — Postwar and Contemporary: postwar fiction, postmodernism, the widening
    canon and how to read work no consensus yet exists about.
  • Unit 6 — Advanced Writing: synthesis, the research paper, style and systematic
    revision.

How the course works

Most of your time is spent on teaching lessons built around close analysis of technique, using
original illustrative passages written for the course alongside references to the major works. Each unit
includes two interactive activities and one automatically marked quiz. A mid-course assessment follows
Unit 3 and a final assessment closes the course.

All illustrative passages are original to this course or drawn from public-domain texts.

A note on difficult material

Units 2 and 3 cover slavery and the slave narrative, and the representation of Indigenous peoples and
of dialect in American writing. These are handled factually and analytically. Unit 3 also addresses
directly why one canonical novel remains genuinely contested, rather than avoiding the question.

Show More

What Will You Learn?

  • Trace American literary movements and explain what produced them
  • Analyse form, style and technique with precision
  • Read difficult modernist and postmodern texts methodically
  • Write synthesis essays and substantial research papers
  • Control sentence-level style and revise systematically

Requirements

  • English II or equivalent. Confident close reading, essay structure and source use.

Audience

  • Students continuing the English sequence, and anyone preparing for college-level literary study or advanced writing.

Course Content

Getting Started
<p>How this course works, what you will learn, and how you are assessed.</p>

  • Course Overview and Learning Objectives

Unit 1: Early American Voices, to 1800
<h2>Unit Introduction</h2> <p>American literature does not begin with the first English settlers, and starting there conceals more than it reveals.</p> <p><strong>Oral literatures existed on this continent for thousands of years</strong> — origin narratives, ceremonial poetry, oratory and story cycles, transmitted with precision across generations. They are literature by any reasonable definition, and they were not written down because writing was not the medium.</p> <p>This unit covers those traditions, the colonial writing that followed, and the revolutionary rhetoric that turned political argument into a national literature.</p> <h2>Unit Learning Objectives</h2> <p>By the end of Unit 1 you will be able to: - Describe Indigenous oral literary traditions and the problems of studying them - Analyse Puritan writing and its enduring influence on American self-description - Analyse Enlightenment and revolutionary prose - Explain how form shapes argument in the sermon, the pamphlet and the autobiography</p>

Unit 2: Romanticism and Its Shadows, 1800–1865
<h2>Unit Introduction</h2> <p>This is the period when American writing became self-consciously American — when writers deliberately set out to produce a literature that was not an imitation of European models.</p> <p><strong>It produced three things simultaneously</strong>, and the tension between them is what makes the period interesting: a philosophy of optimistic self-reliance, a body of writing exploring exactly what that philosophy left out, and the slave narrative — which tested the period's stated ideals against the country's actual practice.</p> <h2>Unit Learning Objectives</h2> <p>By the end of Unit 2 you will be able to: - Describe Romanticism and its American characteristics - Analyse transcendentalist ideas and prose - Analyse dark romanticism and explain what it responds to - Analyse the slave narrative as literature and as argument</p>

Unit 3: Realism, Regionalism and Naturalism, 1865–1914
<h2>Unit Introduction</h2> <p>The Civil War killed several hundred thousand people, and the literature that followed it could not sustain the previous period's optimism about individual transcendence.</p> <p><strong>Realism is a reaction.</strong> Where Romanticism sought the extraordinary, Realism attends to the ordinary. Where Romanticism trusted intuition, Realism observes. Where Romanticism located meaning in the individual soul, Realism locates it in society, economics and circumstance.</p> <p><strong>Naturalism goes further</strong>, and asks whether the individual has meaningful agency at all.</p> <h2>Unit Learning Objectives</h2> <p>By the end of Unit 3 you will be able to: - Describe Realism and contrast it with Romanticism - Analyse regional writing and the use of dialect - Explain Naturalism and its deterministic premises - Analyse the short story as a developed form</p>

Unit 4: Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance, 1914–1945
<h2>Unit Introduction</h2> <p>Modernism is the largest formal break in the history of American literature. Writers stopped assuming that a story should be told in order, that a narrator should be reliable, that a poem should rhyme, or that a sentence should be complete.</p> <p><strong>The break was not decoration.</strong> It followed from a genuine conviction that the old forms could no longer carry what had to be said — after a war that killed on an industrial scale, and in a century whose science had made the world less solid than it had appeared.</p> <p><strong>Simultaneously, the Harlem Renaissance</strong> produced a body of work that expanded who counted as an American writer, and it did so partly by rejecting modernist assumptions rather than adopting them.</p> <h2>Unit Learning Objectives</h2> <p>By the end of Unit 4 you will be able to: - Explain modernism's causes and characteristic techniques - Analyse fragmentation, stream of consciousness and unreliable narration - Describe the Harlem Renaissance and its internal debates - Analyse the period's distinctively American prose styles</p>

Unit 5: Postwar and Contemporary American Literature, 1945–Present
<h2>Unit Introduction</h2> <p>The period since 1945 is the hardest to teach, for a reason worth stating: <strong>there is no settled account of it.</strong></p> <p>Earlier units describe movements that have been sorted, named and argued about for a century. <strong>This period is still being sorted</strong>, the arguments about it are live, and several of the writers are still working.</p> <p>What can be described clearly is the change in <strong>who</strong> was published and read. <strong>The American literary canon of 1945 was overwhelmingly white and male; the canon now is not</strong> — and understanding how that happened, and what the arguments about it were, is more useful than memorising a list of names.</p> <h2>Unit Learning Objectives</h2> <p>By the end of Unit 5 you will be able to: - Describe major developments in postwar American writing - Explain how and why the canon widened, and what was contested - Analyse contemporary techniques including postmodern devices - Evaluate recent literature without pretending consensus exists</p>

Unit 6: Advanced Writing
<h2>Unit Introduction</h2> <p>English I taught the analytical essay. English II taught argument and research. <strong>This unit teaches synthesis — building an argument from multiple sources that says something none of them said.</strong></p> <p>It also addresses <strong>style</strong> directly, which most writing instruction avoids. Style is teachable: sentence rhythm, diction, syntax and voice are choices, and learning to make them deliberately is the difference between prose that conveys information and prose that anyone wants to read.</p> <h2>Unit Learning Objectives</h2> <p>By the end of Unit 6 you will be able to: - Write a synthesis essay that goes beyond its sources - Plan and write a substantial research paper - Control sentence-level style deliberately - Revise systematically at every level</p>

Course Completion
<p>Final assessment and full-course review.</p>

Tags

Instructors

Rapid Grad Academy

Rapid Grad Academy

4.3
7 Students
25 Courses
No Review Yet
No Review Yet
$75.00
  • Grade 11 – Junior Year
  • 1
  • September 30, 2026
  • Certificate of completion

Related Courses

Government and Civics

26 Lessons
Grade 11 – Junior Year
Rapid Grad Academy

Economics

26 Lessons
Grade 11 – Junior Year
Rapid Grad Academy

Chemistry

38 Lessons
Grade 11 – Junior Year
Rapid Grad Academy

Algebra II

38 Lessons
Grade 11 – Junior Year
Rapid Grad Academy

Quick Access

Course Levels

SUPPORT

© 2026 Rapid Grad Academy. All Right Reserved.