AMS U810/MALS U732
Introduction To American Studies:
Histories and Methods
The Graduate Center of The City University of New York
Spring 2001
- About the Course
- This course serves as an introduction to many of the methodological and epistemological questions in the field of American Studies. Some of the things seminar participants will be reading in this course are older studies and articles which chart the development of the field. Others are newer studies which show the results of American Studies traditions.
The seminar will focus on the development of several concerns among American Studies scholars. Starting from the "Myth and Symbol" School's synthesis of literature and history, American Studies has expanded to include cultural studies and new approaches to literary criticism. American Studies has also expanded to include the study of the cultural construction (and deconstruction) of categories of analysis including race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality and the body. Finally, there have been several other influences within the field of American Studies, including cross-cultural studies and popular culture studies.
Seminar participants will be responsible for reading all of the articles listed on the syllabus. In some weeks, when more than one book is listed, participants will divide the reading among themselves. Class time will focus on discussion of the texts, as well as presentations on the books that have been read by only a portion of the seminar. Short writing assignments on the readings will be given each week, and copies of written work will be circulated to participants. Further, participants will each be expected to present one monograph to the class during the semester.
- Basic Information
- This course meets Mondays from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. at the Graduate Center (Room 3305). My office hours, held in the American Studies Program office (Room 5109.04), will be by appointment, preferably on Mondays before class. I am also available by phone during my office hours at the College of Staten Island at 718-982-2869. You may leave voice mail messages for me at that number. Finally, I encourage you to contact me via email, at lavender@postbox.csi.cuny.edu.
A Note About Academic Integrity: Integrity is fundamental to the academic enterprise. It is violated by acts such as borrowing or purchasing term papers, essays, reports, and other written assignments; using concealed notes or crib sheets during examinations; copying others' work and submitting it as one's own; and misappropriating the knowledge of others. The sources from which one derives one's ideas, statements, terms, and data must be fully and specifically acknowledged in the appropriate form; failure to do so, intentionally or unintentionally, constitutes plagiarism. Violations of academic integrity may result in failure in the course and in disciplinary actions with penalties such as suspension or dismissal from the University.
- Required Texts
- Lucy Maddox, ed., Locating American Studies: The Evolution of a Discipline (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999).
- Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, ed. Susan K. Harris (Houghton Mifflin Co., 2000).
- Course Schedule
- 29 January--Introduction to the Course
- 5 February--American Studies and the Problem of Method: The History-Literature Synthesis in Myth and Symbol
- Readings:
Henry Nash Smith, "Can 'American Studies' Develop a Method?" American Quarterly 9 (Summer 1957): 197-208 (in Maddox, Locating American Studies).
Leo Marx, "American Studies--A Defense of an Unscientific Method," New Literary History 1 (October 1969): 75-90.
Bruce Kucklick, "Myth and Symbol in American Studies," American Quarterly 24 (October 1972): 435-450 (in Maddox, Locating American Studies).
R. Gordon Kelley, "Literature and the Historian," American Quarterly 26 (May 1974): 141-159 (in Maddox, Locating American Studies).
Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth (Harvard University Press, 1950).
or
Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (Oxford University Press, 1964).
- 12 February--No meeting; University closed.
- 13 February--American Studies and the Problem of Method, II: The History of American Studies
- Readings:
Gene Wise, "'Paradigm Dramas' in American Studies: A Cultural and Institutional History of the Movement," American Quarterly 31 (1979): 293-337 (in Maddox, Locating American Studies).
Guenther H. Lenz, "American Studies and the Radical Tradition: From the 1930s to the 1960s." Prospects 12 (1987): 21-58.
Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens), The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885)
Recommended Further Readings:
Giles Gunn, The Culture of Criticism and the Criticism of Culture (Oxford University Press, 1987).
Cecil Tate, The Search for a Method in American Studies (University of Minnesota Press, 1973).
Gene Wise, American Historical Explanations: A Strategy for Grounded Inquiry (Dorsey Press, 1973).
- 19 February--No meeting; University closed.
