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Fall 2008 Courses

AMS 150 Introduction to American Studies
This introduction to the field of American Studies examines American personal and national identity through an interdisciplinary study of American culture. It seeks to introduce students to an American Studies perspective on scholarly work, while emphasizing how race, ethnicity, class and gender have functioned historically in the United States. The course challenges standard definitions of “text” and “reading,” as well as what is typically considered “American” or “America,” and insists on a multilayered investigation of history, artistic production, and culture. While America has never been one thing to all its citizens, constant recreations of America are visible in such enduring concepts and themes as nation, memory, patriotism, family, the American Dream, social justice, the land, leisure, work, and liberty. As befits and American Studies approach, we will incorporate a variety of academic disciplines and ask how a multiplicity of cultural forms--essays, photographs, novels, films, songs, legal opinions, paintings, architecture, advertising, artifacts of material culture, and the physical landscape itself--shape and are shaped by the historical moment and the contexts in which they appear.
Karina Skvirsky, TR 11:00-12:15

AMS 362:01 Topics Seminar— Topics in Black Literature & Culture
This is a course that will examine the complicated ways in which contemporary black intellectuals have responded to what black novelists, poets, and playwrights produced during the second half of the twentieth century. [W]
Bryan Washington, MWF 3:10-4:00

ENG 386/AMS 362 Topics Seminar— Native American Literature & Culture
Gerald Vizenor argues, “Native American identities are created in stories.” This course surveys imaginative literature and autobiography written by Native Americans of North America from the seventeenth century to today. The range of tribal and regional selections will enable us to engage with a broad set of theoretical questions that have given rise to Native American Studies: What constitutes “Indianness”? Who or what is “Indian”? How do questions of cultural ownership – intellectual property and land – shape concerns and the production of texts? How do indigenous responses to the history of European racial, ethnic, and religious differentiation give us leverage on questions of cultural politics – colonization, race, class, ethnicity, and religion? [W]
Melinda DiStefano—TR 9:30-10:45

AMS 363 Senior Research Seminar
This is the required capstone course for all American Studies majors. The purpose of the seminar is to enable majors the opportunity to conduct in-depth scholarly work on a topic of their own choosing, and to work through the stages of research in a collaborative, workshop setting. Seminar participants are encouraged to integrate and deepen the diverse disciplinary perspectives to which they have been exposed in previous courses. The main project, typically an argumentative research paper 40-55 pages in length, must be based on original, primary source materials collected, scrutinized, and documented by the student (e.g., advertisements, films, paintings, photographs, reports, buildings, letters and diaries, oral interviews). [W]
David Shulman, MWF 11-11:50

Spring 2008 Courses

AMS 150—Introduction to American Studies
This class is an introduction to the field of American Studies, an interdisciplinary and scholarly approach to American culture, history, and identity. By examining different historical eras, different texts, and different points of view, the class will ask what we mean when we talk about our identity as Americans, or our country as "nation." We'll think about topics such as the role of the land in the American psyche, national memory, immigration, and the American Dream. We'll consider race, class and gender in America, and we'll address these issues using a variety of sources: essays, novels, songs, photography, painting, architecture, journalism, government documents, films/documentaries, advertising, and material culture.
Liz Rosen—TR 1:15-2:30 pm

AMS 352—The Story of World War II
World War II was perhaps the greatest story, as well as the greatest catastrophe, in human history. This course will tell the epic story of the war through the words of American soldiers, sailors, and airmen, as well as nurses, war correspondents, and innocent civilians caught in the ruin and agony of the world’s first total war, a war fought without mercy or letup. Primary sources will include letters and diaries from the front lines, war reportage, and novels and films made during and after the war.
Don Miller—MT 7:00-9:50 pm

