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Build your résumé by writing for The Diamond (student newspaper), The Canon (student literary magazine), or maybe even Dordt's Marketing and Communications Office.

Read your work at an annual student public reading and compete for cash prizes in the annual Purple Martin writing competition.

Become one of a growing list of students who has won awards in the college division of the Iowa Poetry Association competition and has had poems published in the association’s annual anthology, Lyric Iowa.

Get published in a professional journal for teachers, as some of our English education students have.

Be part of a writing class team that composes documents to solve real problems—from an EMT training guide for the local ambulance squad to marketing materials for a women’s ministry in Cambodia.

Serve as a teaching assistant working with underachieving college writers.

Participate in an internship such as working in a publishing company on the Chicago Semester Program.

To learn more, you can also view the program strengths and learning outcomes for this program.

A degree in English will require students to complete seven English classes. Students will also need to choose an emphasis in literature or writing.

• Introduction to Literary Studies: Provides students with a foundation of knowledge and skills for work in the major. It does so by introducing them to the subject matter, critical schools and methods, research strategies, forms of responsive and critical writing, and major contested issues of the discipline.
• Earlier British Literature: A survey of earlier British literature from the beginnings through the 17th century, including Beowulf, Chaucer, Sidney, Spenser, Shakespeare (his poems), Donne, Herbert, Jonson, and Bunyan. Special attention will be given to the Scriptural tradition that this literature evokes. Throughout, the course focuses on how the literature of these eras addresses fundamental questions about human nature.
• Shakespeare and Elizabethan Drama: Primary emphasis on a study of Shakespeare’s plays: comedies, histories, and tragedies. Some attention to Shakespeare’s sonnets, to other Elizabethan playwrights, and to background. One paper required.
• Later British Literature: A survey of British literature from the late 1700s through the 1990s, including poetry, novels, plays, and other creative writings in English by authors in or from the United Kingdom. The course will study the major literary, cultural and aesthetic trends that impacted most of the world. Those include neo-classicism, romanticism, realism, naturalism, and modernism.
• American Literature I: This course surveys the literature of colonial North America and the early United States republic (1492-1860), including poems, novels, magazines, and newspapers. We will examine the influence of Calvinism, Catholicism, and the Enlightenment on American culture, and we will place American literature in a transatlantic and global context. Authors and texts include Edgar Allan Poe and other American Romantics, Benjamin Franklin, slave narratives, Puritan poetry, and Native American writings.
• American Literature II: This course surveys the selected prose, poetry plays, and other creative writing by Americans, from 1865 to the 1990s. It will investigate a number of major literary, cultural, and aesthetic trends that impacted the lives and history of Americans and beyond, including realism, naturalism, and modernism. Students will discuss literary works in relationship to major historical events and their lasting cultural effects, which may include the Civil War, World War I and II, the Great Depression, and the Civil Rights movement.
• Contemporary Literature: The study of selected contemporary literature, particularly novels, written in the last fifty years to the present. Students will be exposed to acclaimed living writers. This course will consider global contemporary literature from non-Western cultures. Writers may include Margaret Atwood, David Foster Wallace, Marilyn Robinson, Khaled Hosseini, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.

See the course catalog for more information.