With the latter option, students may pursue concentrations in Creative Writing or the Teaching of English as a Second Language.
External minors are also available.
All students must display a reading knowledge of a foreign language, usually by having completed four undergraduate semesters in that language with a B average or higher. All students, regardless of their fields of concentration, must take a comprehensive examination based on a reading list in British and American literature. The exam must be taken at the beginning of the student's third full semester. Members of the graduate faculty have served as Fulbright Senior Lecturers in Europe and Australia, have held Guggenheim, American Council of Learned Societies, and Huntington Library Fellowships, and have been awarded numerous grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Their publications include books on Shakespeare, Joseph Conrad, T.S. Eliot, Sylvia Plath, Paul Bowles, Richard Harding Davis, Mark Twain, Graham Greene, Donald Barthelme, renaissance poetry and architecture, medieval mysticism, sociolinguistics, the history of the English language, textual editing, women's studies, Southern literature, Caribbean literature, Los Angeles culture, and the teaching of English as a second language, as well as books of poetry and fiction, and dozens of scholarly articles on language and literature.