On the pages that follow, you will find: information about the English major and English minor at Saint Vincent; personal webpages for faculty members; special webpages for individual courses; links to the Departmental course offerings; and other sites that may be of use or interest to students of literature and writing.  We invite you to explore our site and feel welcome to email us if you have coments or questions.

Students who major in English at Saint Vincent College can expect to encounter courses and assignments in which reading and writing are considered as investigations of the world, its processes, 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 writing, 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.
• Interdisciplinary 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.

Typical Freshman Year Schedule
Fall Semester
Language and Rhetoric or Exploring Religious Meaning
Classical or Modern Language
Mathematics or Social Science
History
English Elective/Requirement

Spring Semester
Language and Rhetoric or Exploring Religious Meaning
Classical or Modern Language
History or Social Science
Social Science
English Genre or Interdisciplinary Course