In addition to the goals for the core program, all of which apply to the major program, the English department sets the following as goals for its majors:

• Develop a lifelong habit of reading literature for both pleasure and intellectual edification
• Acquire a basic knowledge of literary history—how generations affect each other, and how authors write with an awareness of those who have written before them
• Recognize that texts can be approached in multiple ways
• Understand how works of literature reflect their own times; how they are affected by the spirit of their age (currents of thought as well as social, political, and economic forces); and how they can in turn affect that time
• Understand how works of literature, even those written in and about times and places foreign to us today, are able to speak to us personally and directly