The English Department at Saint Vincent College is an expressly active environment of mentoring and collaborative learning. Students work with departmental faculty and in small groups on independent and extracurricular projects, as well as in regular courses. Students can choose to concentrate in Literature, Secondary Education, Professional Writing, or Creative Writing to prepare for graduate school, law school, or medical school, to receive training in journalism, business, and technical writing, to achieve certification in secondary or primary teaching, or to pursue a career in writing fiction or poetry. As part of their chosen concentration, students can gain direct work experience through internships.
In their courses and assignments, English majors at Saint Vincent can expect to pursue the processes of reading and writing as investigations of the world and its events. Working with novels, poems, plays, and other creative media, all of which represent the values and ideas of past and present thinkers, students have the opportunity to learn by discovering, examining, analyzing, and discussing literature. In these pursuits, students gain fluency in thinking, reading and writing, and the ability to express ideas and values in a number of ways. Most important, students develop a critical awareness of self.
Requirements for the major are set to ensure that students study language, criticism, genres, periods, and figures; they include three distinctive emphases within the Department’s offerings:
- Writing courses focus on the ability to read critically and to gain skill in established rhetorical modes. In these courses, students are introduced to a variety of forms and styles of writing and provided with the opportunities to master these modes themselves;
- Literature courses emphasize treatment of an individual work in relation to literary history, as well as the effect that writers and works have on readers. Students develop an understanding of primary texts and secondary texts, as well as the ability to explicate any kind of text;
- Thematic courses explore the connections literature makes with other disciplines and thus with other ways of finding meaning and expressing it in human activity.
Students who major in English are eligible to participate in a cooperative program between Saint Vincent College and Duquesne Law School that allows them to earn their bachelor’s degree and Juris Doctor degree in six years. In this program, qualified students who complete their first three years of study at Saint Vincent, fulfilling the Core Curriculum requirements and the requirements for the major, may transfer into the Law program and complete the requirements for the Juris Doctor in three years. For details, see the explanation of this program in the Pre-Law section of the Bulletin.
Bulletin 2009-2011 Department of English
