Department of English

is spoken by more people than any other language in the world. It has a rich literary history that spans the globe, from Britain and America to India, the Caribbean, Oceania, Africa, and many other places besides. These far-flung traditions arose because of British and American colonialism, in a history that our curriculum and our faculty interrogate in depth. And yet, while words have been used to control and repress, language itself cannot be ruled or governed; as Virginia Woolf wrote, English words have “gone a-roving, a-roving,” freely rebelling against any authority that would “stamp them with one meaning, confine them to one attitude.” Words are “highly democratic,” Woolf writes; “there are no ranks or titles in their Society.” To write great literature, she notes, we must “allow words their liberty.” In her Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Toni Morrison contemplates the life and death of language. A dead language is not only one no longer spoken or written, but any language that is “censored and censoring” and that “has no desire or purpose, other than maintaining the free range of its own narcotic narcissism, its own exclusivity and dominance.” The writer’s responsibility, in contrast, Morrison says, is to make language live. This is what you will be doing in the classes you take at USC, whether you are considering romantic poetry or contemporary television, whether you are exploring the history of the novel or writing one yourself.