Literature & Culture Undergraduate Program
The Literature & Culture undergraduate program trains you to be an agile interpreter of and writer about literature and culture; skills that can be applied to the wide variety of complexities and challenges you may face in your professional life and beyond.
The goal of the Literature & Culture Major is to teach you how to read, interpret, and write persuasively about novels, poems, plays and other imaginative works across a variety of genres and media forms. Along with teaching you the analytical skills and methodological tools to interpret these works, this major will teach the importance of understanding imaginative works within their cultural and historical contexts. In addition, the major is designed to train you in strong professional and academic skills like critical thinking, inductive reasoning, and persuasive argumentation that are applicable to other fields of study and a variety of career paths.
Our university’s strengths in technology, STEM fields, and the social sciences are only increased by the training of agile interpreters of, and writers about, the wide variety of complexities and challenges they may face; the curriculum for this major will therefore serve our students outside as well as inside the major.
Learning Objectives
- Use disciplinary vocabulary from literary theory and Cultural Studies scholarship appropriately in analyses.
- Deploy literary and/or Cultural Studies theories/frameworks appropriately to describe, explain, or critique artifacts of communication.
- Apply methods appropriately to answer research questions commonly asked in Literary and Cultural Studies.
- Explain how contexts and identities (historical, social, economic, political, technological, etc.) influence cultural forms, language, and practice, and how cultural forms, language, and practice shape the contexts of use.
- Exhibit competence in reading, writing, and speaking in academic and professional contexts by identifying scholarly niches/research questions and synthesizing evidence to support a claim.
These skills in reading, writing, and systematic methods of problem formulation and solving speak to students' employability and readiness for postgraduate education.
Spotlight: Stephen Wittek
Professor Wittek explores the intersection between early modern drama and cultural studies
Stephen Wittek is the author of : Shakespeare, Middleton, Jonson, and the Idea of News (University of Michigan Press in 2015), a study of the co-productive relationship between the commercial news industry and the theatrical industry in early modern England. Wittek's work has also appeared in journals including Studies in English Literature, Digital Humanities Quarterly, and Journal of Cognitive History.
Among many additional projects, Wittek is the director of the virtual reality education project, , and co-director of the Center for Early Modern Print, Networks, and Performance along with Professor Chris Warren.
