English

Department Overview

Read and discover Truth.

At Grove City College we share your conviction that literature is a source of God’s Truth and a path to wisdom and virtue. In the works of masterful writers like Homer and Shakespeare, Milton and Hawthorne, Dante and Austen, you will discover a great conversation: a treasure trove of rich meditations on such perennial themes as the nature of God, the reality of goodness, sin, salvation, and human identity. Some of these great works will lead you to deep questions, down into the moral battlefield of the human heart. (“Out of the quarrel with ourselves,” W.B. Yeats reminds us, “we make poetry.”) But a great many other works have the potential to lead you out of yourself, to show you what the Renaissance writer Philip Sidney once called “speaking pictures” of the good life. As we delve together into great works of literature, poetry, and drama, you will see that these imaginative “pictures” have the power to “speak” to your soul — forming your affections as a disciple of Jesus Christ and empowering you to share Truth with others.

Find your professional calling.

Your experience as an English major will not be just intellectually rich and spiritually formative. As evidenced by our 96% post-graduate career outcomes rate, it will also be vocationally empowering and meaningful. In a culture where the power of language has been reduced to the ever-lauded 140-character post, the ability and desire to care for words is more and more rare. Here at Grove City, your love of words will be celebrated and strengthened, developing the very way in which you see the world, and ultimately forming a lens and skill set highly sought after in the job market — from publishing and teaching to health care and media. Many of your forerunners here have entered top-notch law and graduate programs at the University of Pennsylvania, NYU, the University of Chicago, Duke, Baylor, and University of Notre Dame. Others immediately thrive in the workforce, at such companies as UPMC and Net Health, to Tor Books and Scholastic Publishers, to the U.S. Department of State and Carnegie Mellon University.    

Love language for life.

Your love of language is a beautiful gift — one given directly by the Creator — and we would be honored to walk with and guide you through your continued search for beauty and truth in literature, as well as your search for a rewarding career that fully employs your gifts. We hope you will join us in our pursuit of Christ through literary wisdom. As Augustine taught us, all truth belongs to Him, so wherever we find the scent of it — even, yes, in sonnets and plays, novels and essays — we find Him, the great Poet, the great Maker.