Brock’s English Department offers challenging academic study combined with practical experience in critical thinking and in writing. Our programs allow you to study contemporary and historical literary texts written in English within their cultural contexts, to gain strong writing and analytical skills and to improve your public speaking skills, through our small seminars.

The Department offers a broad range of courses in literature in English and in writing, rhetoric and discourse studies as well as Creative Writing options. The study of literature exercises in our students an imaginative, emotional and intellectual connection with and understanding of people of other places, times, backgrounds and challenges. The Department’s literature programs build valuable transferable skills in reading, historical understanding, working with culturally potent narratives and symbols, researching, and writing with clarity and resonance.

Such transferable skills contribute to our students’ potential as workers in our global knowledge economy, and as citizens positioned to contribute significantly to their local and broader communities. Studies in our writing programs imbue our students with the potential to become wordsmiths, people who can write convincingly, creatively and tellingly within a broad variety of cultural and professional contexts. All of our courses create the capacity in our students to be readers who can read critically in order to discern the underlying assumptions and the rhetorical strategies which inform all manner of written work and social texts.