ENAM 483: Introduction to American Studies

Syllabus

syllabus version 1.2; last updated 11/23/95.

Class HomePage | Workshop | Mail List for American Studies.

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General Statement of Purpose

Texts (available at University of Virginia Bookstore):

• Raymond Williams, Keywords.

Calendar of Meetings

9/1:Organization and Introduction

Begin working on The American Hypertext Workshop

9/4: Classic Paradigms I: Cultural Maps and Master Narratives

• Hans Holbein the Younger, Map of the World (1515)
• William Bradford, from Of Plymouth Plantation(R)
• Captain John Smith, from The History of Virginia.(R)
• Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Maypole of Merrymount from The Complete Novels and Selected Tales of Nathaniel Hawthorne.(C) This may also be available atthis site.
• Cotton Mather, Book I and Nehemius Amercana from Magnalia Christi Americana.(R)
• Ben Franklin, from The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, pp.5-29, 81-92 and Poor Richard Improved, 1758 pp. 1295-1304.

Suggested:

• Sacvan Bercovitch, The Puritan Origins of the American Self.
• Daniel Boorstin, The Americans: The Colonial Experience.
• Oscar Handlin, The Uprooted.
• Michael Kammen, People of Paradox.(C)
• Melissa Kennedy, Exploring the West from Monticello.
• Perry Miller, Errand into the Wilderness.
• Thomas Paine, The American Crisis
• Plymouth, MA
• James City County, VA
• Franklin Institute, Philadelphia, PA
• David Potter, People of Plenty.

NOTE: (R) refers to a xerox collection of materials while (C) refers to individual books, all on reserve in Clemons. A highlighted word or phrase, of course, indicates that the text is available from this page.

9/11: Classic Paradigms II: The Middle Ground: Early National Period to WW I

• Thomas Jefferson, Draft of The Declaration of Independence. andQuery 4 pp. 142-149 and Query 19 pp. 290-291, from Notes on the State of Virginia.
• James Madison, The Federalist #10
• George Washington, Farewell Address.
• Hector St. Jean de Crevecoeur,Letter III: What is an American?, from Letters from an American Farmer.
• Alexis deTocqueville, Volume II, Part I, The Influence of Democracy on the Action of Intellect in The United States: Philosophical Method of The Americans, Of the Principal Source of Belief Among Democratic Nations, Why the Americans Show More General Aptitude and Taste for General Ideas that their Forefathers, The English, Why the Americans have never been so Eager as the French for General Ideas in Political Affairs, How Equality Suggests to the Americans the Indefinite Perfectibility of Man, In What Spirit the Americans Cultivate the Arts, Literary Characteristics of Democratic Times, How American Democracy has Modified the English Language. Part II, The Influence of Democracy on the Sentiments of Americans: What Causes Almost All Americans to Follow an Industrial Calling, How an Aristocracy may be Created by Manufacures. from Democracy in America
• Ralph Waldo Emerson, The American Scholar.
• Abraham Lincoln, The Gettysburg Address.
• Walt Whitman, selections from Democratic Vistas.(R)
• Frederick Jackson Turner, The Significance of the Frontier in American History.
• Thorstein Veblen, (Industrial Exemption and Conservatism, from The Theory of the Leisure Class (R)
• Henry Adams, Chicago and The Dynamo and the Virgin,from The Education of Henry Adams.(C)

Suggested:

• Daniel Boorstin, The Americans: The National Experience.
• Michael Kammen, The Machine that Would Run by Itself: The Constitution in American Culture.
• Miles Orvell, The Real Thing.
• Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land: The American West as Myth and Symbol.
• Alan Trachtenberg, The Incorporation of America.

