Department of Literary Arts

Department of Literary Arts
Name	Department of Literary Arts
Established	19th century
Type	Academic department
Location	University campus
Disciplines	Literature, Creative Writing, Comparative Literature

Department of Literary Arts

The Department of Literary Arts is an academic unit devoted to the study and practice of literary production and criticism, intersecting traditions represented by figures such as William Shakespeare, Homer, Dante Alighieri, Geoffrey Chaucer, Miguel de Cervantes, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Alexander Pushkin, Leo Tolstoy, Victor Hugo, Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Mark Twain, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Franz Kafka, Marcel Proust, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Sylvia Plath, Langston Hughes, Pablo Neruda, Gabriel García Márquez, Jorge Luis Borges, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Salman Rushdie, Kazuo Ishiguro, Haruki Murakami, Chinua Achebe, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Seamus Heaney, Derek Walcott, Wole Soyinka, Maya Angelou, Louise Glück, Bob Dylan, Samuel Beckett, Euripides, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Aristophanes, Sappho, Ovid, Virgil, Stendhal, Honoré de Balzac, Friedrich Schiller, Molière, Anton Chekhov, Ivan Turgenev, Nikolai Gogol, Bertolt Brecht, Federico García Lorca, Juan Ramón Jiménez, Octavio Paz, Italo Calvino, Umberto Eco, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, Rainer Maria Rilke, Arthur Rimbaud, Charles Baudelaire, Paul Valéry, Maurice Blanchot, Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Edward Said, Homi K. Bhabha, John Ashbery, Gwendolyn Brooks, Ralph Ellison, Cormac McCarthy, Don DeLillo, Philip Roth, Joan Didion, Margaret Atwood, Alice Munro, Annie Proulx, E. L. Doctorow, Ian McEwan, Zadie Smith, Nadine Gordimer, Vladimir Nabokov, Doris Lessing, Kurt Vonnegut, Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, Truman Capote, E. M. Forster, D. H. Lawrence, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Arthur Miller].

History

The department traces curricular antecedents to models associated with University of Paris, University of Oxford, University of Cambridge, Harvard University, Yale University, Columbia University, Princeton University, University of Chicago, Stanford University, University of California, Berkeley, University of Toronto, University of Edinburgh, University of Glasgow, University of Bologna, University of Salamanca, University of Leiden, King's College London, University College London, Sorbonne University, University of Vienna, Humboldt University of Berlin, Freie Universität Berlin, Sciences Po, University of Rome La Sapienza, University of Salamanca (Spain), University of São Paulo, University of Buenos Aires, University of Melbourne, University of Sydney, Australian National University, National University of Singapore, and Peking University; its formation reflects influences from movements linked to Romanticism, Realism (arts), Modernism, Postmodernism, Renaissance, Enlightenment, Neoclassicism (arts), Symbolism (arts), Existentialism, Postcolonialism, Structuralism, and Deconstruction.

The department underwent reforms inspired by archives and libraries such as British Library, Library of Congress, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Vatican Library, Bodleian Library, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, New York Public Library, and by patronage models echoed in institutions like Guggenheim Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, Ford Foundation, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation.

Academic Programs

Programs include degrees patterned after bachelor's, master's, and doctoral curricula comparable to offerings at Master of Fine Arts, Doctor of Philosophy, and professional certificates aligned with fellowships such as the Rhodes Scholarship, Fulbright Program, Guggenheim Fellowship, MacArthur Fellowship, National Endowment for the Arts, and awards like the Pulitzer Prize, Nobel Prize in Literature, Man Booker Prize, Costa Book Awards, National Book Award, Pen/Faulkner Award, Goldsmiths Prize, Hugo Award, Nebula Award, World Fantasy Award, PEN/Hemingway Award, and Polaris Prize (music).

Curricula emphasize workshops, seminars, and practicum modeled on programs at Iowa Writers' Workshop, Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, Tinker Foundation, MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, The Poetry Center at SF State, Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellows, and residencies similar to Scribner Residencies.

Faculty and Administration

Faculty appointments reflect scholars and practitioners associated with chairs and professorships named for figures and institutions like W. H. Auden, T. S. Eliot Prize, James Laughlin, Seamus Heaney Professorship, Johns Hopkins University, Brown University, New York University, Duke University, Cornell University, University of Pennsylvania, University of Michigan, Northwestern University, University of California, Los Angeles, Emory University, Rice University, Vassar College, Swarthmore College, Barnard College, Smith College, Bryn Mawr College, Pomona College, Claremont McKenna College, and professional organizations like the Modern Language Association, Association of Writers & Writing Programs, PEN America, Society for the Study of Narrative Literature, Creative Writing Studies Association, and European Society for the Study of English.

