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English Department Mission Statement

Literature has the power to awaken, challenge, and even shock the reader by addressing profound questions about human identity and values. Through its ability to enter our minds, hearts, and actions, literature offers us the most complete picture of our selves and what it means to be human. Imaginative writers often dramatize poetically what those working in other fields "discover" empirically centuries later. Because it delights and disturbs, literature not only reflects our existence in the world, but also inspires change and the adventure of unforeseen possibilities.

While the English program maintains the intrinsic value of literature and encourages students to read across the boundaries of time, place, and culture, it also recognizes the historical and cultural contexts in which literature is created. Literature's investment in aesthetic and intellectual matters is inseparable from its involvement in cultural, social, and political issues. By exploring a wide range of literary and cultural works-from Gilgamesh to Michael Joyce's hyperspace fiction-the English program enables you to understand how the past informs the present and encourages you to become an archivist of both past works and present cultures.

The study of literature is both objective and a subjective. As a faculty, we read, research, interpret, discuss, and write-the customary practices of our discipline. We train students to communicate effectively and to apply to all writing the critical and analytical skills learned in the study of literature. Yet we also know that our students must appreciate from within how literature captures and moves us. That's why, in addition to offering rigorous training in the analysis of texts, we ask students to make a connection with literature by composing their own critical and creative works. In this way students develop an analytical and imaginative relationship with literature that continues long after their graduation from D’Youville College.

Goals

The English program translates the college's mission into a course of study that reflects the centrality of language to human endeavor and the effectiveness of English in achieving an awareness of the complexity of ourselves, our relationships, and our roles in the world.

The program's objectives include the development of:

  1. communication skills and mastery of the English language;
  2. aesthetic judgment and critical skills that enable students to assess the values that literature expresses;
  3. analytical skills to question the ways in which art and literature represent and promote certain value systems;
  4. a thorough knowledge of the literary heritage of English speaking cultures;
  5. an understanding of how English borrows from and enriches other disciplines.