AMS U810/MALS U732
Introduction To American Studies:
Histories and Methods

The Graduate Center of The City University of New York
Spring 1999

Professor Catherine Lavender
lavender@postbox.csi.cuny.edu

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 expect to take responsibility for one class meeting. Click here for the schedule of responsibilities.

Basic Information
        This course meets Tuesdays from 6:30 to 9:30 p.m. at the Graduate Center (GS 905). My office hours, held in the American Studies Program office (4013 Grace Building), will be by appointment, preferably on Tuesdays before class; the phone number in the American Studies Program Office is 212-642-2341. I am also available by phone during my office hours at the College of Staten Island (M and W 2:30-4:30) 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.

Course Schedule

2 February--Introduction to the Course

9 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.
    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.
    R. Gordon Kelley, "Literature and the Historian," American Quarterly 26 (May 1974): 141-159.
    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).

16 February--No meeting; classes follow a Friday Schedule

23 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.
    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).

27 February (Saturday)-- New York Metro American Studies Association (NYMASA) Conference, NYU; attendance encouraged.

2 March--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.
    Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, "Between Individualism and Fragmentation: American Culture and the New Literary Studies of Race and Gender," American Quarterly 42 (1990): 7-34.

9 March--The Emergence of Cultural Studies Within American Studies
Readings:
    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.

16 March--Literary Americanists I
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.
    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).

23 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.
    Michael Berubé, Public Access: Literary Theory and American Cultural Politics (Verso, 1994).

30 March--Cultural (De)Constructions--Race and Ethnicity
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.
    Eileen Boris/Melinda Chateauvert, "Dialogue: Gender, Race, and Rights: Listening to Critical Race Theory," Journal of Women's History 6:2 (Summer 1994): 111-134.
    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).

6 April--Spring Recess, No Class

13 April--Cultural (De)Constructions--Class
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).

20 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.
    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.
    Louise Newman, "Critical Theory and the History of Women: What's At Stake in Deconstructing Women's History," Journal of Women's History 2: 3 (Winter 1991): 58-68.
    Elizabeth Long, "Women, Reading, and Cultural Authority: Some Implications of the Audience Perspective in Cultural Studies," American Quarterly 38 (Fall 1986): 591-612.

27 April--Cultural (De)Constructions--Sexuality and the Body
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.
    Steven Seidman, "Identity Politics in a 'Postmodern' Gay Culture: Some Historical and Conceptual Notes," in Fear of a Queer Planet: Queer Politics and Social Theory, ed. Michael Warner (University of Minnesota, 1993): 105-42.
    Alexander Doty, Making Things Perfectly Queer: Interpreting Mass Culture (University of Minnesota Press, 1993).
        or
    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).

4 May--Knowers and Artificers: American Studies and Cross-Cultural Knowledge
Readings:
    James Clifford, "Identity in Mashpee," in The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Harvard University, 1988): 277-346.
    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.
    Clifford Geertz, "Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight," in The Interpretation of Cultures (Basic Books, 1973): 412-453.
    Renata Rosaldo, "Subjectivity in Social Analysis," in Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis (Beacon Press, 1989): 168-95, 241-44.
    Lynn Hunt, ed., The New Cultural History (University of California, 1989).
        or
    Ruth Behar, Translated Woman: Crossing the Border with Esperanza's Story (Beacon Press, 1993).

11 May--Popular Culture Studies and 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.
    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, Time Passages: Collective Memory and American Popular Culture (University of Minnesota Press, 1990).

18 May--Cores and Peripheries, or, Why Is Huckleberry Finn a "Widget"?
Readings:
    Shelley Fisher Fishkin, Was Huck Black?: Mark Twain and African-American Voices (Oxford University Press, 1993).

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
Spring Semester 1999. Last modified: Tuesday 2 February 1999.