ETS Curriculum

Program Learning Outcomes

The English Department's curriculum has been carefully constructed to facilitate particular learning outcomes and to impart skills and abilities that we feel are crucial for an English major.

Skills specific to the field of English and Textual Studies:

1. Recognize how meanings are created through acts of critical reading and analysis.

A. Analyze texts using various theoretical paradigms for literary and cultural studies

B. Analyze texts in relation to their historical contexts

C. 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

General skills and abilities:

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

Organization of the ETS Curriculum

Because the ETS curriculum stresses not only what is read but how we read, it is organized by topics of reading and modes of critical inquiry. Our goal is both to show how meanings are created through acts of critical reading and also to demonstrate the consequences of pursuing one method of reading over another. Focusing on a wide range of cultural productions within British and American traditions, the ETS curriculum highlights the relationships among (1) historical dimensions of reading in the past and present, (2) critical theories that supply strategies of interpretation and analysis, and (3) political questions that reading inevitably addresses. These three concerns structure 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 organization of the curriculum around the coordinates of history, theory, and politics serves to emphasize the multiple contexts in which reading occurs and to make visible the important differences as well as the alliances between one type of critical perspective and another.

Historical Modes of Inquiry (courses with a second digit of 1 or 2) These courses assume that texts bear meaning as they are produced and read in specific historical formations. Courses taught under this rubric will study, for example, literary periods, major authors, histories of forms and genres, and cultural production and reception.

Theoretical Modes of Inquiry (courses with a second digit of 3 or 4) These courses investigate the conditions under which texts can be said to bear meaning, as well as the questions of whether and how such meaning can become available to a reader. This mode of inquiry includes courses theorizing meaning and interpretation, representation, forms and genres, and history and culture.

Political Modes of Inquiry (courses with a second digit of 5 or 6) These courses assume that texts are bearers of political meaning; that is, that they mediate power relations. Courses taught under this rubric will focus, for example, on the cultural politics of nation and empire, gender and sexualities, race and ethnicity, class and economic materiality, and institutions and ideologies.

For descriptions of the undergraduate courses the department is offering this semester, see ETS and ENG Courses