About English at UTC

"Unless you are at home in metaphor," Robert Frost once wrote—unless you are able to deal with the complexities, implications and surprises of figurative language, a language that surrounds us even in the worlds of advertising and science—then "you are lost."

It is the English Department's role both to teach students to write maturely and correctly on the literal level and to interpret and use metaphorical language. In the classroom, that role is carried out in four ways: basic composition; language, rhetoric, literature, and criticism; creative writing; and practical writing.

In the first case, composition, the student is acquainted with the basic rules of the language and its structures and also introduced to examples of clear and well-written prose.

In the second, language, rhetoric, literature, and criticism, the student is taught a reader's intimacy with the language and literature that has shaped our culture, with other literatures and languages that have influenced it, and with the main metaphors and symbols these languages have established, as well as rhetorical structures and theories behind writing.

In the third, creative writing, the student acquires a writer's knowledge of how these literatures are created in order to understand and experience the genesis and fruition of a work, but equally important, to gain a first-hand understanding of how to read fully—actively, rather than passively.

In the fourth case, advanced professional and technical writing classes, the student learns a practical application of writing in various formats for the worlds of business and science and for other disciplines in the humanities, with emphasis on the language, form, and metaphors (paradigms) in use in these fields.

Every aspect of the English Department's program attempts to communicate a sense of wonder and excitement about our written culture, and to engage the student's imagination. Students learn that whenever they read or write, complex and sometimes contradictory elements--factual, emotive, logical—must be apprehended, held in balance, and accorded appropriate weight. They must learn to identify and order intricate responses to arrive at a sound understanding of a written text or to produce clear and forceful writing of their own.

What students learn in the English Department should not only add to their inventory of competencies, but also enrich their experience of life. We who are their teachers know that the ability to understand and produce good writing is an invaluable mental resource. Pliny the Younger wrote:

Literature is both my joy and my comfort: it can add to every happiness and there is no sorrow it cannot console. So worried as I am by my wife's illness, and the sickness of my household and the death of some of my servants, I have taken refuge in my work, the only distraction I have in my misery. It may make me more conscious of my troubles, but it helps me to bear them with patience.

The various support activities of the department—the Works in Progress lectures by faculty, the Take Five public lecture series, visiting lecturers, the Meacham Writers Workshop, the Southern Writers Conference, various publications by students, and the like—all seek to provide the essential education Frost mentions, and the strength that sustained Pliny.