The English and Textual Studies Curriculum

Program Learning Outcomes

Skills and abilities specific to the field of English and Textual Studies:

1. Recognize how meanings are created through acts of critical reading.
1. Analyze texts using various theoretical paradigms for literary and cultural studies
2. Analyze texts in relation to their historical contexts
3. Analyze texts as bearers of political meaning and mediators of power relationships
2. Analyze the ways texts construct categories of difference, including differences of race, ethnicity, nationality, gender, sexuality, and class
3. Formulate sustained interpretive, analytical, or conceptual arguments based on evidence drawn from texts
4. Develop skills for creative self-expression in fiction or poetry

1. Organize ideas in writing
2. Use clear and appropriate prose
3. Use library and web-based resources to locate primary and secondary sources
4. Use and cite sources appropriately
5. Express ideas and information orally
6. Engage in analytical and critical dialogue orally
7. Evaluate arguments
8. Identify and question assumptions

ETS Courses

The ETS curriculum stresses not only what is read but how--and is organized by topics of reading and modes of critical inquiry. Our goal is not only to show how meanings are created through acts of critical reading, but also to demonstrate the consequences of pursuing one way of reading over another. It matters greatly whether texts are taught from the perspective of authorship, literary history, gender studies and feminism, metaphoric language, or imperialism. For this reason our upper division curriculum has no course titled "Shakespeare," although Shakespeare's plays might be studied in any number of courses bearing such titles "Authors" or "Forms and Genres" or "Reading Nation and Empire." This is why every ETS course has two titles: a broader generic title (such as "Literary Periods" or "Theorizing Representation") that marks out a specific set of interpretive questions and critical methodologies, and a subtitle (such as "Renaissance Poetry" or "American Consumer Culture") that identifies the topic or textual material selected by the professor for emphasis in that particular semester.

Organization of the Curriculum

In addition to distinguishing between different modes of critical inquiry, the ETS curriculum highlights the relationships among (1) historical dimensions of reading in the past as well as the present, (2) critical theories that supply strategies of interpretation and analysis, and (3) political questions that reading inevitably addresses. These three concerns underlie the organization of the ETS curriculum into history (studies in literary history, authorship, and reception), theory (theories of representation, textual forms, and interpretation), and politics (interrogations of the political interests served by cultural histories, traditions of representation, and social institutions). The ETS curriculum as a whole is designed so that no single course exists in isolation. The organization of the curriculum around the coordinates of history, theory, and politics, like its concentration on modes of inquiry, brings out the multiple contexts in which reading occurs and makes visible the important differences as well as alliances between one type of critical perspective and another.