As English majors, students read widely, engaging with many kinds of texts from multiple periods, geographical areas, genres, and literary traditions. Within the major, students choose a specific emphasis (English Major: Literature Emphasis, English Major: Creative Writing Emphasis, or Writing and Communication Studies Minor) as their focus and develop their skills and knowledge through in-depth exploration within that emphasis. Through the major, students develop flexibility of thought, attentiveness to language, an ability to engage with the world around them, and to understand difference (gender, race, class, ability, religion, nation), capacities which they may apply in almost any area of study or employment after college.<br><br>If you love to read, this is the emphasis for youeven more, if you love to think and talk about what youve read. Youll have the opportunity to read an extraordinary range of novels, stories, plays, poems, and nonfiction texts, drawn from the medieval period to the present, and from all over the English-speaking world. Your courses will cover writers from Chaucer through Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Walt Whitman, James Joyce, to Sylvia Plath, Toni Morrison, Junot Diaz, and on to forms such as graphic novels and science fiction. As a literature major, youll learn to read attentively and to think deeply about the questions literary texts raise and how literature engages with the world. those analytical and critical skills will prepare you for careers in many fields from journalism and publishing to teaching and law.