COURSE DESCRIPTION

This seminar aims to provide an introduction to the methods and outlooks of American Studies. The course will consider the traditions and classic texts of American Studies, as well as some complementary works in other disciplines (e.g., sociology). But we will also explore examples of more recent scholarship that have challenged and modified the field--for example by reorienting its evidentiary base from texts to artifacts and graphics, by playing off "myth" and "ideology," by engaging with class, race, ethnicity, and gender, and by repositioning "America" within assorted post-national contexts. Attention will be focused as well on the meanings, problems, and possibilities attending the field's interdisciplinary character.

COURSE RESOURCES

All readings are on reserve. Articles are available online at Woodruff Library's on-line reserves (click on “Euclid” and then click on “Reserves Direct”); hard copies of articles are also in a binder at the reserve desk (marked “Readings for ILA 772”). Hard copies of all books are available at the reserve desk (listed by author); most chapters assigned from books not ordered for purchase are available online as well. Books ordered for purchase are indicated with an asterisk.

If you have any special needs due to learning disabilities, please contact one of us at the beginning of the semester and we will discuss the necessary arrangements.

COURSE REQUIREMENTS

(1) Attendance at weekly discussion sessions; thoughtful participation in these sessions.

(2) Two written assignments:

(a) Roughly half-way through the semester each student will be expected to turn in a (roughly) ten page essay review on secondary works related to the course.

(b) Towards the end of the course, students will submit an edited document. (This will be discussed in detail later in the course).

COURSE SCHEDULE

(Subject to Revision)

Radway, Janice. 1999. “What's in a Name? Presidential Address to the American Studies Association, 20 November, 1998.” American Quarterly 51: 1-32.

Turner, Fredrick Jackson. 1893. “The Significance of the Frontier in American History.” Report of the Proceedings of Ninth Annual Meeting of the American Historical Association: 197-227.

Washington, Helen Mary. 1997. “Disturbing the Peace: What Happens to American Studies If You Put African American Studies at the Center?: Presidential Address to the American Studies Association, October 29, 1997.” American Quarterly 50: 1-23.

February 3

*Demos, John. 2000. A Little Commonwealth: Family Life in Plymouth Colony. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Chapters 1-6.

Miller, Perry. 1967. “Declension in a Bible Commonwealth.” Pages 14-49 in Nature's Nation, by Perry Miller. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press.

*Bailyn, Bernard. 1992. The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution. Cambridge, MA: Belknap. Chapters 1-4.

Davidson, Cathy N. 1986. Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America. New York: Oxford University Press. Chapters 1-3 and 6.

Matthiessen, F.O. 1968. “Method and Scope” and “Man in the Open Air.” Pages vii-xvi and 626-656 in American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman, by F.O. Matthiessen. London: Oxford University Press.

Bercovitch, Sacvan. 1986. “The Problem of Ideology in American Literary History.” Critical Inquiry 12: 631-653.

Wilentz, Sean. 1984. “Against Exceptionalism: Class Consciousness and the American Labor Movement.” International Labor and Working Class History 26: 1-24.

Lears, T. J. Jackson. 1981. No Place of Grace: Antimoderism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880-1920. New York: Pantheon. Chapters 1-2 and 7.

*Trachtenberg, Alan. 1979. Brooklyn Bridge: Fact and Symbol. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Parts I and III.

Cole, Thomas, 1801-1848. Thomas Cole: Landscape into History, edited by William H. Truettner and Alan Wallach. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press (Selection of Images).

Cronon, William. 2003. Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England. New York: Hill and Wang. Chapters 3, 7 and 8.

*Marx, Leo. 2000. The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Chapters 1 and 5.

Novak, Barbara. 1980. Nature and Culture : American Landscape and Painting, 1825-1875. New York: Oxford University Press. Chapters 1-3 and 7.

Nygren, Edward J. 1986. Views and Visions: American Landscape before 1830. Washington, D.C.: Corcoran Gallery of Art (Selection of Images).

Scobey, David M. 2002. Empire City: The Making and Meaning of the New York City Landscape. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Chapters 1-2, 4 and 8.

Slotkin, Richard. 1986. “Myth and the Production of History.” Pages 70-90 in Ideology and Classic American Literature, edited by Sacvan Bercovitch and Myra Jehlen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

*Smith, Henry Nash. 1950. Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Book II (“Sons of Leatherstocking”).

Fields, Barbara Jeanne.1990. “Slavery, Race and Ideology in the United States of America.” New Left Review 181: 95-118.

Johnson, Walter. 2000. “The Slave Trader, the White Slave, and the Politics of Racial Determination in the 1850s.” Journal of American History 87: 13-38.

Roediger, David R. 1991. The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class. London: Verso. Chapters 2-4 and 5.

Lacy, Karyn R. 2004. “Black Spaces, Black Places: Strategic Assimilation and Identity Construction in Middle Class Suburbia.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 27: 908-930.

*Lopes, Paul D. 2002. The Rise of a Jazz Art World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Introduction, Chapters 1-3.

Van Ausdale, Debra and Joe R. Feagin. 1996. “Using Racial and Ethnic Concepts: The Critical Case of Very Young Children.” American Sociological Review 61: 779-793.

Stansell, Christine. 1986. City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789-1860. New York: Knopf. Chapters 1-4 and 9.

*Stowe, Harriet Beecher. 1981. Uncle Tom's Cabin. New York: Bantam.

Tompkins, Jane. 1985. Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790-1860. New York: Oxford University Press. Introduction and chapter 5.

*Farrell, Amy. 1998. Yours in Sisterhood: Ms. Magazine and the Promise of Popular Feminism. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Introduction, Chapters 1-3 and 5.

Martin, Karin A. 1998. “Becoming a Gendered Body: Practices of Preschools.” American Sociological Review 63: 494-511.

Peiss, Kathy. 1990. “Making Faces: The Cosmetics Industry and the Cultural Construction of Gender, 1890-1930.” Genders 7: 143-169.

*Davis, Rebecca Harding. 1998. Life in the Iron-Mills. Boston: Bedford Books.

Lang, Amy Schrager. 2003. The Syntax of Class: Writing Inequality in Nineteenth-Century America. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Introduction and chapter 3.

Wilentz, Sean. 1984. Chants Democratic: New York City & the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788-1850. New York: Oxford University Press. Chapters 1-3.

*Beisel, Nicola. 1997. Imperiled Innocents: Anthony Comstock and Family Reproduction in Victorian America. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Chapters 1-3 and 7-8.

Lareau, Annette. 2002. “Invisible Inequality: Social Class and Childrearing in Black Families and White Families.” American Sociological Review 67: 747-776.

*Roscigno, Vincent J. and William F. Danaher. 2004. The Voice of Southern Labor: Radio, Music, and Textile Strikes, 1929-1934. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Introduction, Chapters 1, 5-7 and Conclusion.

Burkhart, Patrick and Tom McCourt. 2004. “Infrastructure for the Celestial Jukebox.” Popular Music 23: 349-362.

*Fischer, Claude. 1992. America Calling: A Social History of the Telephone to 1940. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Chapters 1-3, 6 and 9.

*Zelizer, Viviana A. 1994. The Social Meaning of Money. New York: Basic Books. Chapters 1-3 and 7.