Students: Undergraduate Information
2009-2010 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 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.