AMS 362.1—Photography and Memory in American Culture
This class considers representations of the American landscape in photography and film and how they both shape and construct perceptions of American identity. Students will learn how to read photographs as texts, consider how ³place² acts as a marker for collective memory, and examine how historical events have impacted the American landscape.  Texts will be historical and theoretical requiring in-class participation and dialogue in addition to analytic thinking.  A central portion of this class will focus on laying the groundwork for looking at and analyzing photographs in relationship to their context. Thematic points of interest include 1) the American landscape and its metaphors 2) thinking about the representation of race and identity through photography and film and 3) considering sites of trauma through images. One or two class field trips, outside-of-class film screenings, weekly writing assignments, an analytical research paper and a photographic research project are all part of the requirements for this class. [W]
Karina Skvirsky—MW 11:00-12:15 pm

AMS 362.2—The American Fifties
This course introduces students to the varied and complex works of literature written in the United States during the 1950s. Although our contemporary imagination tends to fix the fifties as an era of poodle skirts, bomb shelters, and conformity, our course will question these assumptions and present the decade as a dynamic period of social change and literary innovation. Throughout the fifties, figures of authority told Americans what was normal and what was not; our course texts will challenge, correct, amplify, or otherwise analyze what was trumpeted to be normal or natural. We will engage a range of cultural materials, mostly novels, but also short stories, poetry, and film. Probable texts are J.D. Salinger’s Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, Flannery O’Connor’s A Good Man Is Hard to Find, John Okada’s No-No Boy, Jack Kerouac’s The Subterraneans, Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, Alice Childress’s Trouble in Mind, Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, and Philip Roth’s Goodbye, Columbus. Likely required films include Rebel Without a Cause, Blackboard Jungle, and Imitation of Life. [W]
Steve Belletto—MW 11:00-12:15 pm

AMS 362.3—Economic History of the United States
Employing an economic approach, this course will explore a number of topics relevant to an understanding of the American experience over the past four centuries. In many ways, this is a course in economic development. During the semester we will study a number of institutions and developments believed to be critical to the United States' ascendancy from a marginal country on the periphery of the Atlantic economy to the dominant economy in an increasingly globalized world. Because the US is a country of immigrants, the course begins with the arrival of the first Europeans and Africans, asking how and why they came and what they found when they got here. Our study of immigration will trace immigration patterns from the eighteenth through the twentieth century, considering who came, their effects on the economy, and how quickly they assimilated after arrival. From immigration we turn to education, and explore the consequences of the US's unique educational experiments of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Next, we will consider the role of technological and scientific advance. Why were Americans so inventive? Was inventiveness a response to cultural, institutional, or economic incentives? After gaining an appreciation for the contributions of labor and capital, the course will turn to a less appreciated source of economic development, namely, financial development. Capitalism depends on the development of financial instruments and financial intermediaries. We will discuss how banks and other financial institutions influenced growth. The semester will conclude with a look at several "Topics" in economic history, including several episodes or events that have recently intrigued and occupied the attention of economic historians. [W]
Howard Bodenhorn—TR 2:45-4:00 pm

 AMS 362.4—Inventing America: The American Revolution
The title above takes us into this course in two ways.   First, it means that we will look at the “writings”—whether handwritten, printed, or spoken—that surrounded, and in some cases spurred, the American Revolution, starting with texts from the 1750s and continuing to the war’s end in 1783.  Second, we will explore the ways in which American writers (a complicated term, as we shall see) processed their understandings of the Revolution and sought ways to declare literary independence from (or dependence on) British literature.  We will explore a range of genres, as different forms of writing lent themselves to different kinds of action and meaning-making—a speech could win votes in a legislature, while a letter could forge or sever intimate alliances, for instance.  Central themes include the interplay between politics and literature, the shift from colonial to national identity, the importance of region, women’s culture, discourses of slavery, the history of print production, and the centrality of performance in public cultures. [W]
Chris Phillips—MWF 10-10:50 am

