DegreeVenue Advance Your Career Today.

The concentration in English introduces students to the full range of imaginative writing in English from Anglo-Saxon times to the present. The concentration also introduces students to the modern phenomenon of global literature in English, such as that written in India, Africa, and the Caribbean. Of course, students cannot cover the entire breadth of this immense field, but the department aims to offer the widest possible experience of it. At the same time, students receive intensive, sharply focused training in advanced forms of textual analysis, in the full range of literary genres and modes, in the formal intricacies of lyric poems and the architectonics of fiction, in the linguistic structures that underlie literary discourse, in the philosophical and historical contexts of literature, and in the careers of great authors, such as Chaucer, Spenser, Milton, Austen, Wordsworth, Melville, Tennyson, Eliot, Woolf, and Heaney. Courses vary in character from large lectures to more specialized study seminars (in which enrollment is limited to 15), such as “The American Transcendentalists,” “Coetzee and Ishiguro,” “Ibsen, Shaw, and Chekhov,” and “Jewish American Literature.” Lecture courses include the two parts of “Major British Writers,” “Postwar American and British Fiction,” “Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales,” “Shakespeare and Modern Culture,” “The Postcolonial Classic,” and “American Cultures and Countercultures of the 1960s.”

Advanced students have opportunities for still more concentrated research and tutorial work with faculty and graduate students. Most honors students write senior theses. Among the topics of recent senior theses are violence in the religious poetry of John Donne, nursing and nurses in the Victorian novel, Cormac McCarthy’s southwestern Gothicism, the iconography of portraiture in the fiction of Nathaniel Hawthorne, the relationship between genre and psychological entanglement in Shakespeare’s plays, and the phenomenon of accident in the prose of Thomas De Quincey.

The department offers creative writing courses in fiction, poetry, screenwriting, playwriting, and the essay. Some honors students pursue creative projects, in verse or in prose, as senior theses. The vital presence of creative writing in the department is reflected by the distinguished authors on its faculty: Jorie Graham, Seamus Heaney, Jamaica Kincaid, James Wood, Bret Johnston, and others. The department sponsors readings and discussions of the writing profession by notable authors in the new “Writers in the Parlor” series. Other informal events, such as “Readings in the Parlor,” in which a faculty member reads and discusses with students a favorite short poem or prose passage, are also part of life in the department.

The student who concentrates in English, whether as an elective concentrator or in the honors program, will be well prepared for graduate school in English, for teaching, and for other professions in which exact habits of thought, close textual analysis, and clear writing are required. But an education in English-language literature is also a source of moral reflection and aesthetic pleasure that will be a possession for life. Literature awakens the mind to the radical strangeness of human experience, to the “otherness” of others as much as to the qualities we share. Literature also helps us to see how complex problems will not admit of simple, technical solutions because they are deeply and subtly embedded in their human contexts. Sharpening one’s powers of discernment as well as widening one’s intellectual horizons is at the heart of a liberal education. Such an education, to which literature is central, prepares the student not only for “life” in the abstract but also for life as an engaged, intelligently caring citizen of the world.

The Department of English has two options for English concentrators: the Elective Program and the Honors Programs. The Elective Program allows more flexibility for course selection within and outside the English department. Students in the Honors Program engage in more intensive study through seminars and the thesis options. A grade point average of 3.40 or higher in the concentration is required in the Honors Program, beginning in the junior year. A third option, for honors candidates only, is a joint concentration, which culminates in a critical thesis supervised jointly by a member of the English department and a member of the allied department (see below.) A grade point average of 3.60 or higher is required for the joint concentration.