English Literature Major

As an English literature major, you’ll explore literature as a reader and writer, starting with a solid base in literary history, stretching from Chaucer and Shakespeare to the most recent literature by writers such as David Foster Wallace and Toni Morrison. Majors will develop writing skills in tandem with the study of literary works in addition to a broad range of skills, including: creativity, nuanced judgment, advanced reading, writing, and research skills, and critical self-reflection.

sample courses:

Art of the Novel

In this course we will read novels drawn from several literary traditions and a number of distinctive narrative modes. Among the questions we will consider are those addressing the nature of narrative form, and the literary and stylistic choices made in order to express such things as character and consciousness, society and history, and the relation between the fictive and the real. There will be two papers, and several short writing assignments.

Topics in Literature: 19th Century Science Fiction

This course will trace the development of a new literary genre that emerged in the nineteenth century, Science Fiction. Major discoveries in biological, geological, and astronomical science spurred writers to imagine entirely new worlds and social orders. But writers were divided about the future. Some were utopians, imagining science as the gateway to greater leisure and prosperity; others were dystopians, imagining a world of destructive behavior driven by out of control scientific discoveries. The course will include major works by Mary Shelley, Mark Twain, Edward Bellamy, Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, and William Morris. Satisfies the Nineteenth Century requirement.

our students have gone on to become:

Attorneys

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Journalists

Literary Critics

Politicians/Lobbyists

Public Relations Specialists

Writers

Teachers/Professors

TV Producers