An important role of English departments has been to create interpretations of the texts of various historical periods, including the present. The major in English at Carnegie Mellon builds on, and also extends, this tradition by training students to see texts as part of a complex web of historical conditions and relationships; by teaching major literary texts alongside nonfiction, functional texts, and public documents; by teaching the overlooked works of women and writers of color alongside well-known authors; by teaching comparative texts that highlight differences across literature and culture alongside the texts of the Western canon; by teaching film, television, and other storytelling media alongside conventional texts.

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