ENAM 484: American Studies SeminarSpring 2001
American Popular Culture
Texts:
- Stephen J. Fjellman, Vinyl Leaves: Walt Disney World and America.
- Robert C. Allen, ed., Channels of Discourse, Reassembled: Television and Contemporary Criticism.
- Sonia Maasik and Jack Solomon, eds., Signs of Life in the U.S.A.: Readings on Popular Culture for Writers.
Calendar:
01/17: Organization and Introduction.
01/22:Vinyl Leaves
Suggested:
General Resources:
01/29: Channels of Discourse, Reassembled I
Note: For the next two weeks, after reading the chapter for discussion, I'd like you to watch a (favorite?) T.V. program.
- Robert C. Allen, More Talk about TV
- Ellen Seiter, Semiotics, Structuralism, and Television
- Sarah Kozloff, Narrative Theory and Television
- Robert C. Allen, Audience-Oriented Criticism and Television
- Jane Feuer, Genre Study and Television
Note: No Class Friday, Feb. 2
02/05: Channels of Discourse II
- Mimi White, Ideological Analysis and Television
- Sandy Flitterman-Lewis, Psychoanalysis, Film, and Television
- E. Ann Kaplan, Feminist Criticism and Television
- Jim Collins, Postmodernism and Television
Suggested:
- Daniel J. Czitrom, Media and the American Mind: From Morse to McLuhan
-
02/12: The World's Columbian Exposition: Popular Culture at the Turn of the Century I
Suggested:
- John Fiske, The Jeaning of America and Commodities and Culture from Understanding Culture.
- America 1900 [videorecording] / WGBH Educational
Foundation.
- Barnum's big top [videorecording] / WGBH-TV, Boston
- Who Built America? [videorecording] / American Social
History Project, City University of New York Graduate
Center.
- The Urban Past Bibliography: The Modern City
- World's Columbian Exposition portal
- City Sites: Chicago and New York, 1870s-1930s
- Raymond Williams, Advertising: The Magic System
- Paul Dimaggio, Cultural Entrepreneurship in 19th C. Boston: The creation of an organizational base for high culture in America
- Bill Brown, American Childhood and Stephen Crane's Toys, Part I and Part II
- Lizabeth Cohen, Encountering Mass Culture at the Grassroots: The Experience of Chicago Workers in the 1920s
- Joel Chandler Harris, Uncle Remus
- John F. Kasson, Amusing the Million: Coney Island at the Turn of the Century.(R)
- The 1900 Census Browser
- Jurgen Habermas, The Public Sphere from On Society and Politics.
- Mark Twain on Stage:
- The Virtual Gramaphone
- The Cakewalk
- Historic American Sheet Music
- The Ragtime Ephemeralist
- Ragtime Database
- Ragtime Midi files
- Ragtime Press
- LOC The 19th Century in Print
- Stereographs
- Edward Muybridge
- Lawrence Levine, Shakespeare in America
- Daniel Horowitz, The Morality of Spending: Attitudes Toward the Consumer Society in America, 1875-1940.
- Thomas J. Schlereth, Victorian America: Transformations in Everyday Life 1876-1915.
02/19: Popular Culture at the Turn of the Century II
- Stuart Ewen, Goods and Surfaces from Captains of Consciousness: Advertising and the Social Roots of the Consumer Culture.
- David Nasaw, Going Out: The Rise and Fall of Public Amusements, Pt.1, Pt.2, and Pt.3 (R)
- Ian Gordon, From Caricature to Comic Strips: The Shaping of Comic Art as Commodity and Comic Strips, National Culture, and Marketing
- Robert Toll, Social Commentary in Late 19th Century White Minstrelcy
- Jim O'laughlin,
Grow'd Again: Articulation and the History of Topsy (in Interpret Mode)
- Michael Denning, Arthurian Knights in Connecticut Factores and Only a Mechanic's Daughter from Mechanic Accents: Dime Novels and Working Class Culture in America.
- Benjamin Lisle, Commodifying Leisure: The Business of Baseball in the Gilded Age
- LOC: America at Work, America At Leisure
Suggested:
- Travelling Culture: Circuit Chataqua in the 20th Century LOC.
- Susan Strasser, New Products, New Habits from Satisfaction Guaranteed: The Making of the American Mass Market.
- Susan Strasser, The New Retailing from Satisfaction Guaranteed: The Making of the American Mass Market.
- Mary Halnon, The Silent Western: Early Movie Myths about the American West
- Ronda Grogan Consumers and Catalogues
- Sarah White, The Incorporation of the Kitchen: The Effects of Industrialization on (American) Foodways.
- American Variety Stage: Vaudeville and Popular Entertainment, 1870-1920
- John Sullivan, Topsy and Eva Play Vaudeville (Go to Interpret Mode, click on Interpretive Exhibits and then on the article.)
- Robert Toll, The Vaudeville Show, Pt 1 and Pt. 2, Plays for the People Pt. 1 and Pt. 2, and The Evolution of Musical Comedy Pt. 1 and Pt. 2 from On with the Show: The First Century of Show Business in America
- The Dime Novel
- Paul Dimaggio, Cultural Entrepreneurship in 19th C. Boston: the creation of an organizational base for high culture in America
02/26: Chicago 1933 and New York 1939: Popular Culture between the Wars I
- Robert S. Lynd, The Historical Setting, Getting a Living Traditional Ways of Spending Leisure, Inventions Remaking Leisure, The Organization of Leisure, and The Dominance of Getting a Livingfrom Middletown: A Study in American Culture as well as Middletown Faces Both Ways from Middletown in Transition.