  9/18:Classic Paradigms III: The American Studies Movement

  • George Santayana, Materialism and Idealism in American Life, from Character and Opinion in the United States.(R)
  • William Carlos Williams, The Voyage of the Mayflower, The Maypole of Merrymount, and Poor Richard from In the American Grain. (C)
  • Constance Rourke, Corn Cobs Twist Your Hair from Native American Humor.(C)
  • Vernon L. Parrington, Introduction,preface to Book I: Liberalism and Puritanism, Chapter III:The Chief Stewards of Thocracy and Chapter IV: The Contributions of Independency from Main Currents in American Thought. Vol I(C)
  • John Crowe Ransome,Reconstructed but Unregenerate from I'll Take My Stand(C)
  • Reinhold Neibuhr, Irony in American History. (R)
  • Henry Nash Smith, The Agricultural West in Literature from Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth.
  • Leo Marx, Sleepy Hollow, 1844 from The Machine in the Garden: (C)

  NOTE: You should have your HomePage built and linked to everyone else's by 9/21 AND you should indicate in class on Friday which article or essay you have selected for scanning..

  9/25: From American Studies to American(?) Cultural(?) Studies(?)

  • Generational Conflict:
    • Henry Nash Smith, Can American Studies Develop a Method.(R)
    • Leo Marx, American Studies: A Defense of an Unscientific Method.
    • Phillip Fisher, The New American Studies.
    • Frederick Lewis Dekker, Disassembling the Machine in the Garden.
    • Nina Baym, Melodramas of Beset Manhood
    • Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Between Individualism and Fragmentation: American Culture and the New Literary Studies of Race and Gender.
    • Christopher Clausen, National Literatures in English
  • Searching for a New Synthesis:
    • Roland Barthes, Wrestling
    • Clifford Geertz, Thick Description.
    • Jane Caputi, IBM's Charlie Chaplin: A Case Study
    • Robert Darnton, Workers Revolt: The Great Cat Massacre of the Rue Saint-Severin. (R)
    • McCrea Adams, Advertising Characters: The Pantheon of Consumerism
    • Gary Engle, What Makes Superman So Darned American?
    • bell hooks, Madonna: Plantation Mistress or Soul Sister?
    • Roland Marchand, Visions of Classlessness, Quests for Dominion: American Popular Culture, 1945-1960.
    • Michael Parenti, Class and Virtue.
    • Andrew Wernick, Vehicles for Myth: The Shifting Image of the Modern Car.

  Suggested:

  • Gender Bibliographies
  • John Fiske, Understanding Popular Culture.
  • Frederick Jameson, Postmodernism or the Logic of Late Industrial Capitalism.
  • Kenneth Lynn, The Regressive Historians from The Airline to Seattle
  • Jay Mechling, An American Culture Grid, With Texts.
  • Russel Reising, The Unusable Past: Theory and the Study of American Literature.
  • Jane Tompkins, Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790-1860.
  • Raymond Williams, Culture and Society, 1780-1950.
  • Gene Wise, Paradigm Dramas in American Studies: A Cultural and Institutional History of the Movement.

10/2: Regional History and American Studies: Professor Ed Ayers

NOTE: Professor Ayers will visit on Friday, 10/6.

• Edward Ayers, Introduction from American Regionalism MS.
• Edward Ayers, What Do We Talk About When We Talk About the South? from American Regionalism MS.
• William Faulkner,Was from Go Down Moses(C)
• Nathaniel Hawthorne, Young Goodman Brown,from The Complete Novels and Selected Tales of Nathaniel Hawthorne.(C)
• Mark Twain, Jim Blaine's Grandfather's Old Ram from Cohen and Dillingham, eds., Humor of the Old Southwest(C)

Suggested:

• Edward Ayers, The Promise of the New South.
• Edward Ayers, The Valley of the Shadow: Living the Civil War in Pennsylvania and Virginia.
• W.J. Cash, The Mind of the South.
• Jay Mechling, If They Can Build a Square Tomato: Notes Toward a Holistic Approach to Regional Studies,Prospects, Vol. 4, 1979.
• Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth.
• John Shelton Reid, My Tears Spoiled My Aim.
• Austin Warren, The New England Conscience.
• Eudora Welty, Place in Fiction from The Eye of the Story: Selected Essays and Reviews. (R)
• The American Memory Project from The Library of Congress.
• The Center for the Study of Southern Culture.

