has overhauled its undergraduate degree requirements for the first time in more than a decade, making the curriculum more diverse, engaging, accessible, and flexible, and introducing a cutting-edge, team-taught introductory course to bring all new majors together.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nBeginning this fall, all new English majors are required to take \u201cEncounters: Reading Across Time and Space,\u201d or EN 101, which introduces <\/span>students to canonical and noncanonical works from the middle ages to the present, within a global lens. The course encourages students to compare older works \u2014 by authors like Chaucer, Shakespeare, Wordsworth, and Gertrude Stein \u2014\u00a0to modern literary responses or \u201cencounters\u201d by contemporary authors like Kazuo Ishiguro, Patience Agbabi and Louise Erdrich. <\/span>Previously, there was no required 100-level course for all new majors.<\/p>\n\u201cThe new major is designed to introduce a diverse range of voices into the curriculum right at the beginning. This better matches the rest of our course offerings as a department, which have diversified in recent years,\u201d said <\/span>Associate Professor Joseph Rezek, who is co-teaching the course. \u201cThe course itself is fairly experimental \u2014 we hope it will be a new way to engage canonical works of literature, from Beowulf to the present.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\nThe class is currently team-taught by Rezek, who is also Director of the American & New England Studies Program, and Associate Professor Amy Appleford, Chair of the English Department. Going forward, faculty teaching the course will continue to have different areas of expertise to fit the scope of the curriculum, with one focusing on early<\/span> English literature and one in American or British literature of a later period, according to the department.<\/span><\/p>\nMaurice Lee, professor and director of undergraduate studies and outreach, said the goal of EN 101 is to better emphasize the history of English and its relationship to contemporary work. \u201c<\/span>The old major was very heavily focused on literary history told chronologically from the beginnings of English literature studies,\u201d he said. \u201cNow, instead of starting at Homer and working our way up to the present day, we designed this new course as a way to show how old lit and new lit are in conversation with each other.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\nThe \u201cencounters\u201d aspect of the course title also reflects students\u2019 own reactions and responses to the English literature they\u2019re learning about. As a result, one assignment in EN 101 tasks students with creating an \u201cencounter\u201d of their own with a text on the syllabus.<\/span><\/p>\n\u201c<\/span>This creative assignment can take the form of a literary work like a poem or a short story, or a performance, work or art, graphic novel, video, video game \u2014 any form they want. We are very excited to see what they come up with this semester,\u201d Appleford said.<\/span><\/p>\nThe new English major will also no longer require British Literature I (EN 322) or British Literature II (EN 323), although students are still able to take those courses if they wish. Other updates include changing the number of courses required. According to the English Department, newly-enrolled English majors now have ten required courses, rather than eleven. Also, the \u201cDiverse Literatures in English\u201d requirement\u2019s name was changed to \u201cPower, Identity, and Difference.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n\u201cThe older multicultural model represented a lot of different backgrounds,\u201d Lee said regarding the requirement name change, \u201cWe wanted to emphasize the importance of attending to power structures when talking about diversity.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\nCurrent English majors welcome the changes to the curriculum.<\/span><\/p>\n\u201cThey\u2019re moving away from a strict focus on the British canon and diversifying the literature,\u201d said Roni Lakin (CAS \u201925), who enrolled in the major before the new course. \u201cIt\u2019s also good that they\u2019re now getting all the English majors together in an introductory course during the first semester. It’s nice to meet people within your major right away. Beforehand, we were scattered out into different 100-level courses,\u201d Lakin added.<\/span><\/p>\n\u201cI definitely think the English major at BU was heavily Eurocentric and I appreciate that they changed it to be a study of literature through multiple lenses with more focus on diversity,\u201d Kritika Iyer (CAS \u201924) said. She agrees that the major was in need of an update.<\/span><\/p>\nLee said that one of the goals of the English major overhaul was to make the major more accessible. The <\/span>department also hopes that the <\/span>introductory course<\/span> will attract first-year students to English by illustrating the modern relevance of older literature, and \u201cshowing that the canon is still very much alive today,\u201d as Rezek said.<\/span><\/p>\n\u201cEarly on, we want to offer the range of materials you can study as an English major,\u201d said Lee, \u201cHopefully people will come to the class and think, \u2018there’s something here for me.\u2019\u201d<\/span><\/p>\nEN 101: Encounters: Reading Across Time and Space <\/span><\/i>fulfills a single unit for these BU Hub areas: Aesthetic Exploration, Creativity\/Innovation, Teamwork\/Collaboration. EN 101 will be offered every semester.<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"BY Katrina Scalise (COM\u201925) The English Department has overhauled its undergraduate degree requirements for the first time in more than […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":21329,"featured_media":31770,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[195],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63603"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/21329"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=63603"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63603\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":81682,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63603\/revisions\/81682"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/31770"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=63603"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=63603"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=63603"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}