Administration frequently liaises with cultural partners including Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, Tate Modern, National Portrait Gallery (London), Smithsonian Institution, Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Lincoln Center, Carnegie Hall, Brooklyn Academy of Music, Royal Shakespeare Company, The Globe Theatre, Royal National Theatre, and publishing houses such as Penguin Books, HarperCollins, Random House, Simon & Schuster, Faber and Faber, Granta Books, Bloomsbury Publishing, Vintage Books, Knopf, Macmillan Publishers, Hachette Livre.

Research and Publications

Research spans literary history, textual criticism, translation studies, and creative practice with outputs in journals and presses like The Paris Review, Granta, The New Yorker, Poetry (magazine), The Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, The Sewanee Review, London Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, New Statesman, The Atlantic, Harper's Magazine, Nation (U.S. magazine), Times Literary Supplement, Critical Inquiry, PMLA, Modern Fiction Studies, Comparative Literature, Differences (journal), and academic publishers such as Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press, Routledge, Palgrave Macmillan, Columbia University Press, Princeton University Press, Yale University Press, Duke University Press, MIT Press, SUNY Press.

The department curates editions, critical anthologies, and monographs inspired by archival recoveries linked to collections like The Newberry Library, Huntington Library, Morgan Library & Museum, Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection, British Museum, National Library of Australia, and publishes through university presses and independent imprints, competing for honors such as the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, National Book Critics Circle Award, Baillie Gifford Prize, Women’s Prize for Fiction, and Cervantes Prize.

Students and Activities

Student life features reading series, slam poetry, translation salons, and editing collectives that network with festivals and prizes such as Hay Festival, Edinburgh International Book Festival, Cheltenham Literature Festival, Brooklyn Book Festival, Pen World Voices, AWP Conference, PEN World Voices Festival, Bungay Festival, Chelmsford Literature Festival, Perth Writers Festival, and mentorship programs linked to PEN International and World Literature Today.

Student-run journals and presses emulate operations at Poetry Northwest, Ploughshares, Tin House, Granta Student Publications, The Missouri Review, Glimmer Train, The Cincinnati Review, Salmagundi, The Antioch Review, Black Warrior Review, Other Voices, The Kenyon Review Young Writers Workshop, and organize competitions referencing awards such as the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize, Whiting Awards, Remainders Prize, Briggs & Stratton Writing Prize, and local fellowships.

Facilities and Resources

Facilities include seminar rooms, performance spaces, recording studios, and special collections reading rooms comparable to those at Bodleian Libraries, Cambridge University Library, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, National Library of Scotland, State Library of Victoria, Bibliothèque municipale de Lyon, Biblioteca Nacional de España, Biblioteca Nacional de México, and digital repositories interoperable with platforms like JSTOR, Project MUSE, HathiTrust, Google Books, and manuscript initiatives influenced by Digital Public Library of America and Europeana.

The department partners with translation centers, theater companies, and media labs modeled after Royal Court Theatre, National Theatre (UK), Schubert Theatre, BBC Radio 4, NPR, Ted Conferences, The Moth, Club de Traducción, and hosts visiting writers supported by fellowships like Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers.

Notable Alumni and Impact

Alumni have included award-winning novelists, poets, playwrights, critics, editors, and public intellectuals who have won prizes such as the Nobel Prize in Literature, Pulitzer Prize, Man Booker Prize, National Book Award, Kosovo Prize, Hugo Award, Nebula Award, Tony Award, Laurence Olivier Award, OBE, CBE, Order of Canada, Padma Shri, St. Louis Literary Award, and who have held posts at institutions including United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, European Commission, U.S. Department of State, British Council, Academy of American Poets, Royal Society of Literature, American Academy of Arts and Letters, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, MacArthur Foundation, Ford Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, Carnegie Corporation of New York.

The department's influence is visible in cultural policy, publishing trends, and curricular models adopted by universities such as University of California, Irvine, Boston University, University of Iowa, University of Arizona, Arizona State University, Florida State University, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Rutgers University, SUNY Stony Brook, University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, and international programs at University of Cape Town, University of Nairobi, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Beijing Foreign Studies University, Seoul National University, Kyoto University, Universidade de São Paulo, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Universität Zürich, and Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich.

Category:University departments of literature