English 419:  How to Read Anything

Detailed Description Spring 2021

Literature takes us around the world and back home, into the complexities of human experience and the power of human emotion.  English 419 is a class about how we read, think, and write about literature.  It is the foundational course for majors in the English department.  It’s also a great foundational course for almost everything you might do in any profession. 

Why?

Because reading literature builds a set of skills that you’ll bring to every discipline from astronomy to zoology, and professions as diverse as accounting and criminology, medicine and human resources, government service and entrepreneurship. 

How? 

Because when you read literature, you practice transferable and essential skills:  being observant (details matter); being curious (the right questions matter); finding connections (patterns matter); and clarifying your thinking (precision matters). 

When you read literature with others, you practice collaboration and teamwork--understanding a work together requires generous listening, effective collaboration, and mutual respect.  When you share your ideas with others, you hone basic communication skills essential in any job or discipline:  writing, in both long and short forms, across a number of platforms, and to a variety of audiences; and speaking, both informal—in conversation with others—and formal—when we stand before colleagues and invite them to listen. 

Professional schools and employers increasingly value these qualities.  Friends and lovers prize them.  And, you will want them for yourself:  we live in a world of words, of signs, and of symbols—an ocean of language and half-obscured meaning—and it is an environment too powerful to navigate without some skill.

When you track your Discovery requirements for graduation, know that English 419 is a Humanities course, is Writing Intensive, and counts as an Inquiry course.