Fall 2007 Courses

AMS 150: Introduction to American Studies
This course examines American culture from a variety of scholarly perspectives. We will use the unique vantage points of different disciplines (such as Sociology, English, History, Art) to investigate different historical eras and many kinds of texts, including: autobiography, biography, law and social policy, painting, photography, music, advertising, criticism, film, ethnographic research, speeches, poetry, novels, artifacts, and the built environment. We will look at crucial American themes from an interdisciplinary perspective, exploring some experimental textual forms and artifacts of questionable origin (social critique in novels and photographs, talk show appearances, counterfeit souvenirs, video performance, “secret’ flight logs, and web commentary). Examining questions of authorship, authenticity, and legitimacy will help illustrate the boundaries of American Studies and the audiences for American texts.
Caroline Lee, TR 11:00-12:15

AMS 362:01: Topics Seminar—American Decades: The 1920s
Bootleg gin, short skirts, and "bobbed" hair, financial boom and bust—this arguably is the Twenties of our imagination. But is there another way to look at the period? For its literary preoccupations are undeniably social—social in the Marxist sense; social, then, as in radical, but also, paradoxically, social as in conservative. Work—socio-textual work, that is—will be the focus of a course including writers as different and as similar as Hurston, Fitzgerald, Hughes, Faulkner, Locke, and Cather. [W]
Bryan Washington, MWF 3:10-4:00

AMS 362:02: Topics Seminar—America, a Hydraulic Society
This course examines the various ways in which our culture interacts with and is dependent upon water resources, with particular emphasis on the social and cultural interactions involving water use, control, and perception. Topics covered include the social impacts of the Erie Canal and Niagara Falls, the history and mythology of the Mississippi River, and the complexities of the recent New Orleans/Gulf Coast hurricane tragedy. We will examine issues such as the urban/rural tensions resulting from municipal water supply development in New York City and Los Angeles, study how the Grand Canyon came to be perceived as "Grand" by the American public, and explore Damn disasters and government propaganda. Historical texts, film, music, material and popular culture will all be means for investigating the meanings of American society and the hydraulic environment. [W]
DC Jackson, W 1:10-4:00

AMS 362:03: Topics Seminar—American Renaissance
The 1840s and the 1850s brought about drastic change in the United States: industrialization, immigration, expansion, and internationalization were just a few of the major phenomena that shaped the US in an age marked globally by revolution and reform movements. This course will explore the decades leading up to the Civil War by examining texts canonical and obscure, literary and political. Major themes will include the development of nationalism and Romanticism, the place of slavery in American life, the interplay between discourses that we now see as distinct (such as science and art), the impact of emerging technologies such as steam and photography on American culture, and the relationship between sound, image, performance, and print in an age strangely familiar to us-and just plain strange. While many of the texts this course will examine are identified as “literary,” we will use interdisciplinary modes of analysis to find multiple uses for those texts, as well as to ask the question of what constitutes the literary. And at the heart of the course is the question: just what is the American Renaissance? [W]
Chris Phillips, MWF 10-10:50

AMS 363: Senior Research Seminar
This is the required capstone course for all American Studies majors. The purpose of the seminar is to enable majors the opportunity to conduct in-depth scholarly work on a topic of their own choosing, and to work through the stages of research in a collaborative, workshop setting. Seminar participants are encouraged to integrate and deepen the diverse disciplinary perspectives to which they have been exposed in previous courses. The main project, typically an argumentative research paper 40-55 pages in length, must be based on original, primary source materials collected, scrutinized, and documented by the student (e.g., advertisements, films, paintings, photographs, reports, buildings, letters and diaries, oral interviews). [W]
David Shulman, MWF 11-11:50

