English Literature Major, Creative Writing Specialization
Program Requirements
- Total Units Required: 36
- Grade Required: C or above
Required Courses
| Code | Title | Units |
|---|---|---|
| ELIT 2151 | Early Texts & Contexts | 3 |
| ELIT 2152 | Modern Texts & Contexts | 3 |
| ELIT 3000 | Introduction To Literary Theory | 3 |
Requirements
In addition to the 9 units of required coursework, students must complete 27 units of coursework, 24 of which must be upper-division (3000- and 4000-level) coursework, and at least 6 units of which must be at the 4000 level, distributed as follows. Students must earn a C or better in all courses to count them toward the major.
1. Historical requirements
Three historical courses covering three of the following five historical periods in American, British, or Anglophone literature and including at least one course from each of the following two groups:
Group 1
- Medieval
| Code | Title | Units |
|---|---|---|
| ELIT 3103 | Introduction to Old English Language and Literature | 3 |
| ELIT 3139 | Topics - Queer Medievalisms | 3 |
| ELIT 3153 | Reading Sex in Premodern England: Medieval Sexualities | 3 |
| ELIT 3153 | Topics - Reading Sex in Premodern England: Monstrous Desire from Eros to Eroticism in the Early Modern Period | 3 |
| ELIT 4101 | Medieval Dream Visions | 3 |
| ELIT 4102 | Medieval Women's Writing | 3 |
| ELIT 4158 | Chaucer | 3 |
| ELIT 4158 | Global Chaucer | 3 |
- Early Modern
| Code | Title | Units |
|---|---|---|
| ELIT 3114 | Shakespeare And The City | 3 |
| ELIT 3118 | Topics - Early Modern Misbehavior | 3 |
| ELIT 3140 | Topics - Drama Queens: Cleopatra in Elizabethan England | 3 |
| ELIT 3140 | Topics - Early Modern Frenemies: Literary Competition, Envy and Admiration | 3 |
| ELIT 3154 | The Renaissance - Magic and Mayhem, Desire and Disguise: A Novel Beginning | 3 |
| ELIT 3154 | The Renaissance - The Marvelous and the Monstrous in Early Modern Literature | 3 |
| ELIT 3155 | Topics - The Renaissance of Doubt | 3 |
| ELIT 3162 | Shakespeare in Performance | 3 |
| ELIT 3163 | Shakespeare - The Godly and Grotesque | 3 |
| ELIT 4103 | The Cultural Poetics of the Early Modern Book | 3 |
| ELIT 4123 | Topics - Early Modern Comedy | 3 |
| ELIT 4201 | Spenser / Spenser Lab | 4 |
| ELIT 4323 | Reading in the Renaissance: Literature and Media in Early Modern England | 3 |
Group 2
- The 18th Century
| Code | Title | Units |
|---|---|---|
| ELIT 3116 | Topics - The Savage and the Civilized | 3 |
| ELIT 3116 | Topics - Island Stories | 3 |
| ELIT 3125 | Selected Writers - Jane Austen | 3 |
| ELIT 4146 | Topics - Inventing The Novel | 3 |
| ELIT 4148 | Topics - The Secret Life of Things | 3 |
- The 19th Century
| Code | Title | Units |
|---|---|---|
| ELIT 3111 | Topics - Black Riders: 19th Century African American Print Culture | 3 |
| ELIT 3113 | River, Marsh, Coast - American Literature and the Environment | 3 |
| ELIT 3114 | Topics - 19th Century Science Fiction | 3 |
| ELIT 3117 | Topics - Gothic Traditions: From Frankenstein to Dracula | 3 |
| ELIT 3130 | A History Of The Golden Age Of Childrens' Literature | 3 |
| ELIT 3153 | Topics - Scribbling Women: 19th Century Women Writers | 3 |
| ELIT 4109 | Topics - Best Sellers and Baggy Monsters: Victorian Serial Fiction | 3 |
| ELIT 4109 | Wilde Times - Aestheticism and Decadence | 3 |
| ELIT 4109 | Topics - Literature and Religion in an Age of Doubt | 3 |
| ELIT 4110 | Topics - The Literature of Climate Change | 3 |
| ELIT 4110 | Topics - Henry James: The American in Europe | 3 |
| ELIT 4110 | Topics - Bodies in Pain: Disability and Illness in the 19th Century | 3 |
| ELIT 4112 | Topics - American Women Poets and the Trouble with Normal | 3 |
| ELIT 4112 | Topics - Whitman, Dickinson, and the Trouble with Normal | 3 |
| ELIT 4115 | Topics - Romanticism, Post-Romanticism and the Problem of Belief | 3 |
| ELIT 4118 | Topics - Refounding America: Emerson and the American Renaissance, 1836-1860 | 3 |
| ELIT 4125 | Topics - 19th Century American Drama | 3 |
| ELIT 4155 | Frankenstein: Origins and Afterlives | 3 |
