The Bachelor of Arts Degree in English is a liberal arts English Major. After completing the basic writing requirement (CWP 102), students begin our major with English 190, Introduction to Literary Interpretation, which emphasizes the basic types of responses to literature; the defining characteristics of poetry, fiction, and drama; as well as the skills of close reading of literary texts. Students often take 190 at the same time that they begin taking our 200 level survey courses in British and American literature. At the 200 and 300 level, our courses focus on national, minority, and global literatures, literary theory, as well as major figures such as Shakespeare, Chaucer, and Milton. At the 400 level, students begin taking more specialized courses in British and American Literature, or in specialized topics. A student’s course of study concludes with English 490, our senior seminar cap-stone, taught on a specialized topic, typically within the faculty’s field of expertise. Below are some of our recent 490 course topics:
Our literature degree is both diverse and rigorous, asking students to think and respond to texts and paradigms that are both familiar and unfamiliar to them in creative and critical ways. Students complete our degree with a strong sense of both the traditional literary canon, and the diverse writers and texts who have been excluded from that canon.
