Book Smarts
By Kate Albiniak
Books on Benedictine Blanket
Photo by Kate Albiniak
Shakespeare. Virginia Woolf. Charles Dickens. Chaucer. Jane Austen. These are just a sampling of authors that are studied at Benedictine University in the English Language and Literature program. The Literature program provides students with an opportunity to study great authors of the past and present, while developing other critical skills to further education.
Perhaps the most important question is: why study literature? One reason is that by studying literature other worlds are opened up to students. According to Benedictine's Web site, "Literature, when read as a way of knowing the human, is not separable from other fields of culture."
That means that when a student studies literature, they study some of all subjects; literary text is analyzed by the time period and event in that time: war, poverty, riots, etc. In studying literature, you are also studying all aspects of cultures.
