Dec 13, 2024  
2024-2025 Undergraduate Catalog 
    
2024-2025 Undergraduate Catalog

English, B.A.


Return to {$returnto_text} Return to: Academic Organization, Faculty Listing

The English program offers students an opportunity to study literature intensively and expansively – reading, interpreting, and writing diverse kinds of texts. The program features small, discussion-oriented classes, in which students engage with significant texts, learn to read with care and sensitivity, and develop important skills in writing, critical thinking, and detailed textual analysis. The English program offers a student-centered approach to education that emphasizes student choice in selecting courses as well as individualized attention to developing marketable career skills.

Total Major Requirements 39 Credits


Distribution Requirements:


Of the major courses listed above, one course from each of the following categories:

  • American Literature
  • British Literature
  • Pre-1800 Literature
  • Post-1800 Literature

 

Other Requirements


General Education Requirements


For specific information about general education requirements and expectations, see the General Education Requirements  in the Academic Programs section of this catalog.

Graduation Requirements


Completion of at least 120 credits and all requirements for this specific program, with a cumulative grade point average of at least 2.000.

Minimum Total Credits for The Degree: 120


Learning Goals and Assessment


Learning Goals:

  • Students will be able to analyze and interpret texts by drawing on the range of theories and methods available to scholars in literary and cultural studies
  • Students will be able to situate texts (principally British and American) within literary, intellectual, historical, and cultural contexts.
  • Students will be able to write in a clear and complex way about literature and culture
  • Students will be able to work independently, guided by their own interests, and synthesize and articulate their work within the context of the major.
  • Students will be able to adapt the skills they learn as English majors to help them fulfill their career goals.

Assessment Criteria:

Analysis and Interpretation

  • Students will be able to pay close attention to textual details, follow out the suggestions and implications of these details, and understand strategies of signification and representation, thereby producing interpretations grounded in the text
  • Students will be able to identify a range of theoretical approaches and draw on these in the process of interpretation.

Contexts

  • Students will be able to explain how texts are shaped by literary, intellectual, historical, and cultural contexts.
  • Students will be able to explain how texts and our responses to texts are informed by historical formations of race, class, gender, and sexuality.

Writing

  • Students will be able to write in a prose style that is clearer, more graceful, and more intentional than when they entered the program.
  • Students will be able to construct and sustain complex critical and interpretive arguments about literature and culture.
  • Students will be able to frame, quote, summarize, and respond to other critical voices as they develop their arguments.

Agency

  • Each student will be able to articulate the coherence of an individual concentration in the major and the relation of each course to the central idea of the concentration.
  • Students will be able to design and carry out independent research projects.
  • Students will be able to adapt the skills they learn as English majors to help them fulfill their career goals.

Return to {$returnto_text} Return to: Academic Organization, Faculty Listing