Program Overview | Course Work and Requirements | Apply Now

MA Literature Track

The MA Literature track is designed for students who wish to extend their liberal education beyond the bachelor’s level, to acquire professional training for teaching in high schools and junior and community colleges, and/or to prepare for the PhD, the degree most often required for teaching literature and writing in four-year colleges and universities. In working toward such goals, students in this program should develop:

• a general breadth of knowledge of the main features and backgrounds of British and American literary history and an introductory, working knowledge of a number of significant and representative texts
• a basic knowledge of scholarly tools and critical theories, and the ability to apply them to critical analyses of sophisticated literary texts
• the ability to produce well-organized, well-written arguments that formulate and defend a significant thesis and that consider the individual texts at hand, the larger issues raised by those texts, the contexts into which those texts can be placed, and the research tools and resources available and appropriate to such arguments