The fourfold objective of the Department of English is?

• ?to improve the abilities of students in understanding, writing, and speaking the English language;?

• ?to increase students? pleasure in and knowledge of literature as an art form;?

• ?to enable our students to find meaning in large amounts of information and to give them the skills of synthesis to evaluate, interpret, and use this information to solve problems;?

• ?to endow students of literature and language with the ability to work with sympathetic imagination with people from backgrounds and cultures different from their own?that is, to give the English major an understanding of globalization and its implications for the world of work in the twenty-first century.

Courses in literature are varied in such a fashion that general overall views of world literature, British literature, and American literature are presented in addition to period courses, ?figure? courses, and genre courses which allow greater in-depth study. Increasingly, our world literature classes and our introduction to fiction, drama, and poetry are taking a global perspective which demonstrates to students the nature of and relationships among cultures across national boundaries. By understanding literary expression as a product of social, historical, and artistic processes, our students see parallels and connections among citizens and artists in societies around the globe.