Students: Undergraduate Information
2007-2008 Director's Letter
Welcome!
English at Ohio State is one of the most kinetic and wide-ranging fields of study offered at this university. We are the proud winners of a Departmental Teaching Excellence Award, largely because our more than 100 faculty teach a dazzling variety of undergraduate courses in a multitude of areas: we teach everything from Beowulf to Digital Media, from rhetoric to Rushdie, from film noir to folklore.
To bring this multitude of options into sharper focus, this Handbook takes you through our requirements and offerings and gives you a sense of all the things you'll be able to do during your time here. I hope you will develop, with the help of your faculty adviser, a program that's right for you, and that you'll take advantage of all the opportunities that we provide, from teaching other students, to working on a literary journal, to studying one-on-one with a faculty member on a project of your own. The choices are truly unlimited.
If you have questions that are not answered in the Handbook, you can always ask me or Sharyn Talbert, the Associate Director of Undergraduate Studies (292-6735, Denney 413, talbert.2@osu.edu).
Good luck with your studies.
Manuel Martinez
Director of Undergraduate Studies
Why Study English
Articles that recount the experiences of soon-to-graduate Ohio State University English Majors.
Why English?
The English Department of The Ohio State University offers a varied and comprehensive curriculum in literature, rhetoric, composition, folklore, language study, critical theory, film, and creative writing. The strength of the department rests not only on its regular full-time faculty members, many of whom have won University-wide teaching awards in recent years, but also on its undergraduate students whose interests and gifts are as varied as the curriculum itself. While both students and teachers generally agree that such literary classics as Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Shakespeare’s King Lear, Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself, and Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse are great human achievements worthy of study for their own sake, the study of English provides other benefits as well.
The analytical study of literature helps develop a capacity for logical thought, a greater awareness of the complexity of value judgments, and a better understanding of the imaginative possibilities of the mind itself. By exposing us to some of the greatest minds our civilization has produced, the study of literature engages and deepens all our faculties—our minds, our emotions, our ability to make moral and political judgments, and our aesthetic sensibilities. When combined with the study of language and composition, literary analysis can expand our emotional and creative capacities, sharpen our ability to make value judgments, and help us to understand societies and times different from our own. Since the study of literature and language involves learning how to think, the skills it teaches can make us better able to respond to the personal, social, and intellectual problems that confront us throughout our lives.
Overview of English Courses and Departmental Programs
The Ohio State University offers an incredible range of resources for its students. As a land-grant institution committed to public service, Ohio State is internationally distinguished for its research, scholarship, and teaching in a wide spectrum of academic programs in the sciences, the professions, and the liberal arts. The University’s library holdings are among the most extensive in the United States, with one of the most comprehensive online databases and catalogs of any library.
Ohio State’s English Department is also large, in the best sense of the word. Students may complete the English major at any of Ohio State’s five campuses. With over one hundred regular full-time faculty members, including a great many nationally recognized teachers and scholars, the English Department offers over one hundred courses beyond first-year composition. After taking the first-year writing requirement, students become eligible to enroll in many introductory literature and writing courses. Representing a few of our diverse offerings at this level are Introduction to Shakespeare, The English Bible, Introduction to Film, Introduction to African-American Literature, and the writing of fiction and poetry.
Soon after declaring the major, students enroll in English 398, the required critical writing course which is limited to eighteen students per section. Throughout their programs, English majors continue to receive a good deal of faculty attention: the advanced literature courses enroll no more than forty students per class; many sections are much smaller.
With its great diversity of course choices, the English major is flexible. Students work closely with faculty advisers to create major programs that combine a solid foundation in a wide range of English studies along with the opportunity to do focused work in an area of special interest. The Department’s course offerings are listed on the Undergraduate Web site (http://english.osu.edu/students/undergrad/).
Opportunities also exist for individual study programs and participation in a challenging and rewarding Honors program. Our popular summer study abroad program in England sends qualified students to the beautiful city of Greenwich for six weeks’ study of British literature and art; students can also study in the U.K. and continental Europe as part of the Literary Locations course.
The students and faculty in our department traditionally form a close social and intellectual community. The English undergraduate organization, EUGO, arranges social events, field trips, lectures, and job information meetings. Students serve as representatives on many departmental committees, and undergraduates represent the English Department Council, the department’s governing body. In the past several years, our undergraduates have played an important part in determining the nature of our curriculum and programs.
