3 Literary Studies Course Programs

Literary studies’ comprehensive core includes textual analysis, literary theory, and American, British, and international fiction. We also encourage students to tailor the program to their own interests and incorporate classes from other disciplines. With the benefit of small class sizes, faculty provide individualized instruction and mentoring, with one-on-one advising to help you choose the courses best suited to your ambitions. Additionally, our faculty are active scholars and researchers, with substantial work in their respective disciplines.

While the program does not offer a major, its courses serve the literary interests of all students and provide greater breadth for majors in foreign languages and in English. The General Literary Studies program reflects the assumption that, as an educated person, you will wish to extend your experience of literature beyond what has been written in your native tongue and beyond what you can read in the foreign languages you have mastered. You’ll enrich your education by exploring literature in translation and discovering a variety of illuminating relationships among works in different languages.

A word after a word after a word is power, according to the contemporary Canadian writer Margaret Atwood. Appreciation of the power of language as an artistic medium is the goal of the literary studies concentration. The requirements of the concentration are designed to foster students’ skills as interpreters of literature and as writers, while also instilling appreciation of form and knowledge about literature and its relationship to social and political contexts. The Simon's Rock literature program is decidedly comparative, allowing students to study British and American literature as well as French, Spanish, German, Russian, Chinese, Arabic, Czech, and other literatures, in the original language or in translation.