English

专业介绍

The Department of English Language and Literature offers students opportunities to explore how humans—throughout history—have made sense of our experiences through our creative, resourceful engagements with literature, language, and culture.

In Foundations & Methods courses, English majors develop reading skills that equip them to interpret the complex texts, media, and cultural forms that surround us.  Students learn how to parse a memoir or poem, a Supreme Court decision, a Bollywood film, a horror story, a clothing trend, a historical treaty, a social media phenomenon.  English majors also hone their capacities as writers capable of communicating ideas through compelling creative, analytic, and digital forms.

In Regions courses, students investigate how literary, linguistic, and cultural forms both shape and are shaped by structures of power and intersecting social identities.  Through encounters with literary and cultural traditions from regions around the globe, English majors investigate issues of race and ethnicity, gender and sexuality, nationality and religion, geography and migration, and histories of political, economic, and cultural domination.  Students learn about the historical and ongoing ways in which cultural representations both contribute to and challenge inequities, injustices, exclusions, and forms of structural violence.  They also learn about the myriad ways in which cultural texts—a medieval romance, a theater performance, an ecofeminist manifesto, a cookbook, a novel about a con artist, a photograph—create beauty and pleasure, or inspire new forms of community and new ways of imagining sustainable futures amid global-scale challenges.

In Time courses, English majors explore continuities and discontinuities in the creation, reception, and circulation of literature and culture.  By studying writers, creators, and readers from particular periods, students deepen their awareness of how concepts relevant to the study of English—such as human, environment, nature, culture, language, disability, sex, gender, race, class, law, justice, canon, beauty, and humor—shift over time, reflecting broader political, social, and cultural changes.

Through elective courses, through internships, and through programs that extend learning far beyond the classroom—the New England Literature Program (NELP), the Detroit River Story Lab, the Prison Creative Arts Project (PCAP), the Bear River Writers’ Conference, and the Great Lakes Arts, Cultures, and Environments Program (GLACE)—English majors develop a keen awareness of the vital importance of literary and cultural representations.  In concrete, embodied forms, students learn how and why words matter.

English majors who choose to participate in the Capstone Program in Research or the Capstone Program in Creative Writing work closely with a faculty advisor and cohort of other writers, engage in several months of sustained research and writing about a topic of their own choosing, and produce thesis-length works that represent both a significant personal achievement and an original contribution to knowledge.