Welcome to English

Literature of one kind or another is at the heart of all human cultures. It comes into existence the moment someone tells a story or gives praise or laments or sings. It is human experience itself, expressed in the emotionally rich medium of language. At this university, papers in English are drawn from the literatures of all the major English-speaking cultures, and mainly from those of Britain, North America, Australia and New Zealand.

The study of literature is a study of the nuances of human nature and the imagination as represented by the inexhaustible subtlety of language. Literature is closely related to the other arts of painting, sculpture and music, and is fundamental to the newer image-and-language art-form of film, and to new academic approaches to culture studies. Students who major in English, even students who take just a few papers in English, find that English is about artistic questions, aesthetic questions, questions about the stability of language, questions of cultural meaning and value.