- The 20th Century and Later
| Code | Title | Units |
|---|---|---|
| ELIT 3100 | The Great American Novel | 3 |
| ELIT 3105 | Caribbean Literature in English | 3 |
| ELIT 3105 | Topics - Welcome to the Party: Black Nightlife in the United States | 3 |
| ELIT 3106 | Topics - Gender and Sexuality in American Asian Lit | 3 |
| ELIT 3107 | Topics - International Modernism | 3 |
| ELIT 3111 | Topics - Asian American Fictions: Space, Place and the Makings of Asian America | 3 |
| ELIT 3111 | Topics - Asian American Writings: Contesting American Constructions of the Alien Other | 3 |
| ELIT 3112 | James Baldwin Now | 3 |
| ELIT 3113 | Topics - Turn and Face the Strange: Alienation and Transformation in Modern Literature and Contemporary Music | 3 |
| ELIT 3113 | Topics - The 1960s: Literature, Culture, Politics and the Beginnings of Now | 3 |
| ELIT 3114 | Topics - Excellent Women: Spinsters, Singletons and Sorcerers | 3 |
| ELIT 3114 | Topics - You Are Being Watched: The Work of Art in the Age of Surveillance Capitalism | 3 |
| ELIT 3115 | Topics - SF/SF | 3 |
| ELIT 3116 | Topics - The Nightmare Canon: American Horror Stories | 3 |
| ELIT 3117 | Topics- The Small Press in the 20th Century | 3 |
| ELIT 3118 | Topics - The Cultural History of the American Teenager | 3 |
| ELIT 3118 | Topics - Contemporary Women Writers | 3 |
| ELIT 3138 | Introduction to Postcolonial Literature | 3 |
| ELIT 3139 | Topics - Feminist Science Fiction: Reproduction, Death and the Beyond | 3 |
| ELIT 3139 | Topics - Law and Literature | 3 |
| ELIT 3140 | Topics - The Big World of the Little African Magazine | 3 |
| ELIT 3140 | Topics - The Multiethnic Graphic Novel in 20th and 21st Century American Popular Culture | 3 |
| ELIT 3140 | Topics - What If? On Counterfactual Fiction | 3 |
| ELIT 3142 | Topics - From Ghetto to Gated: Blacks and Jews in America | 3 |
| ELIT 3160 | Topics - African American Writers Since the Harlem Renaissance | 3 |
| ELIT 3161 | African Literature in English | 3 |
| ELIT 3501 | Topics - 30 Years Of Queer | 3 |
| ELIT 3501 | Topics - The Body in Pain | 3 |
| ELIT 3502 | Topics - Girls' Fiction | 3 |
| ELIT 3517 | Topics - Memory and Narrative: The Literature of Memory | 3 |
| ELIT 3518 | Topics - On Time: Clocks, Calendars and Crisis in Modern British and Anglophone Fiction | 3 |
| ELIT 3571 | Global Poetics | 3 |
| ELIT 4110 | Topics - The Novel and Globalisation | 3 |
| ELIT 4110 | Predicting A Bestseller | 3 |
| ELIT 4111 | Topics - The Harlem Renaissance at 100: Reconceiving Black American Modernism | 3 |
| ELIT 4111 | Topics - Food and Literature | 3 |
| ELIT 4111 | Topics - Diaspora and the African American Literary Tradition | 3 |
| ELIT 4111 | Topics - Popular Music and American Literature from Rag to Rap | 3 |
| ELIT 4112 | The Art Of Black Social Movements | 3 |
| ELIT 4112 | Topics - American Women Writers and Modernism | 3 |
| ELIT 4114 | Topics - Slavery and its Legacies | 3 |
| ELIT 4116 | It Did Happen Here - Authoritarianism and Anti-Authoritarianism in American Thought | 3 |
| ELIT 4127 | James Joyce's Ulysses | 3 |
| ELIT 4132 | Modernist Poetry | 3 |
| ELIT 4133 | Topics - Modern Irish Poetry | 3 |
| ELIT 4146 | Topics - Literature and Culture of the 1960s | 3 |
| ELIT 4146 | Topics - Fictions of the Anthropocene | 3 |
| ELIT 4148 | Topics - Queer Youth: LGBTQ Narratives of Coming-of-Age and Coming Out in North America | 3 |
| ELIT 4156 | Selected Writers - Virginia Woolf: Novelist and Feminist | 3 |
| ELIT 4299 | Research Lab: The Modernist Pre-History of Facial Recognition | 3 |
2. One course centered on either global or minority literatures
At least one 3000- or 4000-level literature course must be taken in one of the following areas:
- Global literatures in English, defined as the Anglophone literatures of Africa, the Caribbean, South Asia, and other non-British or non-U.S. territories
- Minority literatures of the United States or the United Kingdom, which include Anglophone African American, Asian American, Native American, Latinx, and Black British writing.
