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Undergraduate Program Overview

We offer both a major and a minor in English, as well as a major in Literary Journalism, and an Emphasis in Creative Writing. Our goal is to give students skills as critics and writers that will allow them to pursue advanced graduate work, if they choose, and succeed in a variety of professions and occupations. Our curriculum is primarily designed to train students in criticism by sharpening their awareness of how one reads, analyzes, and performs critiques of literary writing. This training is conducted against an array of courses in canonical and non-canonical literatures. In addition to teaching major figures, aesthetic movements, and the history of English, American, and Continental literature from medieval times to the present, we also teach minority and world literatures. We want our students to know Chaucer, Romanticism, and Anglo-American Modernism. But we also want them to think about Latin American and African-American Literature, Derrida and Heidegger, and Post-colonial Theory. Our instruction includes both formal lecture courses and small seminars that stress student writing and research. Our hope is to have students leave our program as sharp and engaged students of their culture, with the wisdom of the past and the international perspective of the present equipping them for an intellectual life in the twenty-first century.
UC Irvine Department of English