Mission Statement

The mission of the English Department is to enhance the understanding and pleasure gained from the reading of literature and to make available the satisfaction and achievements of good writing for all students at a liberal arts college. Our discipline stresses careful reading, informed criticism, and imaginative creation of works of literature in English. Through our sponsorship of the Writers Series, our departmental colloquia for students and faculty, our guidance for the student literary magazine (Quiz and Quill), and our participation in the freshman Common Book Program, we act as advocates for literary creativity for the college as a whole. Students and faculty together form a community of writers and scholars, and our mission, in the broadest sense, is to foster the development of that community and the activities of writing and scholarship that keep it alive.

Within our broad mission, we have three related commitments: to our majors in the discipline of English, who may specialize in creative writing or in literary studies; to future English teachers in secondary schools, who take their professional disciplinary preparation in this department; and to all students through the three composition and literature courses of the Integrative Studies program as well as through English elective courses. For all of these students, we are committed to classrooms of open discussion and to an emphasis on critical inquiry and creativity.

The department views both the reading and writing of literature as means to understanding ourselves, human life, and the patterns and ideas of human cultures. We see literature as a mode of knowledge, as a liberating process, and as the product of both individual vision and cultural assumptions. Writing is a generative activity, one that helps individuals to find their own stories as well as to think through and express their own positions. Our discipline is about appreciating the writer’s craft and the creative process by which literary art is achieved; and it is about reading works of literary art as windows into personal and cultural discovery.

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