American Culture: Methods & Visions:

This seminar is an experiment in American Culture Studies. We will be studying three years in U.S. history over the span of several hundred. 1803, 1903, 2003 -?three years in American culture, starting with the year many students in this class were born and tumbling backward to the Early Republic. Paying attention to works of literature and visual culture, advancements in technology and media, huge national events the resonated throughout the world and small twists of fate that would only reveal themselves in retrospect. We will move comparatively across texts, events, and discourses from all three of those years. The Louisiana Purchase and the Iraq War, The Souls of Black Folk and The Known World, the emergence of Sacagawea into the national imagination, the debut of Thomas Edison's most important narrative films, MySpace, The Call of the Wild, the Space Shuttle Columbia, the city of St. Louis across two-hundred years. We will mix and match, utilizing a variety of American Culture Studies methodologies to provocatively juxtapose objects and eras. We will test the common narrative of American Cultural History against our observations of these years, and we will trawl them for familiar myths and symbols -?all the while, working through this generative constraint, we will keep our eye on the question of how the stories of American culture come to form amidst random events, uncanny echoes, and the ordinary lives of Americans, then and now. Preference given to junior AMCS majors.
Course Attributes: EN H; AS HUM; AS WI I; FA HUM; AR HUM

American Culture: Methods & Visions:

AMERICAN CULTURE STUDIES 375A

Section 01

Section 02