English

Overview

The Duke English Department has long occupied a vital and distinctive place both in the discipline and in the university, where it has served as one of the defining spaces of thought, conversation, teaching, and inquiry. We have played a crucial role in defining the history, present, and future practices of reading and interpretation and the paradigms of research, pedagogy, and critique common to and distributed across the humanities as a whole at Duke.

The Bachelor in English program at Duke University offers classes that opens you up to your agency – that is, your capacities and power – in the humanly distinctive medium of language. To explore the indispensible medium of expression, of representation, and communication in the hands of its exemplary users, whether these are poets, essayists, or novelists, is life-enhancing. It is also no surprise that the skills of English majors are in high demand in so many professions and walks of life from law to business, and even medicine. Professional schools and businesses have long acknowledged the great benefits of rigorous training in English. 

Learning Objectives for the Bachelor in English program

• Majors should be able to read literary and cultural texts in relation to philosophical, cultural, social and historical contexts.
• Majors should be able to close-read literary and cultural texts, engage in critical analysis of these texts, and make arguments about them based in a disciplinary understanding of argument and evidence.
• Majors should be able to write about literary texts with conceptual complexity, informed at least in part by familiarity with literary and cultural theory.
• Majors should be able to locate their own argument in in a critical conversation, with understanding of discipline specific use of secondary sources.
• Majors should be able to write rhetorically powerful original literature (in the case of creative writing) and/or rhetorically powerful and logically convincing work about literature (in the case of literary criticism).

Accreditation

Duke University is accredited by the Commission on Colleges of the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools to award baccalaureate, masters, doctorate, and professional degrees.