The Broad Goal: Literate Citizens
The Department of English empowers students to read critically, reflect deeply, and write effectively to professional, social, and creative ends. At the heart of our major lies a rich canon of texts that reflect diverse cultures, peoples, periods, genres, and perspectives. This plurality enables our majors to forge their knowledge through an interrogation of difference and to situate themselves in the context of larger (linguistic, national, global) structures of power. By the time our majors graduate, they have learned to compose from multiple perspectives; bring to the surface new understandings of print and digital texts; and participate in public debate ethically and eloquently. Our training equips them not only for rich and rewarding careers but also for a life of sustained intellectual and public engagement.
Learning Objectives:
Increase Breadth of Literary and Media Knowledge:
Demonstrate knowledge of literary canons in English, including multi-ethnic and global literature. Understand how technologies old and new shape literary and textual production and reception.
- Recognize and appreciate aesthetic and cultural patterns in texts and genres across multiple time periods and traditions.
- Work with different archives across media (digital, print, manuscript) to locate aesthetic and cultural analysis of literary and other texts.
- Learn about writers/texts within literary traditions and their historical definitions of style, practice, and culture.
- Recognize literary and formal adaptations and innovations across global contexts.
Develop Portable Skills:
Develop and demonstrate skills in self-expression, critical analysis, close reading, research, and argumentation.
- Write well-reasoned arguments.
- Consult and integrate critical and secondary sources in a convincing and responsible manner.
- Acquire and apply a specialized vocabularies (literary, critical, and rhetorical) for the analysis of written works.
- Identify strong supportive evidence for an abstract perspective from primary texts, and perform close readings of thematic and formal textual elements in support of an argument.
- Develop narrative and/or poetic skills.
Understand Cultural and Historical Impact of Texts and Language:
Recognize genres and analyze texts as aesthetic, cultural, historical, and political artifacts. Identify the ways language and rhetoric function as tools of empowerment both in history and for students’ own critical and creative voices.
- Identify others’ and develop own critical and creative voices, and the rationale behind them.
- Investigate how language and literature serve as a powerful engines of historical, political, and cultural change from the past to the future.
- Cultivate critical thought and creative expression as tools in the worlds of ideas and direct action.
Understand Audience, Community, and Responsibility:
Develop the ability to write to multiple audiences across genres (e.g. academic, public, professional, creative) and practice self-reflection and responsible participation in diverse communities of readers and writers.
- Demonstrate clear rationale for writing choices through reflection.
- Write public-facing documents that articulate developed opinions.
- Reflect on one’s own subject position in the world, recognizing difference and structures of power in local and global contexts.
- Learn to understand/appreciate texts and aesthetic traditions arising from a culture beyond your own.