Spring 2007 Courses

AMS 150: Introduction to American Studies
This introduction to the field of American Studies examines American personal and national identity through an interdisciplinary study of American culture. It seeks to introduce an American Studies perspective on scholarly work, while emphasizing how race, ethnicity, class and gender function in the United States. The course expands standard definitions of "text" and "reading," as well as what is typically considered "American" or "America," and insists on a multilayered investigation of history, artistic production and culture. While America has never been one thing to all its peoples, constant re-creations of America are visible in such enduring concepts as nation, memory, citizenship, the American Dream, the frontier, justice and civil liberties, family, war, work, leisure, and patriotism. As befits an American Studies approach, we will strive to embrace a variety of disciplines and will consider the ways in which a multiplicity of texts and cultural forms--essays, novels, film, comix, letters, poetry, songs, legal opinions, photography, architecture, painting, journalism, advertising, web sites, government documents, artifacts of material culture, and the physical landscape itself--shape and are shaped by the historical moment in which they appear. We will question the persuasive strategies of American texts while simultaneously exploring some of the historical and mythic contexts from which various American texts arise. In this same tradition, students will scrutinize their own and each other's writing strategies as they develop original argumentative analyses of American culture.
Caroline Lee MWF 11:00-11:50 AM

AMS 362.01: Seminar—Photography and Memory in American Culture
This class considers the American landscape, through photographs and as a site for public art, in its role as both defining and constructing perceptions of American identity. Students will learn how to read photographs as texts, consider how “place” acts as a marker for collective memory, and examine public artworks like Maya Lin’s Vietnam memorial and the dialogue they engender.  As part of this class students will pursue a photographic/art project in which they will explore the city of Easton as a site to uncover hidden histories. [W]
Karina Skvirsky TR 11:00-12:15

AMS 362.02: Seminar—The Beat Generation in American Culture
Who were the Beats? Were they romantic literary geniuses? Know-nothing bohemians? Engaged cultural critics? Political dissenters? Criminals? Religious mystics? An exclusive Boys-Only club? Pre-Hippies? Drug addicts? Stylistic innovators? All of the above? This course will take a cultural studies approach to examine the “Beat Generation” as it was constructed by the Beats themselves and by the culture in and against which they wrote and lived. We will look at how Beat texts initiate a conversation with the values and self-image of America from the 1940s to the 1960s. We will read both important Beat literary texts—including novels, poetry, memoirs, and letters—and relevant historical, political, cultural, and sociological material. The course will be organized around the work of such figures as: Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Neal Cassady, John Clellon Holmes, Carolyn Cassady, LeRoi Jones (Amari Baraka), Hettie Jones, Ann Charters, Diane DiPrima, Gregory Corso, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Alan Watts, Paul Goodman, Joyce, Johnson, Norman Podhoretz, Diana Trilling, and Norman Mailer. [W]
Steven Belletto MW 11:00-12:15

Fall 2006 Courses

AMS 150: Introduction to American Studies
This introduction to the field of American Studies examines American personal and national identity through an interdisciplinary study of American culture. It seeks to introduce an American Studies perspective on scholarly work, while emphasizing how race, ethnicity, class and gender function in the United States. The course expands standard definitions of "text" and "reading," as well as what is typically considered "American" or "America," and insists on a multilayered investigation of history, artistic production and culture. While America has never been one thing to all its peoples, constant re-creations of America are visible in such enduring concepts as nation, memory, citizenship, the American Dream, the frontier, justice and civil liberties, family, war, work, leisure, and patriotism. As befits an American Studies approach, we will strive to embrace a variety of disciplines and will consider the ways in which a multiplicity of texts and cultural forms--essays, novels, film, comix, letters, poetry, songs, legal opinions, photography, architecture, painting, journalism, advertising, web sites, government documents, artifacts of material culture, and the physical landscape itself--shape and are shaped by the historical moment in which they appear. We will question the persuasive strategies of American texts while simultaneously exploring some of the historical and mythic contexts from which various American texts arise. In this same tradition, students will scrutinize their own and each other's writing strategies as they develop original argumentative analyses of American culture.
Andy Smith MWF 2:10-3:00 PM

