Literature, Language & Culture
From the Director of Literature, Language, and Culture, Professor Virginia C. Fowler
Welcome to the Literature, Language, and Culture (LLC) pages of the English Department’s web site. Whether you’ve already selected the LLC Option or are just trying to learn more about it, I’d like to encourage you to read through the following pages carefully.
Is the LLC Option for you? It is if you have an interest in the study of literature and its many contexts and if you are thinking about a career in such areas as the law, business, government, publishing, advertising, social services, or education. The LLC Option is also matchless in preparing you for a lifetime of reading, analysis, self-discovery, and self-expression.
The LLC Option offers you four different tracks to pursue these goals, each tailored to meet your specific interests. After you have completed the Core of the English major, which grounds you in the sophisticated thought and analysis of literary studies, and you select the LLC Option, you will need to choose one of these tracks:
The Literature Track allows you to immerse yourself in the various periods, genres, themes, major figures, and practices distinctive to region, ethnicity, or gender; you'll not only finish your degree with a rich sense of the best that has been thought and said, but you'll find yourself skilled in the art of analyzing any text or body of data before you and presenting your analysis persuasively and insightfully. The skills you’ll acquire in this track are easily transferable to any number of different careers. This track will also prepare you to do graduate work in English, which is an essential pre-requisite for a career in higher education.
The Cultural Studies Track enables you to bring the skills of close reading and analysis to the range of cultural artifacts and practices all around us. Your multidisciplinary study in this track will allow you to look at culture through the perspectives offered by a range of social science disciplines rather than through a strictly aesthetic perspective. The cultural studies track will help you understand cultural artifacts and practices in terms of their relationship to power. This track will prepare you to enter a variety of career paths, including higher education, public administration and policy, politics, and non-profit organizations, to name just a few.
The Pre-Education Track will provide you a thorough grounding in canonical American and British literature and hone your skills in literary analysis, but it will also insure that you become conversant with content areas required by our state licensing board: literature written by minorities and women, linguistics, and sociolinguistics. Pursuing this track is the best possible way to prepare yourself for the graduate work leading to certification.
The Pre-Law Track is the ideal preparation for the demands you will face as a student and practitioner in the field of law, especially the reading and analytical skills required by both law school and a career in law. You’ll also find yourself well prepared to tackle the challenges of presenting ideas in both oral and written form, which constitutes a large portion of the work required in both law school and a legal career.
I believe you will find much to interest and challenge you in the LLC Option. If you have any questions or concerns, please come to see me. I am happy to chat with you about just about anything, and I can usually be found in my office in 313 Shanks.
With warm wishes for your continued success,
Ginney Fowler