B.A. in English Literature

Studying English Literature opens many paths to studying people, cultures, history, traditions, and more. In English Literature, you will investigate ideas through various mediums, including poems, novels, film, social media, podcasts, and more. Through this pursuit, you will gain writing, speaking, critical thinking, emotional IQ, and analytic skills highly sought after by employers in all fields.

Emulating Mark Twain’s work, the English curriculum is cosmopolitan and progressive. We expect you to be an open-minded explorer of diverse cultures and mediums. English courses stress inclusion and a place where you will investigate unfamiliar ideas, interrogate prejudices, and integrate interdisciplinary interests. The English curriculum is also, like Twain, unapologetically modern. “As to the past, there is but one good thing about it, and that is, that it is the past – we don’t have to see it again,” he told a friend in 1876. “There is nothing in it worth pickling.”

Elmira College English majors are prepared not only for careers in education, publishing, and communications but also to welcome unexpected challenges and excel under changing conditions.

The English major offers a range of courses in American Literature, British Literature, Creative Writing, Cultural Studies, and World Literature.

The significant privileges freedom, flexibility, and diversity, inviting students to design a course that integrates a broad range of topics, genres, and methods. Most English courses concentrate on works written during or after Mark Twain’s lifetime. Even when majors are expected to take surveys of early periods, they emphasize the political, technological, social, and cultural developments which recognizably shape the contemporary world.