English

Most students who become majors simply enjoy reading, discussing, and writing about challenging and inspiring works of the imagination. But the skills students develop in studying English—the ability to think sensitively and creatively, to make and evaluate critical arguments, and to write clearly and convincingly—prepare students for a wide array of rewarding and profitable careers.

With small classes and a caring, distinguished faculty, students in English learn to enter sympathetically into the worlds that writers create — from the harsh world of the Anglo-Saxon epic Beowulf to the haunted milieu of William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury and beyond. In addition to introductory courses, the program’s offerings in literature include courses on such authors as Austen, Chaucer, Dickinson, Faulkner, Melville, Shakespeare, and Woolf; and on such topics as African-American literature, early English novels, Irish literature, modern poetry, poetry by women, Shakespeare and film, Southern literature, and 21st-century literature. Except for junior and senior seminars, all English courses are open to all students without special permission.