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English Majors Handbook Booklet
English Majors Handbook Booklet
HANDBOOK
Adam Potkay
Department of English
P.O. Box 8795
College of William & Mary
Williamsburg, VA 23187-8795
757-221-7483
http://www.wm.edu/english
I. Introduction
II. What is English, Anyway?
III. Writing Well
IV. Older Poetry: Getting the Sense Straight
V. Interpretation: Close Reading
VI. World Wide Web Resources
VII. English and American Literary History
VIII. World Literature
IX. English Language and Linguistics
X. Creative Writing Program
XI. The Honors Program in English
XII. What Does One Do With a W&M English
Major?
XIII. William & Mary Career Services
XIV. The Ferguson-Blair Scholarship in Publishing
XV. Some Common Questions about Graduate
Study in English
XVI. Preparation for Graduate School:
Undergraduate Courses
XVII. Applying to Graduate School in English
XVIII. When Should I Apply to Graduate School?
XIX. Which Graduate Schools Should I Apply To?
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I. Introduction
This Handbook is primarily directed at English
majors and at students considering majoring in
English. It is also aimed at non-majors who are
interested in literature, particularly those who are
considering the possibility of doing graduate work
in English or a related field (American Studies,
Creative Writing, Comparative Literature, Drama).
The purpose of this Handbook is to begin to
address two basic questions: first, “What is
‘English,’ Anyway?” and second, the ever popular:
“What can I do after I graduate?”
The first portion of this handbook attempts to
answer the first question. It contains a few insights
into what exactly a major in English is, and how to
do your best in English courses. It also describes
the department's offerings in creative writing and
linguistics.
The second portion offers some basic advice
concerning jobs and careers, and how to go about
preparing for them.
h.) Use the present tense for analysis; save the past
tense for statements of fact set in the past. The
literary work still exists in the present; its author,
however, does not. So, “Swift was a clergyman;
therefore, his tract takes a theistic point of view.”
Other examples:
Awkward: “Defoe had novelized the earlier genre
of the spiritual autobiography…”
Good: “Defoe takes the eighteenth -century genre
of spiritual autobiography and transforms it into
what we have come to recognize as the novel.”
Sally eats.
Shakespeare.
Modernism (1901-1945):
William Butler Yeats, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce,
D. H. Lawrence, Joseph Conrad, T. S. Eliot.
Colonial (1620-1776):
Anne Bradstreet, Edward Taylor, Cotton Mather,
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Realism (1865-1920):
Mark Twain, William Dean Howells, Charles
Chestnutt, Edith Wharton, Henry James, Theodore
Dreiser, Stephen Crane, Robert Frost, W.E.B.
DuBois, Paul Laurence Dunbar
Modernism (1913-45):
Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, Ernest
Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Carlos
Williams, Wallace Stevens, H.D., Willa Cather,
Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard
Wright, Ralph Ellison, William Faulkner.
1) teaching;
2) writing, publishing, editing, film, or other media;
3) law.
1. TEACHING
Good luck!