As a discipline, the study of English literature and composition is relatively new when compared to mathematics or history. Certainly ancient and modern students read literary works carefully in and out of the classroom, but the formal category of a department emerged in the late nineteenth century. The discipline's central organization, the Modern Language Association, was founded in 1883. Since that time, English departments and professors have specialized to teach students language and literature.
Almost all college students, not just majors, must take some kind of introductory composition class, usually in their first year. The purpose of the composition class is to train students how to write at the college level and how to craft persuasive, organized and grammatically correct papers. Because nearly all disciplines require some degree of writing, making the composition course central to an incoming student's experience, the number of instructors teaching and studying English composition has grown considerably. Courses typically consist of writing a number of short essays, usually producing several drafts of each, and practicing different types of assignments, such as the research essay.
The literary survey is designed to give students a broad understanding of English literary history. Courses may cover large periods of time, say from Anglo Saxon England to the eighteenth century Romantics, and are usually taught with the help of a large anthology. Surveys propose to expose students generally to the movement of literary history, not always progressive or smooth, as a way of giving students another lens to understand history, culture and art. Instructors hope that survey courses will help students find a period or style they later will explore in depth.
Some professors of English literature continue to teach formal methods of literary analysis. Formalist approaches analyze poetic meter and form, generic categories and their history, numerology and other symbolic patterns within literary language, while recognizing rhetorical forms, such as irony, allegory or mimesis. Although courses in formal analysis are often neglected and ridiculed as dull and old-fashioned, students of English literature gain considerable insight when recognizing deliberate patterns in poetic language or rhetorical strategies to persuade audiences, methods still at work in any political contest.
While some English professors see the poem or novel as a work of art to be evaluated solely on its own terms, other professors study the work of literature in relation to its cultural moment or how it demonstrates certain theoretical frameworks. Marxists, feminists, historicist critics, to name a few, teach literary texts as examples of particular ideologies. This approach understands literature less as an independent object and more as a part of a larger cultural system from which it was born and to which it contributes. It is not enough, for example, to read a novel and annotate the allusions to the Bible or classical poetry; rather, it is more satisfying to see how the novel reflects the condition of women or how it challenges the period's racial stereotypes.