The description of the English major on UNE’s website is only a small blurb. It gives a broad, but vague, explanation of what students should expect in their time here. It does not, and could not, include everything about what being an English major entails. The description actually relates to one paragraph in Scheuer’s work, “One [usage of the conceptions of the liberal arts]… embraces the ideal of the integrated curriculum, encompassing virtually all nonprofessional higher learning, from the natural and social sciences to the humanities and the performing arts.” By Scheuer’s words, it becomes clear that English is too broad a subject to accurately simplify it in a paragraph on a website. It also makes sense in the sheer number of learning outcomes for the major. Though most of the outcomes can be boiled down to reading comprehension and effective presentation, each one has a hand in the development of many aspects of the arts.
I finally found a different class description so I don’t have to keep using the same two or three. “Who and what is an American?” is one of the two required American literature classes. It looks at literature from the time of the Civil War to the present day. It seems to primarily focus on the historical side, but Boyer’s three essential questions can be used to see how and if this course fulfills the guidelines of an “enriched major”. “What is the history and tradition of the field to be examined? What are the social and economic implications to be understood? What are the ethical and moral issues to be confronted?” It’s already pretty obvious how the course is examined in a historical sense, but the social and economic implications are a bit trickier. For that, the description actually talks about some of the topics it will be exploring, such as “race, gender, and class relations.” These have always been very social issues, affecting many branches of life between slavery, segregation, and the discrimination still happening today. Morally, there has always been the fact that Americans descended more directly from Europeans and the government never treated others with much respect or fairness. There were the Japanese internment camps in WW2, the conflicting nature of the reservations for Native Americans, immigration, and, again, slavery. Looking at these issues and discussing them can help us investigate the moral dilemmas present in the history and literature of the time.