- The 1933 Chicago World's Fair
- The 1939-40 New York World's Fair (UVA)
- The 1939-40 New York World's Fair (SJSU)
- Lawrence Levine American Culture and the Great Depression
- Cecelia Tichi, from Shifting Gears
- Warren Susman, The Thirties.
- Alfred Haworth Jones, The Search for a Usable Past in the New Deal Era
- Joseph Irrante, The Road to Autopia: The Automobile and the Spatial Transformation of American Culture.
- David L. Lewis, Sex and the Automobile: From Rumble
Seats to Rockin' Vans.
- Warren J. Belasco, Toward a Culinary Common Denomiator: The Rise of Howard Johnsons, 1925-1940
- Lawrence Levine American Culture and the Great Depression
- David Gebhard, The Moderne in the U.S., 1920-1941
- John Kouwenhoven, Stone, Steel, and Jazz,from Made in America
Suggested:
- Peter Kuznick, Losing the World of Tomorrow: The Battle over the Presentation of Science at the 1939 New York World's Fair
- Lawrence Levine, Jazz and American Culture
- Ken Burns, Jazz: A history of America's Music
- John A Jakle, The American Gasoline Station: 1920-1970
- Kenneth Jackson, The Transportation Revolution
and the Erosion of the City, from: Crabgrass Frontier.
- Peter Stanfield, An Octaroon in the Kindling: American Vernacular and Blackface Minstrelsy in 1930s Hollywood
- Peter J. Kuznick, Losing the World of Tomorrow: The Battle over the Presentation of Science at the 1939 New York World's Fair.
- Dwight Macdonald, Masscult and Midcult from Against the American Grain
- Lawrence Levine, Jazz and American Culture.
- John G. Cawelti, Adventure, Mystery, and Romance.
- Cawelti, Six Gun Mystique
- Ronald Berman, Soaps Day and Night from How Television Sees its Audience.
- Warren Susmann, Soapland
- Film Noir and Pop Culture
- The Greatest Films
- Film Genres: An Introduction
- LOC: Origins of Film Animation
- Classic Movie Reviews
- Gilbert Seldes, The Seven Lively Arts.
- Museum of Television and Radio
- The Lindy Hop
- 1930 Census Browser
- NYPL Guide to Comic Books
- Lawrence Levine, Progress and Nostalgia: The Self-Image of the 1920s
- Daniel Czitrom, The Ethereal Hearth: American Broadcasting from Wireless through Boradcasting, 1992-1940.
03/05: Popular Culture between the Wars II
- 30s Radio.
- On the Air: Radio in the 1930s
- 1930s: On the Air
- Gerald Nachman, Nesting Instincts, Treadmill to Posterity, The Anticomedian, Jokes, Inc. and Wise Guys Finish First from Raised on Radio.
- Robert C. Allen, An Institutional History of Soap Operas
- James Thurber, The Soap Opera
- Margaret T. McFadden, 'America's Boyfriend who Can't Get a Date:' Gender, Race, and the Cultural Work of the Jack Benny Program, 1932-1936.
- Comic Strips:
- Film:
- Suggested:
Spring Break
03/19: Signs of Life
- Readings:
- Merchants of Cool PBS Frontline.
- Laurence Shames, The More Factor.
- Peter Gibian, The Art of Being Off-Center:Shopping
Center Spaces and Spectacles.
- Joan Kron, The Semiotics of Home Decor.
- Andrew Wernick, Vehicles for Myth: The Shifting
Image of the Modern Car.
- Roland Marchand, The Parable of the Democracy
of Goods.
- Jane Caputi, IBM's Charlie Chaplin: A Case Study.
- Ann Norton, The Signs of Shopping.
- Gloria Steinem, Sex, Lies, and Advertising
- Jack Solomn, Masters of Desire: The Culture of American Advertising.
- susan Douglas, Signs of Intelligent Life on TV
- Wlater Kirn, Twentysomethings
- Marilyn M. Lowery, The Traditional Romance Formula
- Michael A. Messner, Power at Play: Sport and Gender Relations
- Jennifer Scanlon, Boys-R-Us: Board Games and the Socialization of Young Adolescent Girls
- Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth
- LynNell Hancock, The Haves and the Have-Nots
- Andrew Calcutt, The End of Adulthood?
- Gary Cross, Barbi, G.I.Joe, and Play in the 1960s
- Lucy Lippard, Alternating Currents
- Shaw and Prelinger, Manifest Congestion: Freeway Landscapes and Timescapes
- Robert B. Ray, The Thematic Paradigm
- Linda Seeger, Creating the Myth
- Umberto Eco, Casablanca, or, the Cliches Are Having
a Ball.
- Michael Parenti, Class and Virtue.
- George H. Lewis, From Common Dullness to Fleeting
Wonder: The Manipulation of Cultural Meaning in the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
Saga.
- McCrea Adams, Advertising Characters: The Pantheon
of Consumerism.
- Michael Omi, In Living Color: Race and American Culture
- Seth Mydans, Not Just the Inner City: Well-to-Do Join Gangs
- Evelynn Hammonds, Race, SEx, AIDS: The Construction of "Other"
Suggested:
03/26: Project Proposals
04/02: No Class
04/09: Revision and upgrade of Project Proposals
04/16: Story Boards
04/23: First Drafts
GTMAP
04/30: Second Drafts
Final Examinations: 05/04-05/11
Final Projects due 05/11
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