AMS 362:01: Seminar in American Studies--Inventing America
Pocahontas and John Smith. An errand into the wilderness. A Great Awakening. The profit and terror of the slave trade. The construction of and threats to a great political ideal and art. The Indian "problem." The emergence of distinctive American writing. This course investigates the diverse literary production and cultural contexts of early America, from important moments of European exploration of the "New World," to about 1830. Our primary concern will be to understand this vital age of cultural invention and the ongoing construction of "America" and "American," through a close scrutiny of literary, cultural, and historical texts. Central to our discussions will be the concepts of nation, memory, liberty, race, class, gender, region, domesticity, nature, authorship, and canonicity. The class will proceed in an interdisciplinary fashion, employing various disciplinary concerns and reading multiple cultural forms--novels, poems, letters, speeches, paintings, landscape, architecture, music, artifacts of popular culture--in an effort to understand this formative chapter in the American story, and to question what from this period remains integral to our own time. [W]
Andy Smith MWF 10:00-10:50 AM

AMS 363: Senior Research Seminar
This is the required capstone course for all American Studies majors. The purpose of the seminar is to allow majors to explore in depth one topic of their choice and, in their research and analysis, to integrate the disciplinary perspectives to which they have been exposed in previous courses. The research paper--usually 40-55 pages in lengthÑmust be based on original, primary source materials collected and documented by the student (e.g., advertisements, films, paintings, buildings, letters and diaries, oral interviews). [W]
DC Jackson TR 1:10-2:30 PM

Spring 2006 Courses

AMS 150: Introduction to American Studies
This introduction to the field of American Studies examines American personal and national identity through an interdisciplinary study of American culture. As befits an American Studies approach, we will strive to embrace a variety of disciplines, and consider ways in which a multiplicity of textual forms-essays, films, novels, letters, poetry, songs, legal opinions, photographs, paintings, architecture, journalism, advertising, government documents, artifacts of material culture, and the physical landscape itself-shape and are shaped by their historical contexts. Throughout we will seek to understand how race, class, and gender function in the ongoing American project.
Prof. Janet Armentor-Cota MWF 3:10-4:00 PM

AMS 362:01: Topics Seminar--America a Hydraulic Society
This course examines the various ways in which our culture interacts with and is dependent upon water resources, with particular emphasis on the social and cultural interactions involving water use, control, and perception. Topics covered include the social impacts of the Erie Canal and Niagara Falls, the history and mythology of the Mississippi River, and the complexities of the recent New Orleans/Gulf Coast hurricane tragedy. We will examine issues such as the urban/rural tensions resulting from municipal water supply development in New York City and Los Angeles, study how the Grand Canyon came to be perceived as "Grand" by the American public, and explore Damn disasters and government propaganda. Historical texts, film, music, material and popular culture will all be means for investigating the meanings of American society and the hydraulic environment.
Prof. DC Jackson TR 1:15-2:30 & R 2:45-4:00

AMS 362:02: Topics Seminar--American Decades: the Sixties, Part II
This is a continuation of English 352, in which the focus was on African Americans and civil rights. This course will consider other seminal and also contradictory events, such as the women's movement, the Vietnam War, the Johnsonian "great society," Hollywood's liberal paradoxes of production (the television sitcoms Julia and I Dream of Jeanie, for example, coupled with the stunning release in very nearly the same of year of two radically different major motion pictures: The Sound of Music and Lillies of the Field). The course will look closely at a kind of phantasmagoria of segregation, desegregation, racism, busing, Zionism, anti-semitism, rock-and-roll, Lawrence Welk, Motown, and Leonard Bernstein. We'll talk about white middle-class angst in the face of what looked to be a cultural revolution but which was in fact, arguably, a kind of national carnival culminating, as far the arts were concerned, in the gorgeous nonsense of Woodstock. To Kill a Mocking Bird (Harper Lee), In Cold Blood (Truman Capote), The White Album (Joan Didion), Night of the Iguana and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf (Edward Albee), Radical Chic (Tom Wolfe), Good-bye Columbus (Philip Roth), One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest (Ken Kesey), and The Feminine Mystique (Betty Friedan) are among the texts organizing the work of the course.
Prof. Bryan Washington-MWF 11-11:50

