International Year One - Undergraduate Pathway - General (5-Semester Pathway) Transfer to Bachelor of Arts - English

Literature encompasses the history of human attempts to remain “wide-awake” in response to experience, whether that experience unfolds in the realms of dreams, ideas, nature, urban life, political terror, or sensual pleasure. Literary texts record the questions that people or communities have found urgent, troublesome or exciting. For most human experiences and emotions, there are no adequate words until writers invent them. Therefore, the study of literature cultivates deep attentiveness to and love of language. The production of literary texts is hugely various, criss-crossed continually by movements and borrowings from other cultures and by richly textured relationships between writers and other artists or works of art and new ideas about the purposes of art.

The English major organizes their access to this history by examining texts along both a chronological spectrum (from Anglo-Saxon oral epics to contemporary graphic novels) and a geographical and cultural spectrum (from Celtic to Caribbean, from South African to African-American). As a student of English, they will develop their skills as a reader of literary texts; they will learn various approaches to the study of literature, among them biographical, intertextual, genre study, cultural and historical, feminist, postcolonial; and they will be encouraged to connect their literary study to work in other fields such as history, ethnic studies, gender and sexuality studies, biblical and classical studies, film studies, performance studies, visual art, theater, religious studies, and philosophy.