A variety of options are available to undergraduates wishing to devote their major electives to further work in literary studies. Usually organized by some combination of genre, theme, historical period, or national, cultural, and ethnic focus, the English Department’s upper-division literature courses are numerous and are offered regularly.
Many students take upper-division literature courses because of an interest aroused in one of their ILP courses. Creative writing and rhetoric and composition students often take advanced literature courses to get a sense of the history of their own practice or to see what contemporary writers are doing, or perhaps both. Students with an interest in literary theory or cultural studies take courses which foreground these concerns in the selection and discussion of texts. And virtually all students take at least one course dealing in some way with contemporary literature, whether written in England, Hawai‘i, the continental U.S., New Zealand, Ghana, Canada, India, Samoa, or any other place where English serves as one of the languages of literature.