Bachelors in English

The Department of English is committed to the study and analysis of literature in English, from its origins to the present day. We teach and study not only poetry and prose, but also films and newer media and technologies (journalism of all sorts, television and the Internet, for example) and place these texts in historical and geographic context.We study the past for at least two reasons: because literary works shape themselves as a tradition in which dialogue, disruption, revision and influence occur over time; and because, for many of us, context is integral to comprehending the particular novel, poem or essay under study. When we teach Paradise Lost, for example, we want our students to know something of the English Civil War. When we read Moby-Dick in the classroom, we immeasurably enrich our analysis of the text if we can discuss Ahab as at once a commentary on 19th-century Manifest Destiny and a reconceptualization of Milton s Satan.