English and Foreign Languages
Rationale
In an "information age," with a profusion of data and media resources available, the individual who can find information, understand its significance, and communicate it becomes both valuable and powerful. The English Program prepares its majors for just these activities. In the study of texts, we read, analyze, research, interpret, discuss, and write as the habitual practices of our field.
In research especially, good readers must be prepared to assimilate information and commentary both broadly and deeply in order to understand a given work and its contexts. In writing and speaking, our students learn to understand and apply ideas drawn from fields as diverse as theology and advertising, metaphysics and popular journalism, and they learn as well to communicate these ideas to a broad audience. Thus, the English Program provides its graduates with the tools of information gathering and critical thinking that prepare them for work in a broad variety of fields: market research; legal research; work in corporate, school, and public libraries; writing of all kinds from grant proposals to movie reviews; paralegal work; government research and administration; business in various areas from marketing to management; teaching. The Writing Internship allows students to receive academic credit for using their writing skills in a number of these environments, and those interested in writing as a profession may also enroll in the Writing Minor. As a group, English majors receive excellent preparation for graduate study in law, business, library science, education, and advanced literary study at the graduate level, and hold jobs in all of these areas. In a society that seems to experience swift and radical changes more and more frequently, English majors are equipped in a way few others are to be both practical and thoughtful, both flexible and mindful of principle.
In
addition to our instructional goals, the department
cultivates an active interest in extra-curricular
literary culture, and hosts a number of special
activities: informal readings of prose and poetry;
a trip to Stratford, Ontario, each year to view
plays by William Shakespeare and more modern playwrights;
Loquitur, the campus literary magazine;
the English Language and Literature Conference
at which undergraduates from many colleges including
USF present papers; visiting speakers; various
activities associated with Sigma Tau Delta, the
English Honor Society. English faculty have
led or co-sponsored trips to