The department stresses critical thinking, incisive writing and speaking, and a sense of initiative and responsibility for the enterprise of interpretation. With their advisers, English majors design a program of study that deepens their understanding of diverse genres, textual traditions, and periods. We encourage students to explore the history of cultural production and reception and also to question the presuppositions of literary study. The major culminates in an independently written essay of 30-40 pages, developed during a senior research seminar in the fall semester and individually mentored by a faculty member in the spring. Students are expected to take at least two English courses at Bryn Mawr before signing up for the major or minor.
As students construct their English major, they should seek to include courses that provide:- Historical depth-a sense of the construction of traditions.
- Formal breadth-experience with more than one genre and more than one medium: poetry, prose fiction, drama, letters, film, epic, non-fiction, essays, documentary, etc.
- Cultural range-experience with the Englishes of more than one geographical location and more than one cultural tradition, and of the exchanges and transactions between them; a course from another language or literary tradition can be valuable here.
- Different critical and theoretical frameworks-the opportunity to experiment with several models of interpretation and the debates that animate them.
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