NOTE:You should post your scanned article by 10/6.

10/7-10/10 Reading Days

10/11: Catch-Up

10/16: Public History and American Studies: Professor Phyllis Leffler

• David Lowenthal, Ch. 6, Changing the Past, (pp. 263-363) from The Past is a Foreign Country. (C)
• Peter Burke, The New History, its Past and Future, pp. 1-23, from New Perspectives on Historical Writing.
• Umberto Eco, Travels in Hyperreality from Travels in Hyperreality
• Levine, Lawrence W., William Shakespeare in America from Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America. (C)

Suggested:

• John Bodnar, Remaking America : Public Memory, Commemoration, and Patriotism in the Twentieth Century.
• Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember.
• James Deetz, In Small Things Forgotten: The Archeology of Early American Life.
• Michael Kammen, Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Memory in American Culture.
• Ivan Karp and Steven Lavine, eds., Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display.
• Ivan Karp, Christine Mullen Kreamer, and Steven D. Levine. eds.,Museums and Communities: The Politics of Public Culture.
• Phyllis Leffler and Joseph Brent, Public and Academic History : A Philosophy and Paradigm.(C)
• Phyllis Leffler, from Public History Readings. (C)
• The Popular Memory Group, Popular Memory: Theory, Politics, Method.(R)
• David Middleton and Derek Edwards, ed., Collective Remembering
• The Smithsonian Institution.

10/23:Photography and American Studies: Professor John Bunch

• Thomas J. Schlereth, Mirrors of the Past: Historical Photography and History, from Artifacts and the American Past.(C)
• America and Lewis Hine -- video (C)
• Miles Orvell, A Hieroglyphic World: The Furnishing of Identity in Victorian Culture and Photography and the Artifice of Realism from The Real Thing: Imitation and Authenticity in American Culture, 1880-1940. (C)

Suggested:

• Ansel Adams, The American Wilderness,ed. by Andrea G. Stillman.
• Richard Avedon, In the American West.
• Margaret Bourke White, The Photographs of Margaret Bourke-White ed. by Sean Callahan.
• Walker Evans, American Photographs, ed. by Lincoln Kirstein.
• Robert Mapplethorpe, Mapplethorpe.
• Christine Sills, The Holsinger Collection at The University of Virginia.
• Susan Sonntag, On Photography.
• Maren Stange, Symbols of Ideal Life: Social Documentary Photography in America, 1890-1950.
• Alan Trachtenberg, Photography as History
• Photography Collection of the Farm Security Administration.
• The Art of the American Daguerreotype.
• University of Deleware Symposium on Photography and Society.

10/30:Popular Fiction and American Studies: Professor Stephen Railton

• Herman Melville, Chapters 42 and 58 from Moby-Dick
• Harriet Beecher Stowe, Chapters 13 and 26 from Uncle Tom's Cabin.

  NOTE: both of these texts are presented as single large files, difficult to download and tedious to navigate; you may find it preferable to get a hard copy.

• Mark Twain, Chapters 15 and 38 from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
• Chapter ix: The Western Hero in the Dime Novel and Chapter x: The Dime Novel Heroine, from Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land.

Suggested:

• Debbie Durbin, Little Women.
• James D. Hart, The Popular Book.
• John G. Cawelti, Adventure, Mystery, and Romance : Formula Stories as Art and Popular Culture.
• Michael Denning, Mechanic Accents: Dime Novels and Working-Class Culture in America.
• Glenwood Irons, ed., Gender, Language, and Myth : Essays on Popular Narrative.
• Hans Robert Jauss, Literary History as a Challenge to Literary Theory, from Toward an Aesthetics of Reception.
• Mark McWilliams, With Lee in Virginia.
• Frank Luther Mott, Golden Multitudes.
• Russel B. Nye, The Unembarrased Muse
• Stephen Railton, Authorship and Audience: Literary Performance in the American Renaissance.
• Joshua Rutsky, Madam Butterfly.
• Jane Tompkins, Masterpiece Theatre: The Politics of Hawhtorne's Literary Reputation, and But is it any Good? : The Institutionalization of Literary Value from Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790-1860.
• Popular Culture Page at Bowling Green State University.

