M.A. in English
Harrisonburg, USA
DURATION
2 Years
LANGUAGES
English
PACE
Full time, Part time
APPLICATION DEADLINE
01 Feb 2025*
EARLIEST START DATE
Aug 2025
TUITION FEES
USD 42,603 **
STUDY FORMAT
On-Campus
* february 1 for full consideration
** estimated in-state tuition and fees: 18,513 USD| estimated out- of-state tuition and fees: 42,603 USD
Introduction
The English department emphasizes preparation for Ph.D. work and advanced training both for secondary education teachers and those for whom an M.A. in English would enhance career options. We welcome students who, for whatever reasons, are eager to read literature on an advanced level, who enjoy research and writing, and who appreciate the responsibilities and pleasures of pursuing one's intellectual goals within an academic community.
The mission of the Master of Arts program in the department of English is to foster the growth of scholars, teachers, and writers at the early stage of their professional lives. It is also our mission to use literary study to broaden the horizons of students whose work lies beyond the traditional occupations of the English graduate. For these reasons, ours is a rigorous and broad curriculum that endeavors to create for each student the best possible circumstances for intellectual maturation and creativity.
We expect all of our graduates to read and think with disciplined insight, to be grounded in literary history, to explore both traditional and non-traditional canons, and to be adept at analyzing new works and understanding various critical perspectives.
Gallery
Admissions
Scholarships and Funding
For virtually all full-time students, the M.A. in English Program is fully funded. Students receive funding through a combination of Graduate Assistantships held by the English Department and partnerships with other offices on campus, which provide valuable professional experience that supplements their graduate coursework. Graduate Assistants receive a full tuition waiver and a stipend for their two years in the program in this multifaceted assistantship structure.
Curriculum
The minimum requirement for the Master of Arts degree is 33 hours of graduate credit in English. All students must take ENG 600 in their first semester. Completion of the second year of a college foreign language course or passing an examination demonstrating intermediate competency in a foreign language is required for all students of the Master of Arts degree. Toward the end of their course work, students must pass a formal M.A. examination.
All students should plan a program of study with the director of graduate studies in English before registering for graduate courses in English. In addition, each student meets with the graduate director for a mid-semester progress conference during the student’s first semester; after the first semester regular progress conferences are strongly encouraged.
Fall 2024 Graduate Courses
ENG 600: Research Methods
Introduction to research and writing in the discipline for beginning graduate students. Advanced training in research methods and citation, in critical analysis and scholarly writing, and in disciplinary history and the workings of the academy. Required for all Master of Arts students in their first semester.
ENG 602: Contemporary Critical Theory: Narrative, Fiction, and the Form of the Novel: Theories and Histories
Combining a formalist approach to the study of narrative with a genre-studies approach to the history of the novel, this course will dive deeply into debates about the origins, structures, interpretive possibilities, and social lives of novelistic narratives from the eighteenth century to the present.
How do the definitions, histories, and structures of narrative, fiction, and the novel overlap, intersect, and conflict? How do these categories operate to shape some of our literary and intellectual landscapes today? Most of the literary and theoretical works assigned in our course explore these questions from predominantly Anglophone, American, and/or European intellectual contexts; but students will have the opportunity to work beyond those (fluid) boundaries in some assignments.
Readings will include extensive engagement with theoretical texts. We will conduct close-readings of theory and of a variety of novels and novellas, possibly including works by Samuel Richardson, Charlotte Bronte, Jamaica Kincaid, and Margaret Atwood, among others.
ENG 612: Contemporary Black British Literature
A postcolonial examination of literature related to Black people in Britain and its Commonwealth.
ENG 672: Black Poetry Extravaganza
This course is designed to accompany the historic 2024 Furious Flower Poetry Conference, a once-in-a-decade event inaugurated in 1994. The 2024 conference, under the theme of “The Worlds of Black Poetry,” seeks to establish a space for transformative projects and conversations that center the worldwide, world-making energy of Black poetic expression, analyzing and celebrating its visionary abundance and planetary reach. Students in this course will volunteer at the conference, attend panels and performances with celebrated poets, and study Black poetry as a living art form.
Program Outcome
The goals of the English M.A. program are to:
- To excite and maintain in students a permanent desire for an expanded knowledge and understanding of the world through the study of diverse authors and genres.
- To help students to discover and appreciate the English language, and to learn how richly language clothes our responses to the world.
- To actively promote, through formal study, both the self-examination and the imaginative understanding that are among the central values of advanced study in the humanities.
- To encourage in post-baccalaureate students a broader, more formal inquiry into specific authors and movements in both western and non-western literatures, and to teach them by example the professional practices of reading and interpretation.
- To cultivate the practical talents gained by the study of literature: the ability to recognize the functions of analysis and synthesis in one's professional life, to construct an argument, to think critically, to write efficiently, clearly, and gracefully, to develop confidence in the validity of one's judgments about many kinds of writing, and to learn to see the interstices as well as the architectural whole in widely different encounters with the written word.
- To stimulate the kind of intellectual self-scrutiny and the passion for reading that will lead to successful work on the doctoral level, and to help students gain admittance into excellent Ph.D. programs throughout the country.
- To provide an opportunity for qualified students who are considering teaching as a career to work with faculty in large sections of sophomore literature classes or to teach their own first-year composition class through the awarding of graduate and teaching assistantships.
- To foster in those who are interested in pursuing careers in writing and editing, politics, business, nonprofit work or other less obviously English-related fields the kinds of attention and analysis that are concomitant with the formal study of vastly different kinds of writing fiction, poetry and drama, argumentation and analysis, opinion, review essays, and creative nonfiction.
- To both broaden and deepen the needed practical knowledge of the fields of writing, literature and literary history for future English teachers in high schools, business schools and community colleges.
- To offer career teachers of English a place to improve their knowledge of these fields and rejuvenate their commitment to the study and teaching of literature.
- To enhance the professional opportunities of career teachers of English through advanced study.
English Language Requirements
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