AMS 362:03: Topics Seminar--Native American Literature and Culture
This course is an exploration of Native North American Indian literature within cultural and historical contexts. While we cannot in one semester hope to cover this growing field of expression in all its complexity, we can study significant and recurring themes and concerns of American Indian authors as they write from both inside and outside the dominant American discourse and culture. Such topics include identity formation, (in)articulation, (in)visibility, the centrality of place, the threat to cultural survival via cooptation and colonization, environmentalism, poverty, alcoholism, Indian gaming, and an ongoing political resistance. In addition to close readings, writings and discussions of literary texts, we will investigate the Indigenous American experience via numerous film representations of the "Indian," and constantly employ varied textual materials (images, music, government documents, advertisements, artifacts, websites) to understand how Indians fit into and what they mean to the larger United States culture.
Prof. Andy Smith-TR 9:30-10:45

Fall 2005 Courses

AMS 150: Introduction to American Studies
This introduction to the field of American Studies examines American personal and national identity through an interdisciplinary study of American culture. The course proceeds from the notion that we can gain a worthwhile understanding of competing perceptions of “America” and “American” by examining the kinds of arguments and stories we have historically constructed and continue to tell about ourselves. As befits an American Studies approach, we will strive to embrace a variety of disciplines, and consider ways in which a multiplicity of textual forms—essays, films, novels, letters, poetry, songs, legal opinions, photographs, paintings, architecture, journalism, advertising, government documents, artifacts of material culture, and the physical landscape itself—shape and are shaped by their historical contexts. Throughout we will seek to understand how race, class, and gender function in the ongoing American project.
A. Smith TR 11:00-12:15 PM

AMS 362:01: Seminar in American Studies--American Renaissance
This course investigates the diverse literary and cultural texts of mid-nineteenth-century America, with particular attention paid to the period known as the American Renaissance. In many ways a revolution of consciousness and creativity, this extended historical moment offers richly layered opportunities to study changing notions of American personal and national identity amid a unique flowering of artistic, scientific, and cultural invention. We will read both celebrated and lesser-known works, and employ multiple contexts and perspectives in our readings of them. We will seek to comprehend the moment that produced both Henry Thoreau and PT Barnum, that simultaneously embraced Indian removal and the Transcendental Eye. Central to the discussion will be issues of nation, race, class, gender, ethnicity, region, domesticity, nature, Transcendentalism, urbanization, authorship, and canonicity. In addition to a close scrutiny of literary texts, the class will proceed in an interdisciplinary fashion and scrutinize multiple cultural forms -- photography, painting, landscape architecture, music, advertising -- in an attempt to complicate and enrich our understanding of American Romanticism. Finally, we will consider what from this period might be relevant and usable today. [W] Andrew Smith TR 9:30-10:45 AM

AMS 362:02: Seminar in American Studies--Historical Early America
This course investigates consequential issues in early-American history and culture. It considers historical topics from multiple disciplinary perspectives and examines various cultural forms to gain an in-depth understanding of the topic. [W] Staff T 1:10-4:00 PM

AMS 363: Senior Research Seminar
This is the required capstone course for all American Studies majors. The purpose of the seminar is to allow majors to explore in depth one topic of their choice and, in their research and analysis, to integrate the disciplinary perspectives to which they have been exposed in previous courses. The research paper—usually 40-55 pages in length—must be based on original, primary source materials collected and documented by the student (e.g., advertisements, films, paintings, buildings, letters and diaries, oral interviews). [W]
H. Bodenhorn TR 1:10-2:30 PM