A note from the department chair
The English faculty at Ouachita believes that through your diligent study of the English
language and literature, you will gain practical skills. You will learn to read carefully
and analytically, looking for ways the parts relate to the whole. You will wrestle
with complex ideas, ambiguity and multiple interpretations. You will learn more words,
and you will learn more about words--their histories, complexities and mysteries.
In short, you will learn to read complex texts and you will learn to write more clearly.
Whether your future holds law school, Sunday school, high school, or homeschool, your
diligent studies in English will enrich your work for God's kingdom.
To these very useful skills of analysis, synthesis, and verbal expression, studying
English will increase your appreciation for beauty and design. You will study the
forms of literature in a way that will allow you to move beyond impulsive reactions
to works of art; you will gain an appreciation for whatever is truly lovely, and you
will discriminate between the tawdry and the genuine, the false and the true, the
mediocre and the excellent.
Because literature by its very nature explores what it means to be a human being,
it confronts the questions that humans have always faced, questions about fate and
free will, about our place in the cosmos, about our relationships with each other.
Literature does not merely tell us about these questions; rather, literature presents
human experiences in a concrete form. Thus, if we as readers will submit ourselves
momentarily to the premises and demands of the work before us, then we can safely
encounter a limitless number of human stories. We agree with C.S. Lewis, who describes
the expansive effects of reading by saying “I become a thousand men and yet remain
myself.”
Above all, while there are many skills we gain from studying language and literature,
we believe that such study changes us; we study literature not merely for what it
will do for us, but for the great good it does to us.
On behalf of the English Department faculty, I hope you will be enriched and challenged
by your studies in English. God be with you.
Dr. Doug Sonheim
Professor of English