Major | Minor
Major | Minor
Minor
Whether you’re an avid reader, aspiring writer, or somewhere in between, Seattle University’s English Department has a place for you. With courses in literature, creative writing and writing studies we prepare you to read, write and create in a powerful way, while providing you a foundation to pursue and be successful in a variety of careers.
Dive into cultural and literary inquiry as you grapple with the complex questions of justice and value that arise from a range of texts spanning various historical periods and the globe.
Great writers are strong readers: become both — with a curriculum that blends the skills of literary study with the craft of creative writing.
Strengthen your rhetorical awareness and practical skills with this minor, as you study different genres of writing, forms of argumentation, and traditions of persuasion.
Through the study of different perspectives and voices in literary texts, you will develop a broad and deep understanding of a range of human experiences and expressions, so you can make a difference. With a passionate and dedicated faculty as well as several student-run organizations and study abroad opportunities, you will find both a support system and the tools to achieve your goals.
Designated a UNESCO World ity of Literature, Seattle booms with passionate readers, writers and thinkers. With a campus nestled in the heart of Capitol Hill, you are just steps away from cinemas, theaters, iconic literary sites and more. Grab coffee at a local café as you study before a poetry reading or support a local author by buying their book at Elliott Bay Book Company.
This course will introduce you to some of the poetry of Geoffrey Chaucer’s "Canterbury Tales." It is an intensive class in that you will be asked to very quickly familiarize yourself with reading Middle English, while also producing subtle and well-crafted responses to the various themes presented to you throughout his poetry. The class asks that you work to be engaged not only in understanding Middle English, but also in investigating how Chaucer’s poetry resonates with cultural, political, and social events from his own time and from ours. This last point, in particular, will be of continued importance to us this quarter, as reading Chaucer’s poem "NOW", in a world sometimes literally in flames, asks us to make connections that may alternatively be surprising or disturbing.
In this class, we will fix our lens on production, taking inspiration from athletic interval training: a full sprint (writing short fiction) and then a breath by jogging (writing flash fiction), always writing new material and learning how to rest while remaining active in our craft.
Irish literature is one of the richest literatures in the world. The nation of Ireland is two-and-ahalf times smaller than Washington state, and its population about one-and-a-half million people fewer. Yet four Irish writers (W. B. Yeats, George Bernard Shaw, Samuel Beckett, and Seamus Heaney) have won the Nobel Prize for Literature, and their number does not include James Joyce, author of "Ulysses," which the Modern Library rated as the best novel so far written. (Joyce’s "The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" is number three on this same list.) This class provides an immersion into Irish literature from the so-called Celtic Revival, through the 1916 Easter Rising, the Irish War of Independence, the Irish Civil War, and the Troubles, to the death of Heaney in 2013.
The short novel falls somewhat loosely between the short story and the novel, both in terms of its length and its effects. Like a three-hour movie, it poses special challenges for both the maker and the audience (as well as producers/publishers). In this course we will be interested in how these challenges are met, how the short novel artfully negotiates between the primarily spatial medium of the short story and the temporal/historical medium of the novel.
What’s your story—and how does it fit into our broader world? Whether in creative expression or academic study, writers use a shared set of tools to gather, analyze, and craft social and cultural information. In this class, we will study strategies of field research and writing that are common to genres ranging from ethnography to journalism to creative nonfiction. Throughout this work, we will employ surveys, interviews, and observations in order to learn more about the world we live in—and how authors can promote positive changes within it.
In the late 1970s, many literary scholars began a critical engagement with the discourses of colonialism, imperialism, decolonization, and nationalism. This approach to literary discourse soon broadened to include other areas of cultural production and is referred to as “postcolonial studies.” In this course, we will examine postcolonial cultural theory from a variety of theorists, engage with the debates within postcolonial studies, and explore the relationship between postcolonial studies and globalization. Drawing on literary and theoretical texts from across the globe, this course offers you an introduction into some of the major questions that shape this field.
Meet your peers, develop your writing (creative and academic) as well as editing and/or research skills, or help other students develop their own.
Established in 1958, we annually publish the best literary and visual art of the Seattle U community. Students can submit work, join the staff, or volunteer. Copies are available in the English Dept.
Developed to highlight undergraduate research, Seattle University Undergraduate Research Journal publishes peer-reviewed student work, offering editorial apprenticeships in a credit-bearing program.
Watch our video slide show of recent events
Watch the video of our bilingual poetry event.
Read More about Virtual Transversal: Poetry & Performance by Urayoán Noel
Appointed Theiline Pigott McCone Chair 2020-22
Learn about our Visiting Writers.
For English and Literature
English and Literature