Introduction

Our department offers one of the most popular and challenging majors on campus.  Because our discipline lies at the heart of the University’s Core curriculum, every undergraduate student has taken or will take classes with our faculty.  We are passionate about our teaching, scholarship, and creative endeavors and invite you to join our diverse learning community of readers and writers.

Choosing to become an English major at Seattle University means choosing to become an active and sophisticated reader – of texts, history, and culture. From such critical reading comes engaged, incisive, and graceful writing that is capable of contributing to both traditional and contemporary discourses – from poetics to politics. The English major has two concentrations from which you may choose: Literature and Creative Writing. Both tracks lead students through a well-designed course of study that cultivates critical thinking and composition skills, close-reading and textual analysis, methodological awareness and theoretical sophistication, historical breadth, and social awareness.

Whichever track you choose, the English major will prepare you not only for graduate study in literature, teaching, and creative writing, but also for work in journalism, advertising and marketing, technical writing, government, law, and many other fields. In our department, learners will come to understand literary, social, and cultural history, engaging questions of justice and value, history and aesthetics. English majors share and exchange their critical and creative ideas with others in hopes of becoming and remaining thoughtful and active citizens – of the university, nation, and world.

Sequencing the Major: the Literature and Creative Writing Tracks

Both tracks begin with an attention to critical thinking, problematizing, close reading, and argument. By cultivating this critical responsiveness to texts in our first-year courses (English 110 and 120) and our sophomore-level readings in literary history (English 252, 253, and 254), we prepare students to understand and engage the multiplicity of interpretive perspectives that comprise the discipline of English. In the upper-division Context and Theory (CT) courses (300-level), students encounter the historical nature of literature and literary interpretation, consider the stakes of various methods of reading, and learn to enter the scholarly conversations that define our objects and ourselves. Then, building on the skill of close reading, theoretical self-reflection, and historical breadth, all 400-level courses in the Literature concentration continue to foster the practice of scholarly response and argument, requiring a capstone seminar paper in which students research their positions in response to other scholarly positions. In the Creative Writing concentration, upper-division courses emphasize the practice of literary craft in at least three genres, the development of a creative portfolio, and such habits of professional writers as workshopping, revising, and public reading.