Welcome!
The Department of English is a community of writers, critics, and teaching scholars.
Therefore, our curriculum offers a comprehensive education in literature, theory, creative writing and professional writing in order to:
Enable students to understand and contribute to literary traditions in English;
Encourage students to appreciate and critically understand the many cultures that have embraced English;
Foster students’ empathy, imagination, and critical thinking;
Enlarge students’ awareness of the complexity of human experience and of God’s grace.
A Word From the Chair We are living in a moment in history when many are skeptical about the value of majoring in English. With our finance economy collapsing around us, many of you who are passionate about literature and creative writing are tempted to think that you should major in a “useful” discipline, a career track promising financial security upon graduation—like accounting, nursing or engineering. Obviously such options are good career choices. But they are a mistake if your passion is for language, literature, and writing. And it is a mistake to presume that the study of English will leave you with too few options for career paths which provide a decent living.
The late Joseph Campbell was fond of saying “follow your passion, and doors will open.” This was certainly true of his impassioned work in world mythologies, and it has been true in my own life as well. As a sophomore at the Philadelphia College of Bible, I was preparing for Christian ministry when I found myself sitting in Professor John Sheetz’s seminar on C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien. I had been discouraged from reading fiction in my youth, and suddenly I found myself “lit up” with a passion for learning and life which I had never experienced before. I found myself “opened up,” expanding my understanding of humanity, God, and the world. And I found myself deeply engaged in a preparation for life that transcended particular career choices.
Why? I would say that it has to do with imagination, an important gift we often overlook. And yet the imagination is absolutely crucial if we are to envision and effect what Jesus called “the reign of God”—a life centered on compassion for others. And we uniquely exercise and precisely develop our imagination through story, poetry, and drama. We learn and empathize with the peculiar pain of becoming old and vulnerable when we experience Shakespeare’s King Lear. We feel deeply the burden of being oppressed and marginalized when we encounter Toni Morrison’s Beloved. And we know the wisdom of revaluing God’s creation for what it is apart from our false consumption-based economy when we enter Wendell Berry’s Sabbath poems.
We know too that our imaginations are profoundly shaped by our language and our use of language. Language can be used to destroy, and language can be used to create. But we cannot escape the primary role language plays in understanding our past, in negotiating our present, and in shaping our future. The close attention we students of English must pay to language, whether reading poems or writing stories—reading stories or writing poems, prepares us for thriving in a world in which the language we use and the stories we tell largely determine what that world becomes.
Of course you can major in English and pursue a satisfying and sustaining career: Messiah English majors have become lawyers, magazine editors, business executives, librarians, college professors, journalists, high school teachers, freelance writers, administrative assistants, ministers, and even massage therapists. In an era when superb communication skills—speaking and writing with a sense of audience—have become increasingly hard to come by, English majors are prepared to do many jobs well (I recently read a testimony from a business executive who prefers to hire English majors over Marketing majors because they have a keener sense of audience). But this is not the reason we choose to major in English. We choose English because it is our passion and our path into a meaningful life.
If you visit Messiah, stop in and see me and ask me how the rest of my story goes—how I went from hotel doorman to college English professor, following my passion through doors opening as if by design. If you can't visit Messiah, take a look at all the careers/jobs open to English majors: What can I do with an English Major?
—Samuel Smith , Chair of the Department of English |
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