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minor in English Literature-

Why minor in English Literature?

Because it will make you good with complexity. In most majors, you will learn to identify and solve problems in your field by separating part from part until you can isolate the problematic element and analyze it with the conceptual and methodological tools appropriate to your discipline. In other words, you will learn to understand the complex by reducing it to the simple.

The Minor in English Literature will show you that it is also possible to understand complexity while leaving it intact.

In the study of literature, to simplify is to destroy; to explain how it works says little, or nothing, about why it works. The whole, to put it differently, is more than the sum of its parts, just like one cannot understand a crowd by getting to know Bill, Nina, and Jane.

Think of a minor in English Literature as vaccination against reductionist flu. Because, even as you look at a piece of something under a microscope, the rest of it doesn’t really go away.

Core classes


(2 classes; 6 credits)

ENG 201    Survey of British Literature II
ENG 204    Survey of American Literature
   

Core electives


(1 class; 3 credits)

ENG 206    Poetry: Genre, Technique, and Structure
or
ENG 207    Drama: Genre, Technique and Structure
or
ENG 208    Fiction: Genre, Technique, and Structure
                   

Minor electives


(2 classes; 6 credits)

ENG 303    Images of Italy in British and American Writers
ENG 308    Playful Subversion: Understanding Postmodern Text
ENG 309    Shakespeare’s Italian Plays
ENG 315    Advanced Concepts in Fiction Writing and Criticism
ENG 318    Laughter, Satire, and the Comic Form
ENG 319    A Mirror to Life: Realism in Literature
ENG 320    Modernism and the Making of the New
ENG 325    The Grand Tour and the Literature of Tourism
ENG 401    Major American Authors: Hemingway
ENG 411    The Literature of War
ENG 413    Literature and Race
ENHS 330  Great Books
CLS 201      Greek and Roman Mythology
CLS 208      Love and Laughter in Ancient Literature
CLS 304      Classical Greek and Roman Rhetoric
CLS 307      Heroes and Lovers: Epic and the Epic Tradition
COM 324   Explorations in Cultural Studies

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