The Department of English has the following major objectives:
to produce students who have a commitment to the value and importance of
literary and textual studies;
to encourage in students a tolerance and appreciation of human difference
through engagement with a variety of different perspectives, literary,
critical, theoretical and historical;
to encourage students to develop a critical and reflective attitude to
received theories and opinions in the field of English studies;
to enable students to understand the complex and conditional nature of
English by providing them with (1) experience of the multiple interpretative
possibilities available within the discipline and (2) an understanding of the
social, historical and cultural determinants of those possibilities;
to develop students' ability to speak and write critically, to construct
literary and critical arguments, and to turn these skills to the analysis of
social, cultural and literary issues;
to produce students with a flexibility and openness to new ideas in the
field of English studies together with a sensitivity to the ideas and
approaches of others;
to produce students with an interest in learning and the skills and
understanding to pursue it beyond the years of their university
experience.
The department does not require students to take a compulsory
core subject or subjects. It does encourage students to include in their degree
subjects which will provide:
a familiarity with a range of genres, spoken and written, literary and
non-literary, across a broad historical and cultural spectrum. Such familiarity
includes (i) competence in reading literature, film and literary theory; (ii)
competence in writing: the summary, the factual report, the literary critical
essay, the research essay, the review, the review article, the seminar paper,
metacriticism and ficto-criticism; and (iii) competence in discussion.
an understanding of contemporary and historical modes of literary and
critical theory;
an understanding of the nature and construction of the discipline in its
historical and contemporary forms.
The department attempts at all levels to
encourage the practices of close reading and critical textual analysis and of
carefully produced professional writing. It is expected that students who have
completed a minor in English should have a basic understanding of the way
English scholars read and of the ways in which they write about what they read.
It is expected that students who have completed a major in English will have a
more advanced and conscious understanding of these matters, a wider knowledge
of a number of historical periods and issues and a more sophisticated ability
to synthesise and coordinate literary, textual and theoretical questions.
