Skip to main content
College of Humanities
English
Donate

Literary Studies

While this track may naturally appeal to those who love to read good books, who have imagined themselves roaming the mysterious hallways of Hogwarts, or who have read Pride and Prejudice a dozen times, you do not have to be a bookworm to find joy in this track. Perhaps you relish grappling with big ideas, engaging in rigorous and provocative conversations, and analyzing what it means to be human. The Literary Studies track offers all this, and it invites you to build upon a core while introducing you to an advanced study of literature. The track emphasizes the critical study of literature as uniquely meaningful and as a catalyst to an individual’s spiritual, intellectual, and moral development.

Skills:
By completing this track, you will fine-tune your reading and analytic capacities, becoming and an effective communicator and creative problem solver. You will become not only a good reader of literature but a good reader of human experience. Such broad-based skills serve as exceptional preparation for graduate school, including law and business, and prepare you for careers in marketing, public relations, government, business, foreign relations, public service, editing and publishing, and more. In short, graduates from this track will do well in any industry in need of good communicators and thinkers.

Coursework:
5 classes/15 credits. These may be taken in any order, but students are encouraged to take the capstone during their senior year.

  • ENGL 384R: Author Studies. Concentrate on a single author and his or her works. This is your opportunity to immerse yourself in the works of people such as Shakespeare, Austen, and Morrison.
  • ENGL 337R: Studies in Literary Form and Genre. Focus on a favorite genre: mystery novels, drama, nonfiction, poetry, and more. This course will help you better understand the appeal of a particular genre, including how and why it emerges, its shifting contexts, its features across time, and its influence on perceptions and judgments.
  • ENGL 450R: Studies in Literary Criticism and Theory. Enhance your capacity to read and understand literary texts by deep diving into a conceptual or evaluative approach to the study of literature that is both valued and practiced by contemporary scholars and critics.
  • ENGL 357R: Literature, Ethics, and Values. Study both how literature conveys ethics and values and how ethics and values animate the study of literature. Reading good literature is both fun and interesting, but it can also make us better people.
  • ENGL 495: Capstone. Become a practitioner of literary criticism by engaging in the in-depth study of a particular literary topic and deploying all the knowledge and skills you have developed.