English Department
Programs
- Creative Writing
- English Education
- Literary Editing and Publishishing
- Linguistics
- Literature
- Rhetoric and Composition
Creative Writing
Our minor in creative writing provides you the opportunity to study the tradition and craft of poetry, fiction, and drama in writing workshops and contemporary literature classes. In writing workshop classes, you'll write, revise, and critique your creative work and study contemporary literature from a writer's perspective. Our 25-26 unit minor will prepare you to write creative work independently and to understand your work in the context of contemporary literary practices.
[ top ]English Education
Many students choose to major in English because, at some point in their schooling, they had an impassioned English teacher. If you'd like to follow in the footsteps of inspiring teachers by spreading your enthusiasm for language and literature with others, then a major in English education may be for you. English education majors study all aspects of the English discipline–composition and rhetoric, literature, literacy, linguistics, and creative writing–to prepare for rewarding, stimulating careers as English teachers in secondary public schools.
[ top ]Literary Editing and Publishing
Literary editing is where all aspects of the English discipline are put into practical use. This 25-unit certificate program is for people interested in exploring a career in book or magazine publishing, freelance editing, or corporate communications. The interdisciplinary courses in the program will teach you about the publishing processes for various kinds of publications and train you in the procedures and techniques used by professional editors and publishers. Students in the program edit Watershed literary magazine and work as editorial assistants for Flume Press at CSU, Chico. They edit book manuscripts for Naturegraph Publishers and serve internships with publishers in the region and in the Bay Area.
[ top ]Linguistics
Do you ever wonder how we create new words? Or, why once wide-spread languages like Latin die? Have you ever wondered why people can't get rid of a foreign accent even after years of living in a new country or why people in the East say "soda" and in the Midwest say "pop"? Linguistics, the study of language, concerns itself with all aspects of how people use and acquire language. Linguists focus on many different facets of language, from the physical properties of the sound waves in utterances to the intentions of speakers towards others in conversations. Our department offers both a minor and major in linguistics where you'll come to discover how languages are structured, how languages are used, and how they change.
[ top ]Literature
Our work together is a focused reading, discussing, and writing about novels and short stories, poems, and plays. Since literary art, like other arts, seeks to provide its audience with pleasures and delights, this excitement and intensifying of feelings is our first concern. We offer courses covering literature from a vast range of time periods and cultures; and to help you have as rich an experience as possible, teachers often led you to explore historical, philosophical, psychological, political, religious, and social backgrounds from which the writers in hand emerge. Beyond ushering you into new settings of pleasure, we hope that reading and interacting with literature will enable all of us together to see how we could think and feel other than as we do. Then we might better be able to understand ourselves by attending to the differences between how we typically feel and how other people feel and have felt. This relentless attentiveness may lead us into altered but not diminished capacities to experience deeply and gratefully what arises as new, different, and even challenging in our lives.
[ top ]Rhetoric and Composition
Do you like listening to people's arguments? Do you pay attention to how they argue and what works—or doesn't? Do you wonder how we use language and how language uses us? Are you interested in how language and literacy practices affect and influence how individuals do things in society? Are you interested in how different segments of the society use language? If these questions interest you, then the study of rhetoric and composition is for you.
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Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart."