The English major is distinctive in drawing from the artistic and research strengths of its faculty in creative writing, literary and cultural theory, and rhetoric.
Creative writing helps students focus on language as a tool to explore and depict experience.
Literary and cultural theory focuses on the way texts are formally constructed and how they function in historical and contemporary contexts. Rhetoric focuses on the principles through which speakers construct texts and audiences respond to them. Drawing from creative writing, literary, cultural and rhetorical perspectives, students in the English B.A. learn the research skills and writing strategies to enable them to analyze the language and texts of others and to report their research in effective texts of their own. Such training can prepare students for graduate work in literature, culture, or rhetoric, and also for careers in law, business, or government, which require similar skills in interpretation, writing and the analysis of how communication works. In the Study of Forms course, for example, students learn how to use language to express experience through poetic and narrative forms.