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| American Studies - Home | Requirements | Course Atlas | Internships | Honors | ||||||||||
Course Atlas - Spring 2008Schedule subject to change - please check with instructor Note: Please contact the Administrative Assistant at The Graduate Institute of the Liberal Arts for appropriate forms on all Permission Required Courses. AMST 201SWR: Introduction to American Studies Tindal, MWF, 9:35am - 10:25am MAX: 18 Content: This course introduces students to the methods and theories of American Studies through the case studies. This seminar will examine six major events in American cultural history, ranging from the seventeenth through the twentieth century. The case studies will include a broad range of materials from various scholarly disciplines: literature, history, popular culture, material culture, ethnic studies, gender studies, and visual culture. Particulars: Requirements include an 8-10 page paper, a midterm exam and a final exam. AMST 212: American Identities Troka, TTH, 2:30pm - 3:45pm Content: At what point in their lives and at what level of their consciousness do the people of the United States understand themselves to be Americans? Do all Americans understand themselves to be Americans in the same way? This course will explore these questions--and others--through the examination of a number of materials that engage the issue of American identity. We will pay particular attention to the experience of immigrants and to the ways that issues of race, ethnicity, religion, gender and class complicate and enrich the formulation of American identity. This course introduces students to the issues and methods of American Studies. Texts: The reading list will include novels, autobiographies, essays and work in social and cultural history; students will be asked to discuss and analyze issues of Americanness in popular culture, music, visual art, and film as well as in written texts. Particulars: Informed and lively participation in discussion; frequent short writing assignments; several midsize essays; final exam. NOTE: Some sections will require evening screenings - check with instructor of section for details. AMST 321: American Routes Tullos, TTH, 10:00am - 11:15am MAX:15 Content:
This course explores the roots and routes of a variety of traditional and popular musics in the United States through an emphasis upon historical cultural formations, places and regions, genres, "scenes," songwriters, performers, and audiences. Where, when, and why do musical styles emerge and spread? How does popular music make meaning? How do musical streams influence each other? How does music express social identities, states of feeling, displacement and mobility, politics, and consumption? In examining U. S. popular music in historical and geographical context, we will also consider aspects of music recording, distribution, and consumption. AMST 322: Baseball and American Culture White/Dowell, TTH, 1:00pm - 2:15pm MAX:18 Content: The course will explore the cultural history of baseball from its beginnings to the present day, concentrating on the modern history of the game since 1903. We will approach baseball in light of sports and business, work and leisure, records and legend, changing realities and persistent societal myths, examining what has been called the “American game” not only for itself but for what it has to tell us about ourselves, our society, and our hemispheric neighbors. Texts: Books treating with baseball from a variety of perspectives, including: Benjamin Rader’s Baseball: A History of the Game, Frank Deford’s The Old Ball Game, Jonathan Eig’s Opening Day: The Story of Jackie Robinson’s First Season, Marvin Miller’s A Whole Different Ball Game: … the Baseball Revolution, Jane Leavy’s Sandy Koufax: A Lefty’s Legacy, Tom Stanton’s Hank Aaron and the Home Run That Changed America, Roger Kahn’s October Men: … the Yankees’ Miraculous Finish in 1978, and David Maraniss’s Clemente: The Passion and Grace of Baseball’s Last Hero. (Some texts will be read by the entire class, others will be the focal points of group projects.) Films, such as Eight Men Out and The Life and Times of Hank Greenberg, will supplement the written texts. Particulars: Regular class attendance and informed participation in class discussions of lectures, readings, and films are central components of the class. Assignments will include group class presentations, in-class quizzes, and a final paper in conjunction with the group project. AMST 364: Asian American Literature Nickerson, TTH, 8:30am - 9:45am MAX:18 Content: This course focuses on the rich literature that has come out of the Asian American experience. The course will focus on fiction and memoir, but will include some comics, poetry and drama. The emphasis of the course is on the cultural context of this literature, how it is related to the history of Asian-Americans, and how it expresses the subjective experience of a minority group. Major themes in the course will include the concepts of claiming voice and breaking silence; ways of writing about family and childhood; eating and cultural identity; exploring the past (both personal and collective); humor and parody as tools to fight against discrimination. Texts (tentative): Gene Luen Yang, American Born Chinese; Chang-Rae Lee, A Gesture Life; Julie Otsuka When the Emperor was Divine; David Henry Hwang’s Flower Drum Song; Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior; Andrew Pham, Catfish and Mandala; Jhumpa Lahiri, The Namesake, Henry Chang, Chinatown Beat; Patti Kim, A Cab Called Reliable Requirements: Frequent short writing assignments, two 3 page essays, one 8-10 research paper or critical essay, active participation in class discussion. AMST 385: Asian American Experiences Kim, MWF, 3:00pm - 3:50pm MAX: 18 Content:
Who is Asian American? What is American? What is the “immigrant experience?” This course examines these questions focusing on Asian American experiences in the United States in a hist orical, social, and cultural context. Issues of Asian American identity will be examined through nonfiction, literature, film, and arts. While the course is organized in a chronological order from the first wave of Asian immigration to the U.S. through the second wave of post-World War II up to the most recent groups of immigrants from South Asia, it is also divided by a number of important themes and issues. In all, this course will serve as an introduction to Asian American Studies that has been dedicated to examining the formation of complex American identities as a result of both historical and current global influences. AMST 385: The Documentary Imagination of American Roots Music Bransford, TTH, 4:00pm - 5:15pm MAX: 18 Content: This class will examine documentary film and photographic representations of American roots music from the late nineteenth century to the present. The emphasis will be upon blues and old-time music, but