English & Visual Arts Voyage of Creativity, Expression and Discovery in New York

West 36th Street was our home in New York City for five glorious days.  Our hotel was just round the corner from the fabled Madison Square Garden Stadium; a ten-minute walk away from the iconic Empire State Building; and a few blocks north of the Chelsea apartment where Jack Kerouac hammered out the first draft of the Beat Generation-defining novel On the Road in three furious weeks of typing in the Spring of 1951.  It was the perfect location to explore the art, architecture, and literary and cultural riches of the city that is the quintessential symbol of modernity and the modern world.

Students of A Level English Literature at Sedbergh School follow the OCR syllabus and one of their two examination courses is a synoptic unit on American Literature 1880-1940.  In addition to experiencing the joy of exploring two masterpieces of modern American literature in depth—The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald and The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck—students are required to develop a confident knowledge understanding of the significant historical and cultural contexts from which these canonical works emerged, as well as gaining broad knowledge and understanding of other great American literary voices of the period, such as Henry James, Edith Wharton, Ernest Hemingway, and William Faulkner, for example.  Students are required to use contextual knowledge to illuminate their critical discussion of their set texts; and this trip was all about enabling students to have an educational and life-enhancing experience that would shine a light on their studies of American literature and culture.

In addition to encountering the sublime reality of American modernity in the glass and steel canyons of Manhattan, getting the chance to see the apartments and neighbourhoods in which so many of the great American writers of the twentieth-century lived and wrote, and staging readings in significant sites, students were guided through the world-class holdings of modern American Art at the MET, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Guggenheim, and shown how to link the styles and themes of the works of modern American art to the works of modern American literature.

These great museums contains tens of thousands of great works of art and the following nuggets are mere highlights.  In the MET students saw how the impressionist society portraits of John Singer Sargent echoed the novels of James and Wharton; as well as seeing how the celebration of ordinary American working class lives in the New Deal-era murals of Thomas Hart Benton parallelled the themes and concerns of Steinbeck.  In the Whitney they got to see the raw realism of the Ash Can painters and how the work of George Bellows and John Sloan reflected the naturalistic representation of ordinary American lives in the work of Cather and Dreiser.  The Whitney is famous for its Edward Hopper collection.  In encountering Hopper’s haunting representation of isolation and loneliness in everyday life in America from the 1920s through to the 1940s, our students experienced a powerful touchstone for their appreciation of how American writers wrestle with the theme of the American Dream.  And in the MoMA, they could see how Joseph Stella and Georgia O’Keefe’s Cubist-influenced hymns to NYC mirrored the formal experiments of the American literary modernists of the Jazz Age; and how the depiction of African-American lives in the paintings of William H Johnson complemented the subject matter of the writings of the Harlem Renaissance.

The group’s itinerary was designed to allow pop-up readings at places of literary significance.  So, in between the epic encounters with the great art holdings of the city, and visits to the totemic buildings and places of Gotham, the Brantwood came to town.  We read excerpts from Kerouac’s On the Road in Times Square; Frank O’Hara’s lunch poems at MoMA; Bob Dylan and Dylan Thomas in Greenwich Village; and the highlight of the trip’s readings, Hart Crane’s The Bridge in the middle of Brooklyn Bridge as the sun was setting on our last evening in New York.  In a trip that contained a myriad of significant and life-enhancing artistic and cultural experiences, this reading was pretty special, and one that will long live in the memory.

Dr Downes | Mrs Bolton

The week prior to the trip occurring that the pupils benefitted from an art and English themed Brantwood society so that the pupils had plenty of context prior to the visit. The art and Digital Media lessons prior were also geared up for the pupils to know exactly what to to look out for to fulfil the AQA and Cambridge internationals specification in relation to the personal investigation components. Mrs Bolton, Head of Visual Arts

---