Mission & Goals

Mission Statement

Faculty member seated lecturing at desk positioned in front of chalkboard inside classroom setting.

At the center of our work is the close reading of literary works written in English, but in our new curriculum we wish both to strengthen the connection between reading and writing and to examine how storytelling works across a variety of genres (including prose, poetry, drama) and in multiple media (including film, tv, and digital/new media.) While extending our range, we also want to deepen our understanding by making a deliberate effort to include voices from historically underrepresented groups, highlighting literary works from genders, sexualities, races, nationalities, and religions that have been and continue to be marginalized in English studies, and to reveal how literature has worked both to support and to oppose systemic racism, sexism, homophobia, anti-semitism, and ecology-destroying attitudes. We believe that this is a canon-wide, discipline-wide moment of redress, akin to that of the Women’s Studies movement of the 1970s and the Queer Theory movement of the 1990s, and that all English faculty, starting from their own subfields and frames of references, should now work to find the BIPOC or otherwise missing or marginalized voices in their own backyards of knowledge and expertise.

Faculty member lecturing in bright sunlit filled classroom amongst group of students seated at conference table.

We have therefore reconceptualized our curriculum so that it is shaped around forms and genres and around social justice; that is, we have rewritten our requirements to ensure that students who complete a major or minor in English must study more than one genre of storytelling in a formal way and must also engage the writings and literary cultures of previously marginalized groups as well as more canonical texts and contexts. We believe that this curriculum meets the current needs of our students, who want to learn to write skillfully and beautifully in a variety of genres and across media beyond the printed text, and who also wish, as readers and writers and thinkers, to inhabit and understand a diverse and decolonized world. We believe that this emphasis on literary structure coupled with a mandate to theorize and engage content and perspectives from a variety of cultures in the interest of justice will equip students with both the practical skills and the historical and cultural understanding to read, write, and otherwise grapple with stories in the 21st century.

Learning Goals

From Reading X courses:

  • Read actively and deeply.
  • Select and close-read thought-provoking passages.
  • Pursue implications of language and plot use in specified historical and political contexts.
  • Read/consider scholarly arguments with openness to new, different, and even contradictory ideas.
  • Use exploratory and explanatory, formal and informal, writing strategies to develop and share ideas.
  • Discuss the basic elements, structures, and effects of literary forms.
  • Discuss how literature works as a form of social exploration, critique and production.
  • Inhabit a variety of perspectives when engaging with, interpreting and creating the stories that constitute a worldview.

From Social Justice courses:

  • Explain the necessity of unlearning Eurocentric, racist, and heteronormative modes of understanding and explaining the history and current state of our world;
  • Comprehend the role literature plays in revealing, grappling with, and producing the ethnic, racial, socioeconomic, religious, gender-based, and other hierarchies that shape our world – and the role those contexts and hierarchies play in shaping literature;
  • Comprehend how marginalized populations have challenged these hierarchies through literature;
    Understand the importance of being an empathetic reader, listener, responder, and global citizen with an appreciation for difference;
  • Reflect thoughtfully on complex issues facing twenty-first century society and use literature to consider and propose new ways of addressing those issues and creating a more just world;
  • Convey the ways that literature can provide unique access to understanding the experiences of societally marginalized groups;
  • Explain the connection between historical constructions of identity-based differences and contemporary violence against a wide range of marginalized groups;
  • Understand the nuances of and problems inherent within “traditional” literary canon formation;

In addition to these, Social Justice-BIPOC courses help students:

  • Understand how constructions of race and racism have shaped cultural, ethnic, racial, national, socioeconomic, and other hierarchies that dominate our world;
  • Use their knowledge of literature by BIPOC authors to consider and propose new ways of understanding and tackling issues facing BIPOC populations today that result from colonialism, the transatlantic slave trade, and other oppressive systems.

From Forms & Genres courses:

  • Recognize, read, and utilize the major forms and genres that constitute literature in English.
  • Utilize the techniques of reading and writing, of interpretation, analysis, theory, and literate expression, which constitute English Studies
  • Foster their own writing practice.
  • Experiment with and study form at multiple levels.
  • Understand how various forms/genres function as distinct ways of knowing that engage with and/or critique other ways of comprehending phenomena.
  • Comprehend how and why literature in its various forms affects us.
  • Understand how these forms are implicated in and speak to their own historical moments as well as how their meanings and uses change over time and speak back to the forces that shape them.
  • Engage intelligently and sensitively in social discourse of all kinds.
  • Develop a variety of methods with which to engage, interpret and create the stories that constitute a worldview.