(No class meeting Friday, November 3.)

11/6: Film and American Studies: Professor Walter Korte.

• View Sam Wood's Kings Row (C) and Alfred Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt (1943) (C) before class Monday.
• Michael Walker, Kings Row.
• Robin Wood, Ideology, Genre, Auteur.
• Umberto Eco, 'Casablanca:' Or The Cliches are Having a Ball.
• Richard V. Francaviglia, Main Street U.S.A.: A Comparison/Contrast of Streetscapes in Disneyland and Walt Disney World.(R)

Suggested:

• Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio.
• Andrew Bergman, We're in the Money: Depression America and Its Films.
• Emanuel Levy, Small-town America in Film : The Decline and Fall of Community.
• David Plowden, Small Town America.
• W.R.Robinson, ed., Man and the Movies.
• Steven Schoenherr, Multimedia and History.
• Paul Smith, The Hisorians and Film.
• Pointer to Resources in Film Studies.
• Guide to Film Studies.
• Film Database.

11/13: Architectural History and American Studies: Professor Richard G. Wilson

• Richard Guy Wilson, ed., Thomas Jefferson's Academical Village. (You may want to read the whole book; you should read at least the essays by Wilson and Lasalla.) (C)
• Richard Guy Wilson, The Conflagration and the Making of the New' University, in Ed. Gaynor, ed., Arise and Build.
• A Centennial Commemoration of the 1895 Rotunda Fire.
• Peter Gibian, The Art of Being Off-Center:Shopping Center Spaces and Spectacles.
• Joan Kron, The Semiotics of Home Decor.
• John A Kouwenhoven, Stone, Steel, and Jazz, from Made in America.(R)
• Temple of Liberty: Building the Capitol for a New Nation.

Suggested:

• John Baeder, Diners.
• Lois A. Craig, The Federal Presence: Architecture, Politics, and Symbols in United States Government Building.
• Jakle, John A. The Gas Station in America.
• James Kunstler, The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America's Man-Made Landscape.
• Alan Trachtenberg, Brooklyn Bridge: Fact and Symbol.
• Sam Bass Warner, Jr., The Urban Wilderness.
• Richard Guy Wilson, The Making of Virginia Architecture.
• Richard Guy Wilson,, The Machine Age in America 1918-1941.
• Tom Wolfe, From Bauhaus to Our House.
• ArtSource: Electronic Resources in Architecture.
• Government/Politics HomePage.

NOTE:You should post your review of a book from the Suggestions for Futher Reading by 11/17.

11/20:Art History and American Studies: Professor Roger B. Stein

• David M. Lubin, Introduction: The Politics of Method, in Picturing a Nation: Art and Social Change in Nineteenth-Century America, pp. X-xvii. (R)
• Roger B. Stein, A Portfolio: American Seascape Art, in Haskell Springer, ed., America and the Sea, pp. 146-189. (R)
• Roger B. Stein, Packaging the Great Plains in Great Plains Quarterly, vol. 5, pp. 5-23. (R)

Suggested:

• ArtSource: Directory for Electronic Resources in Art.
• John Berger, Ways of Seeing.
• Ralph Henry Gabriel, The Pageant of America. (A 15 volume collection of American images.)
• David M. Lubin, Labyrinths of Meaning in Vanderlyn's Ariadne, in Picturing a Nation: Art and Social Change in Nineteenth-Century America, pp. 1-53.
• Christin J. Maniya, Pop Art and Consumer Culture: American Super Market.
• Keith Moxey, Semiotics and the Social History of Art.
• Barbara Novak, Nature and Culture : American Landscape and Painting, 1825-1875.
• Roger B. Stein, Americans and the Sea.
• Tom Wolfe, The Painted Word.