English

‎‎‏‏‎Everything we do in the English Department is built upon the conviction that our job is to bring the absolutely highest caliber literary education imaginable – comprising the best of what has been known and said and written and argued – to a student body selected with as little regard for the distinctions of status, wealth, background, color, and need as can be found at any major institution of higher learning. Our abiding specialty as a department is the intensive study of language, as formalized in centuries of works of literature. Our chief remit as scholars and teachers can be found in all that follows downstream from that: in questions of aesthetics, politics, media, history, knowledge – of all that transpires at the fractious interface of art and culture – as these are pursued with maximal methodological self-consciousness, precision, and clarity.

The work of our mission is pursued across several interlocking sub-specializations but they are held together by a shared commitment. We study the varying and sometimes contradictory ways that excursions into language can be transformed into meaning – and in our work as teachers and scholars we pay an especially exacting sort of attention to the processes by which such meaning is assembled, dispersed, freighted with joy or with anguish, and otherwise deployed into the larger world. These studies galvanize, in turn, several fundamental pursuits. In venues like the First Year Writing Program and the Writing Center, but also across the whole of our curriculum, we teach a fantastically large number of UIC students what it is to write, doing so through a set of approaches calibrated to the particular needs of our study body, and honed over years of research and training and adjustment. And then, by bringing the imaginative labor of written expression into vital contact with intensive practices of reading and interpretation, we usher our students into an especially versatile, responsive, practicable – and not infrequently exhilarating – mode of critical thinking.

Our mission thus condenses around three principles, roughly concentric in arrangement. Most practically, training in English equips our students with a range of extraordinarily adaptive skills, coveted by employers across sectors. Facility with language, interpretive agility, a live-minded responsiveness to conditions of ambiguity, multiplicity, contradiction, and above all an ability to *write*: these are aptitudes essential to work in tech, media, education, law, politics, medicine (as the record of our department’s internship program, for example, amply demonstrates). More largely, in the context of social and indeed planetary circumstances that grow every day more precarious, our work speaks up as well for the urgent necessity, not only of such practical aptitudes, but of the values they incubate – values without which “success” can come to mean little more than acquisition, “innovation” mere destructiveness, and even rightly cherished academic ideals like freedom of expression begin to operate as preemptive exoneration for the already powerful. Humanist inquiry of the sort we pursue in English, with its situated knowledges and cultural attunements and fine-grained attentiveness to the shifting complexity of ethical and moral life, gives restorative heft to these ideals. Finally, too, serious work in English prepares its participants, as virtually nothing else can, for the perplexities, battering sorrows, and errant joys of being alive in the world. The painful intractabilities of being human make for the ground-note of literary study, and this, we believe, invests all our work with an inexhaustibly valuable gravity, reach, and consequence.