Syllabus

Short Course Description

What are the foundations of American Culture? What are the main themes, symbols, norms, values and underlining assumptions associated with the idea of America? What forces or events shaped the cultural representations of America, and how have they changed, developed and clashed over time? This course will introduce students to American culture through a variety of written and visual texts spanning the colonial era to the present: from the Puritan experiences of 17th century New England, through America's founding documents, the Abolitionist cause and Civil War, the Frontier experience and the challenges of modernity, mass immigration, urbanization and industrialization during the Gilded and Progressive eras, to the Great Depression, Cold War, Sixties' revolutions, and all the way to the contemporary experiences of the twenty-first century.

The course will offer an ambitious "great books" type survey of the main works, literary first and foremost, but also art, music and film, that have shaped how we think about and remember the American experience. It will offer students an intensive engagement with the "American canon," and the opportunity to familiarize and interact with many of the major works and influential writers (fiction and non-fiction) who have shaped our visions of America. Among these are Winthrop, Franklin, Jefferson, Madison, Stanton, Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, Dickinson, Emerson, Whitman, Douglass, Lincoln, Twain, DuBois, Fitzgerald, Anderson, Hurston, Hughes, O. Henry, Eliot, London, Lewis, Frost, Hemmingway, Faulkner, Steinbeck, Miller, Kerouac, Morrison, Roth and Tan (among others).

The course will emphasize how America is not just a juridical and territorial but an imaginative and narrative construct, asking how this construct arose from and transformed the pre-national and pre-colonial landscape, and how and why has it evolved into its contemporary forms. Among the broad issues we'll explore are the relationships of the individual to the community and to nature; the imaginative function of the frontier and geography in structuring American identity; the persistence of racial, ethnic, class and gender divisions across U.S. history; the role of religion, capitalism and politics; America's fraught relationship to imperialism as both a post-colony and an imperial power; and the global dimensions of American culture. We will consider the contested term "America" as a signifier for both the U.S. nation-state and the entire hemisphere ("the Americas").

Offering a sweeping interdisciplinary overview, we will interpret novels, short stories, poems, speeches, autobiographies, essays, paintings, songs, and films in acquainting ourselves with the country's rich - albeit contested - culture and history.