- 26 February--American Studies and the Problem of Method, III: Beyond Myth and Symbol
- Readings:
Robert Sklar, "The Problem of an American Studies 'Philosophy': A Bibliography of New Directions," American Quarterly 27 (August 1975): 245-262.
Robert Berkhofer, Jr., "A New Context for a New American Studies?" American Quarterly 41 (1989): 588-613 (in Maddox, Locating American Studies).
Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, "Between Individualism and Fragmentation: American Culture and the New Literary Studies of Race and Gender," American Quarterly 42 (1990): 7-34.
- 5 March--The Emergence of Cultural Studies Within American Studies
- Readings:
Warren Susman, "History and the American Intellectual: Uses of a Usable Past," (1964) (in Maddox, Locating American Studies).
T.J. Jackson Lears, "The Concept of Cultural Hegemony: Problems and Possibilities," American Historical Review 90 (June 1985): 567-93.
Bryan Palmer, "The Discovery/Deconstruction of the Word/Sign," in Descent into Discourse: The Reification of Language and the Writing of Social History (Temple University Press, 1990): 3-47.
Richard Johnson, "What is Cultural Studies, Anyway," Social Text 16 (Winter 1986/87): 38-80.
- 12 March--Literary Americanists I
- Guest:
Rachel Brownstein, English
- Readings:
Christopher Wilson, "Containing Multitudes: Realism, Historicism, American Studies," American Quarterly 41 (1990): 466-495.
Lawrence Buell, "It's Good, But is it History?" American Quarterly 41 (1990): 496-500.
Janice Radway, "The Utopian Impulse in Popular Literature: Gothic Romances and 'Feminist' Protest," (1981) (in Maddox, Locating American Studies).
Jane Tompkins, Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790-1860 (Oxford, 1985).
Recommended Further Readings:
Russell J. Reising, The Unusable Past: Theory and the Study of American Literature (Methuen, 1986).
- 19 March--Literary Americanists II
- Readings:
Lawrence Buell, "Literary History without Sexism? Feminist Studies and Canonical Reception," American Literature 59 (March 1987): 102-14.
Nina Baym, "Melodramas of Beset Manhood: How Theories of American Fiction Exclude Women Writers," American Quarterly 33 (1981): 123-39 (in Maddox, Locating American Studies).
Houston Baker, Jr., "Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance," (1987) (in Maddox, Locating American Studies).
Shelley Fisher Fishkin, Was Huck Black?: Mark Twain and African-American Voices (Oxford University Press, 1993).
Recommended Further Readings:
Michael Berubé, Public Access: Literary Theory and American Cultural Politics (Verso, 1994).
- 26 March--Cultural (De)Constructions--Race and Ethnicity
- Guest:
Jane Bowers, Theatre
- Readings:
Barbara J. Fields, "Ideology and Race in American History" In J. Morgan Kousser and James M. McPherson, eds., Region, Race and Reconstruction (Oxford University Press, 1982): 143-77.
Werner Sollors, "Theory of American Ethnicity," American Quarterly 33 (Biblio. Issue, 1981): 257-83.
Alan Wald, "Theorizing Cultural Difference: A Critique of the Ethnicity School", MELUS 14 (1987): 21-33.
Alexander Saxton, "Blackface Minstrelsy and Jacksonian Ideology," (1975) (in Maddox, Locating American Studies).
Ramón Gutiérrez, "Community, Patriarchy and Individualism: The Politics of Chicano History and the Dream of Equality," (1993) (in Maddox, Locating American Studies).
George J. Sanchez, Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture, and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles, 1900-1945 (Oxford University Press, 1993).
or
Eric J. Sundquist, To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature (Harvard University Press, 1993).
Recommended Further Readings:
Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1980s (Routledge, 1994).
- 2 April--Cultural (De)Constructions--Gender
- Readings:
Bryan Palmer, "Gender," in Descent into Discourse: The Reification of Language and the Writing of Social History (Temple University Press, 1990): 145-86.
Barbara Welter, "The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820-1860," (1966) (in Maddox, Locating American Studies).
