Spring 2012 Course Offering

AMST  2220 - Race, Identity and American Studies Visual Culture

Carmenita Higginbotham

TuTh 9:30-10:45, Bryan Hall 235

This course surveys the role that visual culture played in constructing racial and ethnic identities in the United States from the mid-19th century to the mid-20th century.  Debates about immigration, nationalism, labor and urbanism will be explored through an examination of critical texts and images (including advertisements, cartoons, films, paintings and photographs.)  Importantly, the course will encourage students to engage with theoretical, ideological and aesthetic concerns regarding ethnicity, race, class and gender across media.

AMST 2300 - Introduction to U.S. Latino Studies

Daniel Chavez

TuTh 11:-12:15, Bryan Hall 235

AMST 3001 - Theories and Methods of American Studies

Sandhya Shukla

TuTh 11-12:15, Bryan Hall 332

Introduction to American Studies:  Space, Time, and Difference

This course explores the theories, methods and practices of American studies through a consideration of a variety of cultural formations of the United States over the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.  Central questions of our inquiry include:  who, what and where is the nation; and how has that nation been narrated over time?  We thus engage in close studies of the real and imagined geographies that writers, critics and other cultural producers traverse, and read different kinds of texts that offer contesting ideas of America.  The tension between the nation as complete and whole, on the one hand, and as diverse and fractured on the other, will be one that should prove productive for our discussions.

      At a critical juncture in the historical production of the nation, we approach the "American imaginary" formed not only at home but also abroad.  Is it possible now, has it ever been possible, to think of nationality as remaining within the geographical borders of the nation-state?  If we believe that race, ethnicity, gender and class are central to all narratives of domestic social life, how might "difference" mark worlds outside, that is both apart from and a part of the United States?  And instead of the conventional story of nations once being stable and now becoming increasingly fragile, might we reconceive of all nations, the United States included, as in a continuous process of formation?

Over the course of the semester, we shall develop an interdisciplinary interpretive practice that will allow us to approach such broad and sometimes abstract questions.  First, we attend closely to how and why things change over time; this is a historical sensibility that does not imply chronology.  Second, in reading texts and reading others reading texts, we analyze how stories are constructed, both in terms of form and content.  And third, we seek ways to understand the expression of the everyday - the experiences and world-views of US citizen-subjects.  We engage a wide array of materials:  novels, histories, political essays, films and more.

Grace Hale

MoWe 2-3:15, Nau 242

AMST 4500 - Fourth-Year Seminar in American Studies.

Anna Brickhouse

TuTh 9:30-10:45, Bryan Hall 330

AMST 4500-001/ENAM 4500-002 TRANSAMERICAN ENCOUNTERS

This comparative and interdisciplinary course focuses on the encounter between the U.S. and the wider Americas as represented in literature and film. Working across a range of historical periods, we will explore the varied and often unacknowledged international contexts underpinning some of our most familiar narratives of U.S. national identity and history. At the same time, we will pay particular attention to the different ways in which literature and other cultural forms can access histories, voices, and perspectives often not available within more official accounts of the past and present. Ultimately, the course aims for a kind of meta-conversation about our own modes of interpreting culture: as we move through the course, we will try to refine our self-consciousness of the different assumptions we bring to how we read texts, view films, interpret, and make arguments.

Jennifer Greeson

TuTh 9:30-10:45 Nau 242

AMST 4500/ENAM 4500, Autobiography and Nationalism: Writing an American Self

This course tracks the simultaneous emergence of the genre of autobiography with that of the United States of America itself. Since the colonial settlement of North America, life writing has been a primary mode taken up by writers posing the question, "What is an American?" To tease out the connections between writing the self and writing the nation in the United States, we will read a historical survey of American autobiographies from the late seventeenth to the late twentieth century.

At the same time that we read for historical change and social context in these books, we will also ask overarching questions about memory, narrative, and truth. Although "autobiography" is a literary term, we will explore the ways in which life writing has always had significance beyond literary studies--and this is true particularly in our own time, when all human perception is understood to be radically subjective, even as the autonomy and unity of the individual has been called into question as never before.

Sylvia Chong

TuTh 2-3:15, Bryan Hall 312

AMST 4500 - Censorship

This course examines the social, legal, aesthetic, and theoretical issues raised by censorship of art, mass media, literature, film, and music in the U.S. While censorship is usually associated with explicit sexuality, we will also look at cases involving racial stereotyping, violence, social disorder, and religion. Our cases will center around novels (The Satanic Verses), art (Robert Mapplethorpe), film (Birth of a Nation, Deep Throat), music (2 Live Crew), mass media, and other cultural phenomena. We will also read Supreme Court and appellate court cases and theoretical texts by Sigmund Freud, Michel Foucault, and Judith Butler.

AMST 4893 - Independent Study in Asian Pacific American Studies

AMST 4993 - Independent Study

AMST 4999 - Distinguished Majors Thesis Seminar

Matthew Hedstrom

We 3:30-6, Bryan Hall 312

This course is required for fourth-year DMP students in American Studies. Most of our time will consist of workshopping outlines and drafts of the thesis projects, and discussing issues related to research and writing in American studies. We will also read and critique a few short pieces as models of American studies writing. The one required text is Kate L. Turabian, A Manual for Writers of Research Papers, Theses, and Dissertations, 7th ed. Make sure to get this substantially revised new edition.