| Code | Title | Units |
|---|---|---|
| ELIT 3105 | Caribbean Literature in English | 3 |
| ELIT 3106 | Topics - Gender and Sexuality in American Asian Literature | 3 |
| ELIT 3111 | Welcome to the Party - Black Nightlife in the United States | 3 |
| ELIT 3111 | Topics - Asian American Writings: Contesting American Constructions of the Alien Other | 3 |
| ELIT 3112 | James Baldwin Now | 3 |
| ELIT 3126 | Selected Writers: Toni Morrison | 3 |
| ELIT 3138 | Introduction to Postcolonial Literature | 3 |
| ELIT 3139 | Topics - Passing: Identities Lost and Found | 3 |
| ELIT 3140 | Topics - The Big World of the Little African Magazine | 3 |
| ELIT 3141 | Topics - The Practice of Diaspora: Literatures of Race, Power and Cultural Crossings | 3 |
| ELIT 3141 | Topics - The Discontents of Globalization | 3 |
| ELIT 3142 | Topics - From Ghetto to Gated: Blacks and Jews in America | 3 |
| ELIT 3160 | Topics - African American Writers Since the Harlem Renaissance | 3 |
| ELIT 3161 | African Literature in English | 3 |
| ELIT 3420 | Topics - Masculinity and 20th Century African American Literature | 3 |
| ELIT 3571 | Global Poetics | 3 |
| ELIT 3881 | Topics - Black Women Writers | 3 |
| ELIT 4111 | Topics - The Harlem Renaissance at 100: Reconceiving Black American Modernism | 3 |
| ELIT 4111 | Topics - Diaspora and the African American Literary Tradition | 3 |
| ELIT 4111 | Topics - Popular Music and American Literature from Rag to Rap | 3 |
| ELIT 4112 | The Art of Black Social Movements | 3 |
| ELIT 4114 | Topics - Slavery and its Legacies | 3 |
| ELIT 4116 | Topics - The Digital Black Atlantic | 3 |
| ELIT 4505 | Interdisciplinary Topics in the Humanities: Freedom / Information / Acts | 3 |
| ELIT 4530 | Topics - Stars of the Canon | 3 |
| AFAS 3254 | African Americans and Childrens' Literature | 3 |
| AFAS 3451 | Topics in African American Literature - Rebels, Sheroes and Race Men | 3 |
| AFAS 3550 | Undoing Empire - Introduction to Postcolonial Writing and Art | 3 |
Courses applied to this requirement may also satisfy other English major requirements involving historical range (requirement 1) and the need to complete two 4000-level courses.
3. Genre sequence
Three creative writing courses specializing in one particular genre (poetry, fiction, or creative nonfiction) that follow the sequence: introductory (2000-level), intermediate (3000-level), and advanced (4000-level).
4. Electives
Three electives: one upper-level literature (ELIT) elective, one creative writing elective, and one creative writing elective outside the chosen genre of specialization. One of the two creative writing electives must be at the 3000 or 4000 level.
5. Additional information
- At least two literature (ELIT) courses must be at the 4000-level.
- Only one non-ELIT or non-WRITING course may be counted toward the 27 units required.
- A maximum of 6 units from the School of Continuing & Professional Studies and/or Summer School courses may count toward the major. These selections require English department approval.
- Study abroad students are expected to complete the 2000-level prerequisite courses and at least two upper-level courses in English literature before going abroad.
- 3 units of 3000- or 4000-level courses in the literature of a language other than English may be counted toward the English major, as an elective, provided that the reading for the course was done in the original language and that the course is not also being credited towards another program.
- Before the end of their junior year, majors are encouraged to consult with advisors regarding the fulfillment of major requirements.
6. Portfolio capstone
All majors are required to complete a portfolio capstone project, for which the student provides a 2000-level paper, a 4000-level paper, and a brief essay (two to three pages) that reflects on the student's overall learning experience in the major.
Creative Writing Specialization
There is the option of completing an English Literature major with a creative writing specialization. To do so, students must take five creative writing courses, including at least three upper-division courses. Students will specialize in one particular genre — poetry, fiction, or creative nonfiction — and, ultimately, take a three-course sequence (2000-, 3000-, and 4000-level courses) in that genre while taking at least one course outside of the chosen genre. The specialization requirements will not change the requirement structure for the English major and, thus, requires 6 additional credit units to complete as compared with a regular English Literature major. For more information, please consult the description of the major on the English department website.
Contact Info
| Phone: | 314-935-5190 |
| Email: | english@wustl.edu |
| Website: | http://english.artsci.wustl.edu |