English
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Department Philosophy
The English Department strives to improve each student’s literary competence—his ability to read and write insightfully and clearly. By teaching students to recognize the conventions by which plays, novels, stories, poems and essays define themselves and speak to us, the curriculum gives students strategies and methods that allow them access to a literature that is complex, challenging, exciting, meaningful and rewarding. Such an approach sharpens analytical and interpretive skills and enables students to experience—that is, to comprehend and enjoy—a work of art. We teach a wide range of literature so that the student can fully appreciate his linguistic, literary, historical and cultural heritage. Since writing is an integral part of this process—in fact, it is through writing that people explore, clarify, organize and communicate their ideas—the curriculum concentrates on teaching students how to write prose that is grammatical, vivid, unified, coherent, interesting, persuasive, and truthful. By focusing on vocabulary building, grammar review, paragraph development, essay writing and rewriting, and the analysis of literature, our courses try to foster an independent, resourceful, critical disposition grounded in the student’s confidence to read, discuss and write intelligently and sensitively.
In the English Department we work with the premise that human beings seek God not only through his Word, in scripture and in teachings, but also in the expressions of individuals who cry out against the absurdities and horrors of the universe and those who celebrate humanity in its longings, beauty, hopes, and affirmations. Good literature often examines the material world and questions its value; undermines hypocrisy and celebrates what is genuine; affirms life, the imagination and its power of wonder; sees both the multiplicity of life and its simplicity; and then, most importantly, communicates these to others and thereby breaks apart the isolation that inhibits and depresses humanity.
Reading literature and writing about it provide an opportunity for the student to examine his own feelings about himself, to become more sensitive to the beauty of the universe and to appreciate the nature of loving commitment. Literature encourages an understanding and acceptance of our strengths, limits, weaknesses, and differences; and it fosters a more mature and considerate sense of humor.
Through the study of literature, students vicariously experience the costs to the individual and the community of injustice and indifference as well as the social and spiritual benefits of decency and sympathy. In its selection of literary texts, the department tries to include imaginative experiences that address moral dilemmas students may have already faced in life; in other cases, the literature invites students to identify with the plight of people different from themselves, to recognize, by that act of identification, the claims that others have on our sympathy. The curriculum also encourages students to recognize the habits and ethics that either degrade or enhance the life of the individual and the community. Put more specifically, the imaginative experience of many literary works suggests the barrenness of acquisitiveness and the fulfillment available to the spiritually ambitious. We design writing assignments that encourage the student to involve himself actively and independently in the recognition and resolution of ethical dilemmas.
In our class discussions, our writing assignments, our tentatively offered interpretations, our advocacy of rewriting, we encourage students to see themselves as we see ourselves—incomplete, searching, and open to growth.
These claims suggest that we have our students read literature because of its usefulness as an instrument of intellectual, moral and religious development. However, first of all, a poem, a story, a play, an essay or a novel ought to be a pleasure—a pleasure of words and images and ideas. This pleasure is sometimes funny and playful, sometimes serene and gentle, sometimes terrifying yet beautiful. We want our students to have such pleasure and to want more of it.
