English, Department & Faculty

The undergraduate program in literature considers poetic approaches to truth in the Western tradition by cultivating the study of lyric, narrative, creative, and rhetorical arts. Students explore how the best of the poets – broadly understood – envision nature and human experience, and how to express such insights with clarity, precision, and elegance.

A tradition of thought extending back to Milton, Sidney and Aristotle holds that literature imparts wisdom.

With respect to the kind of wisdom that governs human conduct, poetry promotes a grasp of reality superior to other ways of knowing in its combination of immediacy, lucidity, practicality, sensitivity to refinements, capacity to shape the affections, and adequacy to the whole.

This conviction guides literary study at every level of the curriculum pursued at the University of Dallas. The program in literature provides a course of study in those authors who best exemplify the capacity of imagination to grasp truth. Teachers and students seek to learn what the best of the poets understand of nature and human experience.

In this mutual learning enterprise, students and teachers are related as beginning and advanced students of their common masters, the major imaginative writers.