other styles will be considered as well. Films and photographs will be situated historically within both musical and documentary contexts, revealing connections between contemporary attitudes about vernacular music and various documentary practices. The class will examine key developments and movements in documentary photography and film (the FSA the emergence of photo-texts, the expository film of the 1930s and 1940s, direct cinema) and in the promotion of vernacular music (the folk revivals of the 1940s and 1960s, changes in folklore studies, the commercialization of roots music). Rather than offer a comprehensive survey of how blues and old-time music has been represented through documentary, the goal of the class will be to engage the issues that have been central to documentary and to American roots music, like authenticity, the depiction of social context, and the art vs. document debate. AMST 385/AAS 385/HIST 385: Segregation Gadsden, W, 2:00pm - 4:00 pm MAX: 15 (AMST 3/HIST 3/AAS 9) Content: This course explores the ideological and structural foundations of racial segregation and its attendant inequalities in American political culture from the period following the Civil War through the turn of the twenty first century. Texts will include: John David Smith, ed., When Did Southern Segregation Begin; Grace Elizabeth Hale, Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890-1940; Henry Louis Gates, Colored People; Kevin Boyle, Arc of Justice: A Sage of Race, CivilRights,and Murder in the Jazz Age; Kevin Kruse, White Flight:Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism; Matt Lassiter, Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South; Jonathan Kozol, The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America; Andrew Wiese, Places of Their Own: African American Suburbanization in the Twentieth Century. Particulars: Short responses to weekly readings, research paper AMST 385/ARTH 379R: Native American Art: Rupture and Reinvention MAX: 15 (AMST 5/ARTH 10) Content : Is there a Native American art? This course considers questions about artistic invention and reinvention and how these are related to issues of identity and authenticity in North American and art-world cultural politics. Beginning with the last cycle of conquest and pacification in the nineteenth century, we will consider the impact of such disparate forces as the opening of the Santa Fe railroad and the influx of Eastern tourists, trading posts and anthropologists. While some local arts such as Navajo women’s weaving and Pueblo pottery were transformed into desirable art market commodities, others such as Northwest Coast monumental carvings disappeared in the wake of radical social change and were only recently reinvented. We will also consider the effects of North American identity politics and government legislation on the work of artists who have emerged since the 1970s such as James Luna, Jimmie Durham, Fritz Scholde and Billy Soza War-Soldier. Texts : Robert Bringhurst, The Black Canoe; Frederick Dockstader, The Kachina and the White Man; David Penney and George Horse Capture, North American Indian Art; Ruth Phillips, Trading Identities; Ruth Phillips and Janet Berlo, Native North American Art; Ruth Phillips and Christopher Steiner, eds, Unpacking Culture: Art and Commodity in the Postcolonial World; Jackson Rushing, Native American Art and the New York Avant-Garde Particulars : The course will alternate weekly lecture and discussion formats. Students will keep a journal of course readings and discussion issues which will be submitted and graded. There will be at least one field trip to a collection. A research paper will be presented in class in the final month. Grading will be weighted as follows: research paper 60%, discussion 20%, journal 20%. AMST 385/AAS 385/HIST 385: African American Social and Political Thought Gadsden, TTh 2:30pm - 3:45pm Content : African American political culture is a site of rich and fervent debate, both in an inter- and intra-racial context. This course is designed to introduce students to the variety and complexity of African American discursive expression and explore the roots of African American ideologies and their relationship with social movements and the grassroots. Through the exploration of primary and secondary texts, students will be asked to consider varied and often competing visions of identity and freedom inherent in, among others, African American expressions of civil rights liberalism, civil rights unionism, Black feminism, Black Nationalism, and Black conservatism. We will pay special attention to the political economy of ideas and how black thinkers of varied stripes understood the “race problem”and, by extension, African Americans’ relationship with “America.” Primary texts will include : Booker T. Washington, Up From Slavery: An Autobiography; W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folks; Rayford Logan, ed., What the Negro Wants; Martin Luther King, Jr. Why We Can’t Wait; James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time; Juan Williams, Enough: The Phony Leaders, Dead-End Movements, and Culture of Failure That Are Undermining Black America—and What We Can Do About It. Particulars : Short responses to weekly responses, mid-term, final paper AMST 385/WS 475S: Feminist Intersections: Advanced Feminist Theory Garland-Thomson, W, 4:00pm - 6:00pm Content: This seminar focuses on several life narratives in which the authorial voice identifies explicitly with multiple subject positions. The vectors of identity in the primary texts are gender, race, sexuality, disability, ethnicity, and class. Authors will range from Helen Keller, a person who self-identifies as a transgendered person with cerebral palsy, a black mother with depression, a young deaf French actress, a young white woman with psychiatric disabilities, an immigrant girl with facial anomalies, to an aging wheelchair user. Close reading and narrative analysis of these primary works will be illuminated by feminist theoretical concepts such as identity, intersectionality, positionality, and subjectivity. Our analyses will reveal how multiple identities intersect, conflict, and are negotiated through narrative and identity formation. Particulars: Prerequisite is WS 301 or 302 or the equivalent or permission of instructor. AMST 490SWR: Senior Symposium Wallace-Sanders, TTH 11:30am - 12:45pm MAX: 15 Content: This course is designed to deepen students' understanding of American Studies as a field of inquiry with a unique history within the academy. Particulars: Permission Only Course AMST 495R: Honors Thesis MAX: TBA AMST 496: Internship for American Studies Written permission of the American Studies Director of Undergraduate Studies required prior to registration. For more information, please contact: Administrative Assistant, The Graduate Institute of the Liberal Arts, S415 Callaway Ctr.
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