Students at Harrison Middleton University design a program of study focusing on the subjects or authors that interest them. In the Master of Arts in Imaginative Literature students do an in-depth study of authors of Imaginative Literature and the ideas they write about. For example, students may include, but are not limited to, the following great ideas: beauty, desire, duty, emotion, experience, family, fate, happiness, honor, immorality, judgment, justice, life and death, love, man, memory and imagination, necessity and contingency, opinion, opposition, pleasure and pain, poetry, progress, prudence, punishment, reasoning, relation, sense, temperance, time, truth, virtue and vice, war and peace, wisdom, and world. Students may choose, but are not limited to, the following great authors of Imaginative Literature: Homer, Euripides, Aristophanes, Virgil, Dante, Chaucer, Rabelais, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Milton, Moliere, Racine, Swift, Voltaire, Diderot, Goethe, Balzac, Austen, George Eliot, Dickens, Melville, Twain, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Ibsen, and 20th Century authors of Imaginative Literature. During the first course The Great Conversation: The Cornerstone Course, the student, with the guidance of the Instructional Team, will make the decisions concerning her or his program of study that meets the curricular requirements of the University.

Upon completion of the Master of Arts in Imaginative Literature degree program, graduates will be able to design, implement, and complete a self-directed program of study in the liberal arts. They will have achieved the ability to think critically about major ideas in Western thought and to engage in rigorous discussion about fundamental questions of human existence. Successful completion of the master’s program requires, and in turn enhances, mastery of critical, analytical, synthetic, creative, and problem-solving skills through discussion and essay writing. Design and completion of a culminating thesis, practicum, or field project demonstrates an ability to carry out sustained library or field research on a designated topic as well as to synthesize and apply knowledge and skills acquired in the course of study. Specifically, the master’s level student will be able to construct logical, coherent, well-supported, creative, and compelling verbal and written arguments; to identify, analyze, evaluate, and exploit textual ambiguity while exploring complex ideas; and to develop synthetic arguments that draw upon multiple strains of thought. The hallmark of graduate study is a student’s ability to draw profound conclusions and create original insights that move beyond the text.