Lida Kerber, "The Republican Mother: Women and the Enlightenment--An American Perspective," (1976) (in Maddox, Locating American Studies).
Joan W. Scott, "Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis." American Historical Review 91 (1986): 1053-75.
Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, "Hearing Women's Words: A Feminist Reconstruction of History," in Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America (A.A. Knopf, 1985): 11-52.
- 9 April--No meeting; University closed.
- 16 April--Cultural (De)Constructions--Class
- Guest:
John Patrick Diggins, History
- Readings:
Sean Wilentz, "Artisan Republican Festivals and the Rise of Class Conflict in New York City, 1788-1837," in Working-Class America: Essays on Labor, Community, and American Society, ed. Michael H. Frisch and Daniel J. Walkowitz (University of Illinois Press, 1983): 37-77
Lizabeth Cohen, "Encountering Mass Culture at the Grassroots: The Experience of Chicago Workers in the 1920s," American Quarterly 41 (March 1989): 6-33.
Michael Denning, "'The Special American Conditions': Marxism and American Studies," American Quarterly 38 (1986): 356-80.
David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (Verso, 1991).
or
Karen Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-Class Culture in America, 1830-1870 (Yale University, 1982).
- 23 April--Cultural (De)Constructions--Sexuality and the Body
- Guest:
Gail Levin, Art History
- Readings:
Judith Butler, "Subjects of Sex/Gender/Desire," in Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (Routledge, 1990): 1-34.
Norma Alarcón, "The Theoretical Subject(s) of This Bridge Called My Back and Anglo-American Feminism," in Making Face, Making Soul/Hacienco Caras, ed. Gloria Anzaldúa (Aunt Lute Books, 1990): 356-69.
Kevin Mumford, "Homosex Changes: Race, Cultural Geography, and the Emergence of the Gay," (1996) (in Maddox, Locating American Studies).
George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940 (Basic Books, 1994).
or
Kathy Peiss, Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in New York City, 1880-1920 (Temple University Press, 1986).
- 30 April--Knowers and Artificers: American Studies and Cross-Cultural Knowledge
- Readings:
James Clifford, "On Ethnographic Authority," in The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Harvard University, 1988): 21-54.
David Hollinger, "The Knower and the Artificer," in Daniel Singal, ed., Modernist Culture in America (Wadsworth, 1991): 42-69.
Clifford Geertz, "Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture," in The Interpretation of Cultures (Basic Books, 1973): 3-30.
K. Scott Wong, "The Transformation of Culture: Three Chinese Views of America," (1996) (in Maddox, Locating American Studies).
Greg Sarris, Keeping Slug Woman Alive: A Holistic Approach to American Indian Texts (University of California Press, 1993).
or
Ruth Behar, Translated Woman: Crossing the Border with Esperanza's Story (Beacon Press, 1993).
- 7 May--Popular Culture Studies and American Studies
- Guests:
Marc Dolan, English; Richard Gid Powers, History/American Studies
- Readings:
George Lipsitz, "Listening to Learn and Learning to Listen: Popular Culture, Cultural Theory, and American Studies," American Quarterly 42 (1990): 615-636 (in Maddox, Locating American Studies).
Paul Buhle, "Introduction: The 1960s Meet the 1980s," in Paul Buhle, ed., Popular Culture in America (University of Minnesota, 1987): ix-xxvii.
Stuart Hall, "Notes on Deconstructing the Popular," in Ralph Samuel, ed., People's History and Socialist Theory (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981): 227-40.
John Fiske, Understanding Popular Culture (Unwin Hyman, 1989).
or
George Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics (Temple University Press, 1998).
- 14 May--Cores and Peripheries, or, Why Is Huckleberry Finn a "Widget"?
- Readings:
Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, ed. Susan K. Harris (Houghton Mifflin Co., 2000).
Prepared by Professor Catherine Lavender for American Studies U810 (Introduction To American Studies: Histories and Methods), The Certificate Program in American Studies , The Graduate School and University Center of the City University of New York. Send email to lavender@postbox.csi.cuny.edu
Last modified: Monday 26 March 2001.