Course for Non-English Majors
Many students who are not English majors take elective courses in English for a variety of reasons. You may simply need to fulfill a College requirement, or you may wish to acquire more specialized training in writing and reading as a background to studies in other areas. Business, industry, and government service, as well as graduate and professional schools (business, law, medicine, social work, for example) now place heavy emphasis on a student's ability to write well and on the breadth of his or her educational background.
The English Department offers a number of elective courses which a non-major may take with no prerequisite other than English 110 or 120. These include courses in writing, editing, drama, the novel, and film (English 140, 150, 151, 152, 153, 154, 155, 156, 200, 201, 210, 211, 220, 225, 265, 280, 285).
If students majoring in such disciplines as history, art history, music, political science, and foreign languages intend to specialize in a particular historical era, they should consider taking English or American literature courses devoted to that period. For the Anglo-Saxon period through the Middle Ages and the early Renaissance, see the Undergraduate Bulletin's course descriptions for English 311, 312, 313 and 320; for the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, English 321 and 322; for Romanticism and Victorianism, English 323 and 324; and for American history students, English 253 and 254 (English 140 or satisfaction of the Humanities I, Tier 1 LASAR requirement is a prerequisite for these courses).
Non-majors may also be interested in Classical Backgrounds of English Literature (380), The Literature of the Bible (381), Literature and Religion (386), Literature and Politics (387), Literature and Psychology (388), Literature and Film (280 and 285), and such Irish Studies courses as 365, 366, 367, and 368.
