<p>William and Mary has a good, solid English Department. It prepares its best undergraduates well for advanced work. Johns Hopkins has a superlative but small program relative to the size of the university (probably not smaller in actual numbers than W & M’s, however). Undergraduate English majors get a ton of attention because most of the young 'uns at JHU are off doing biochemistry or the like. There is also a very strong, separate Creative Writing department and a Humanities Department which is basically Comp. Lit. plus some art history. There is lots of interaction among these related departments. It’s a pretty vital place (I did my PhD there) though some students find it too intense.</p>
<p>I don’t know anything about Washington and Lee, except that it’s a good all-round school.</p>
<p>If your son is interested in doing a PhD, he should write an honors thesis as an undergraduate. He will need to enjoy and excel at independent, original work in order to do well in a PhD program. It is hard to know whether you are good at this sort of thing just from your performance in “normal” undergraduate coursework. He should also continue whatever he’s doing to establish reading fluency, at least, in a couple of other European languages.</p>
<p>Although many students get excellent educations at LACs, my own feeling is that other things being equal, if your S is interested in getting a PhD in English, it will be very helpful for him if he goes to a school that itself has a distinguished PhD program. For one thing, if he’s a fine student, he can often arrange to take graduate classes in the later part of his undergraduate career (UVA has formalized this in a BA/MA program for exceptional students, and I suspect other schools have as well). Actually taking graduate courses, and doing well in them, at Cornell was crucial for me when I was assessing my future prospects back in the day–it’s a very tough and competitive field, and it’s hard to know how you stack up if you are only comparing yourself against other undergraduate English majors. Also, it’s very helpful to get to know graduate students on a social/intellectual basis. Universities with grad programs will also have events, e.g. series of visiting lectures, which are basically geared toward grad students and faculty but which are open to all. Most undergraduates ignore this kind of thing, but for a student interested in doing a PhD, such talks can be revelatory.</p>