English Language and Literature

FACULTY

Chair and Associate Professor Moran; Professors Crider, Kenney, Waterman Ward, and Wegemer; Associate Professors Bourbon, Davies, Davis, Osborn, Romanick Baldwin, Roper, and Stryer; Assistant Professor Berry and West;  Affiliate Assistant Professors Gregg, Saylor, and Spring; Distinguished Professor Emeritus Dupree, Gregory

About the Department of English

A tradition of thought extending back to Milton, Sidney and Aristotle holds that literature imparts wisdom. With respect to the kind of wisdom that governs human conduct, poetry promotes a grasp of reality superior to other ways of knowing in its combination of immediacy, lucidity, practicality, sensitivity to refinements, capacity to shape the affections and adequacy to the whole. This conviction guides literary study at every level of the curriculum pursued at the university. The program in literature provides a course of study in those authors who best exemplify the capacity of imagination to grasp truth. Teachers and students seek to learn what the best of the poets understand of nature and human experience. In this mutual learning enterprise, students and teachers are related as beginning and advanced students of their common masters, the major imaginative writers.

Undergraduate courses in literature answer to two guiding principles: first, continuous study of the classic works of the literature of the West in the effort to appropriate a tradition that ought to be possessed by every educated person; second, intensive study of the literature of England and America for the sake of acquiring the heritage proper to the English-speaking peoples and as the means to complete mastery of a language. The two principles are interdependent: one best learns English by knowing its best literature and one best knows the English poets when one can measure them against those masters and rivals in European literature whom they themselves acknowledge.

The Literary Tradition

The Literary Tradition sequence introduces students to the classics of the West and, thus, to major models and themes of human action, experience and understanding. They further self-knowledge by encouraging students to know themselves in the light of what the best minds have thought human beings are and ought to be. In the first two years of the students’ college career, the Literary Tradition core provides a moral focus for discovering the terms upon which one may assume responsibilities within a community. A large part of the subject of many literary works is portrayal of communities living out the convictions shared by their members and the heart of heroic poetry is the depiction of the efforts of extraordinary characters to exercise their virtue in a way that benefits their city while fulfilling themselves.

Beginning students may learn that seeking truth is analogous to the heroic enterprises of Achilles, Hector, Odysseus, Aeneas, and Sir Gawain. From the heroic models students come to address the challenges presently encountered with something of that combination of boldness and modesty displayed by the traditional heroes. In the second semester (Literary Tradition II) students are prepared to reflect upon those differences in the conception of human excellence and world order that come to view once the Christian epic poet envisions divine grace perfecting nature. The second year introduces tragedy and comedy (Literary Tradition III) and the novel (Literary Tradition IV), the one literary form distinctive to the modern era. From a study of tragedians of Greece, Shakespeare and modern playwrights, students can grasp how tragic dramatists have depicted human nature in the light of its limits. In the comic writers of Greece, medieval Christendom and Elizabethan England, one may see that tragic emphasis upon individual virtue under the pressure of painful limits finds an answer in certain comic writers who celebrate powers human and sometimes divine, that heal broken communities and restore characters to their proper integrity. In the most accomplished novelists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, students will see in the novels portrayals of societies negotiating the changes effected by modern economics, technology, education and politics—a world quite close to our own in local detail as well as in its governing moral intellectual tendency.

The courses that make up the Literary Tradition core depend upon rigorous practice in composition. The writing assignments are exclusively interpretive, requiring careful documentation from the works students read; they are judged by their success in elucidating and critically addressing the works under consideration. Essays are expected to show sophistication in style and argument and students are requested to resubmit corrected essays that answer to exacting criticism.

The Major Program

Advanced courses for English majors aim at deepening the understanding of literature as a mode of knowing. The same principles of attentive care in reading and critical interpretation in writing that guide study in the core also animate the program for majors. The theme implicit in the Literary Tradition sequence also carries over to the advanced courses: students learn to confront the alternative understandings of human beings, society, nature and the divine offered by the major poets. Now, however, the subject of inquiry is primarily the tradition of English and American writers. By studying the literature of the English language, majors learn their most immediate heritage. The seven required advanced courses have four primary aims: to give students specific training in the reading and interpretation of literary texts; to continue the students’ engagement in the discipline of writing, addressing continually the intricacies of an immediate engagement with language; to acquaint them with major writers within English and American literature; and to establish a general sense of literary history, within which one may understand the interpretative nature of imaginative writing, seen within specific cultural, historical contexts.

Courses in English and American literature are arranged in a roughly chronological sequence, beginning with Anglo-Saxon and medieval poetry, drama and narrative and concluding with intensive study of nineteenth-and twentieth-century writing. This sequence of courses is framed by two others (Literary Study I and II) that address specifically the discipline of reading and interpretation of literature. Each of these courses concludes in a major project, based on independent study of particular authors. In the junior year students pursue research in the complete canon of a single lyric poet. The project culminates in an oral examination before the faculty, in which students demonstrate mastery of the poems and of the criticism devoted to the poet. In the senior year English majors conclude a course in interpretation of prose narrative with a written essay and a public lecture on a major novel.

All majors must pass a comprehensive examination which assumes familiarity with the works encountered both in the core and major sequence and the Senior Comprehensive Reading List. This examination is offered once a year at the beginning of the Spring semester. Students who anticipate graduation in December or August rather than at the formal ceremonies in May must meet with the Department Chairman to schedule when in their final semesters of course work they will schedule this Spring examination.

Degrees in English Language and Literature

Bachelor of Arts in English

4 + 1 in English

Course Information

Courses in English Language and Literature