Mission Statement

The English Department at the College of Saint Benedict and Saint John’s University provides rigorous intellectual inquiry through the study of literature and the literary arts. Working closely with all our students, we foster skills in creative and critical thinking, effective writing, and scholarly research that prepare students for inspired careers and meaningful lives.

Learning Goals

Students will effectively employ their knowledge of textual elements to develop a sustained interpretation of a text and to defend that interpretation.

Students will produce a reading of a text that makes appropriate, sustained use of one or more literary or cultural theories.

Students will produce a composition that engages in and contributes to a larger conversation about a text and its relationship to its historical, cultural, aesthetic, or ideological context(s).

Students will independently locate relevant research and use it to develop an interpretation of a text or to create a new text.

Students will design and develop a rhetorically effective argument.

Students will create an effective composition that speaks in a distinctive voice.