English

The Bucknell English Department provides students with opportunities for intensive study in language and literature. Courses in English introduce students to important works of literary art in the English and American literary traditions, to other national and regional literary traditions in English, and to diverse and multicultural voices and traditions. Students in English classes learn to express themselves critically and creatively, developing a sensitivity to language and precision in writing and speech as well as analytical skills that will serve them well in their other university courses and in their professional lives following their education at Bucknell.

Fall 2009 Course Offerings and Major Requirements

Spring 2010 Course Offerings and Major Requirements

 

The Toni Morrison Society, an official author society of the American Literature Association, has been affiliated with Bucknell since July 2008, when Bucknell became the Society's official institutional home. Professor of English Carmen Gillespie is the Executive Director.

The University offers merit awards to support emerging artists on campus, a program coordinated by the Office of Admissions. For more information, please visit www.bucknell.edu/admissions/arts.

Faculty Spotlight

Alf Siewers Publishes New Book, Strange Beauty, Ecocritical Approaches to Early Medieval Landscapes, (Palgrave MacMillan, 2009)

Strange Beauty brings the developing discipline of environmental literary criticism to bear on narratives of nature and the Otherworld from early cultures around the Irish Sea. Reflecting on an Otherworld associated with human experience, Siewers uses texts such as the Ulster Cycle and the Mabinogi to relate views of nature, symbolism and language. This book uncovers early syntheses of Christian and indigenous Insular cultures which express an integration of the spiritual and physical landscapes that are marginalized in later medieval thought. Strange Beauty opens a window on distinctive alternative views of the relation of culture to nature still relevant today.

 

 

 

Ghislaine McDayter Publishes New Book, Byromania and the Birth of Celebrity Culture, (SUNY Press, 2009)

Byromania and the Birth of Celebrity Culture argues that Byron's popularity, particularly among women, marked the beginning of celebrity as a cultural industry. For nearly two hundred years, Romantic criticism has maintained distinctions between Byron the politically engaged poet and Byron the object of obsessive feminine adulation, or "Byromania." Ghislaine McDayter asserts that this distinction results more from the preferences of critics rather than discrepancies inherent in Byron's poetry. Drawing upon recent scholarship on nineteenth-century politics of sexuality and perversity, this book extends the discussion into the realm of feminine desires and fantasy. Rather than isolating Byron from the mania he excited, McDayter uses unpublished fan letters and anonymous contemporary poetry to argue that it was precisely Byron's involvement with popular culture and feminine hysteria that in part made him so politically influential. In essence, Byromania marked the emergence of a celebrity culture and a feminization of popular culture that has endured to the present day.

 

Student Spotlight

Writers of Rohan

Student Publications

• Fire and Ice
• The Sidecar