Corridors was founded in 2007 to showcase best essays in foundation courses in the English major and ran until 2014.
In its new iteration, as a journal of best undergraduate essays in English and Communication studies, Corridors showcases essays that best demonstrate course objectives in literary analysis and explication, creative writing, professional writing, communication studies, and the application of literary and rhetorical theory.
In 2007, we chose the title Corridors from Emily Dickinson’s poem # 670, “One Need Not Be a Chamber—to Be Haunted”:
The Brain has Corridors—surpassing
Material Place
which suggests what we believe the best essays do: take us down one of the corridors the brain opens up, move us beyond the material or location at hand to some new place. These corridors are both connected and open-ended, but the journey is not without risk:
Far safer through an Abbey gallop,
The stones achase,
Than, moonless, one’s own self encounter
In lonesome place.
And yet, we think, the essays that students write in foundational and upper-level English classes represent moments when they best accomplish the goal of English studies: to find company in one’s loneliness and light in the darkness; to connect to both the self and the Other. We hope that these essays, through the articulation of students’ ideas and explorations, will also serve to connect our students to the larger academic community and beyond, to the free marketplace of ideas we enter each day.
We hope you enjoy the essays!
Acknowledgments
We would like to thank the UMass Dartmouth Center for Teaching Excellence (renamed the Office of Faculty Development) for seed funding for the research and development of the project through a CTE Teaching Institute Grant to Professor Evans and to the English & Communication Department for its continued support.