Teachers, scholars, and writers in the program gain a better understanding of their own practices by seeing the extent to which each writer is also a literary critic, each teacher is also a writer and reader of literature, and all critics and readers are teachers and writers. The program is designed to extend and deepen the intellectual rigor of customary approaches to literature by examining issues these approaches often leave unaddressed, such as the history and institutionalization of the discipline, the relationship between theory and the practices of writing, teaching, and textual studies; and the process by which knowledge in the field of English has been and is constructed.