English Department

By encouraging disciplined inquiry and critical thinking, English courses challenge students to examine their cultural and historical positions and to organize and articulate their discoveries.

The program exposes students to a variety of texts so that they can see the relationships among those texts, the contexts from which those texts emerge, and the connections between those texts and their own intellectual and social concerns.

By encouraging disciplined inquiry and critical thinking, English courses challenge students to examine their cultural and historical positions and to organize and articulate their discoveries. All courses require oral and written work in the form of class participation and individual papers. The program provides students with an understanding of traditional literary history and of the histories that have been left out of "the tradition."

The purpose of the program in English is not to legitimate one critical position (what is "worth knowing") but to consider the consequences of "knowing" within the academic disciplines, to recognize the options involved in adopting a critical stance about the written and performance texts that have shaped individual and community experience, and to understand the conventions and practices that have shaped those texts.