ENAM 802: American Studies Colloquium I

Syllabus

Alan B. Howard
427 Bryan Hall
Office Hours: MW 2:00-3:30
1-804-924-6644 or abh9h@virginia.edu

syllabus version 1.0; last updated 10/12/96

• Summer Reading:
  • John Berger, Ways of Seeing.
  • Neill Howe and Bill Strauss, 13th Gen: Abort, Retry, Ignore, Fail?
  • James Hunter, Culture Wars.
  • Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
  • George P. Landow, Hypertext: The Convergance of Critical Theory and Technology.
  • Seymour Martin Lipset, American Exceptionalism: A Double-Edged Sword
  • Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

• New Texts:
  • T.J. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace
  • Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden.
  • Miles Orvell, The Real Thing.
  • Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land.
  • Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America
  • Alan Trachtenberg, The Incorporation of America.
  • Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society.

8/28:Organization and Introduction

• Begin working on HTML Tutorial
• Subscribe to H-AMSTDY , and T-AMLIT.

8/30: Summer Reading I

• Seymour Martin Lipset, American Exceptionalism
• AS Lab Friday, 8/30 4-6:00 in Bryan 203

9/2: Summer Reading II:

• James Hunter, Culture Wars.
• Ian Howe,13th Gen: Abort, Retry, Fail?
• Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.
• AS Lab Monday, 9/2 4-6:00

9/9: Summer Reading III

• John Berger, The Art of Seeing.
• Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
• Richard Landow,Text and Hypertext.
• AS Lab

9/16: American Studies: Getting the Lay of the Land

• Henry Nash Smith, Can American Studies Develop a Method?
• Leo Marx, American Studies A Defense of an Unscientific Method.
• Frederick Lewis Dekker, Disassembling the Machine in the Garden.
• Bruce Kuklich, Myth and Symbol in American Studies
• Kenneth Lynn, The Regressive Historians
• Donald Pease, Visionary Compacts and the Cold War Consensus.
• Nina Baym, Melodramas of Beset Manhood.
• Joyce Joyce, The Black Canon
• Phillip Fisher, The New American Studies.
• Frederick Crews, The New Americanists.
• Frederick Crews, Whose American Renaissance?
• Paul Lauter, The Literatures of America: A Comparative Discipline
• Richard Ruland, Art and a Better America
• David Levin,American Historicism Old and New.
• Gene Wise, Paradigm Dramas in American Studies: A Cultural and Institutional History of the Movement.
• Elizabeth Fox-Genovese,Between Individualism and Fragmentation: American Culture and the New Literary Studies of Race and Gender.
• Christopher P. Wilson, Containing Multitudes: Realism, Historicism, American Studies.
• Christopher Clausen, National Literatures in English.
• Jay Mechling, An American Culture Grid, With Texts.
• Gerald Graff, The Promise of American Studies.
• AS Lab

Suggested:

• Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin, eds., Critical Terms for Literary Study, especially Stanley Fish, Rhetoric, Stephen Greenblatt, Culture, John Guillory, Canon, Myra Jehlen, Gender, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Race, Werner Sollors, Ethnicity, James H. Kavanagh, Ideology, John Fiske, Popular Culture, Louis Menand, Diversity, and Daniel T. O'Hara, Class. (C)
• Theresa de Lauretis, ed., Feminist Studies, Critical Studies.
• Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Race: Writing and Difference.
• Frederick Jameson, The Political Unconscious.
• John Fiske, Understanding Popular Culture.
• Werner Sollors, Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture.
• Edward Said, Orientalism.

9/23: From American Studies to American Cultural Studies

• Gene Wise, From American Studies to American Cultural Studies
• Clifford Geertz, Ideology as a Cultural System
• Roland Barthes, Myth Today, Striptease, Toys, Wrestling
• Frederick Jameson, Postmodernism: The Logic of Late Industrial Capitalism
• Peter Berger, Society as Drama
• Jane Caputi, IBM's Charlie Chaplin: A Case Study
• Robert Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre in the rue Severain
• Umberto Eco, Travels in Hyperreality
• Umberto Eco, Casablanca, or, The Cliches are Having a Ball
• Gary Engle, What Makes Superman so Darned American?
• Peter Giblan, The Art of Being Off-Center: Shopping Center Spaces and Spectacles
• bell hooks, Madonna: Plantation Mistress or Soul Sister?
• George H. Lewis, From Common Dullness to Fleeting Wonder: The Manipulation of Cultural Meaning the the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Saga
• Andrew Wernick, Vehicles for Myth: The Shifting Image of the Modern Car
• Michael Walker, Kings Row
• Joan Kron, The Semiotics of Home Decor
• Roland Marchand, The Parable of the Democracy of Goods
• AS Lab

9/30: Classic Paradigms I: In the Beginning.

• Hans Holbein the Younger, Map of the World (1515)
• William Bradford, Selectionfrom Of Plymouth Plantation
• Captain John Smith, Selection from The History of Virginia.
• Cotton Mather, A General Introduction and Nehemius Amercana from The Magnalia Christi Americana.
• Ben Franklin, from The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, pp.5-29, 81-92 and Poor Richard Improved, 1758 pp. 1295-1304.
• 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?, Letter IX: Description of Charles-Town, and Letter XII: Distresses of a Frontier Manfrom Letters from an American Farmer.
• AS Lab

Suggested:

• Sacvan Bercovitch, The Puritan Origins of the American Self.
• Daniel Boorstin, The Americans: The Colonial Experience.
• Oscar Handlin, The Uprooted.
• Howard Mumford Jones, O Strange New World
• Michael Kammen, The Machine that Would Run by Itself: The Constitution in American Culture.
• Perry Miller, Errand into the Wilderness.
• David Potter, People of Plenty.
• Ernest Lee Tuveson, Redeemer Nation.
• Gary Wills, Inventing America: Jefferson's Declaration of Independence

10/7: Classic Paradigms II: The Middle Ground

• Alexis deTocqueville, from Democracy in America,

  Origin of the Anglo-Americans and the Importance of their Origins in Relation to Thier Future Condition,
  The Necessity of Examining the Condition of hte States Before That of the Union at Large,
  The Federal Constitution,
  Liberty of the Press in the United States,
  Government of Democracy in the United States,
  Main Causes Tending to Maintain a Democratic Republic in the United States,
  The Present and Probably Future condition of the Three Races that Inhabit the Territory of the United States,
  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,
  Why Democratic Nations show a More Ardent and Enduring Love for Equality than Liberty,
  Of Individualism in Democratic Countries,
  Of the Uses which Americans make of Public Associations,
  Of the Taste for Physical Well-being in America,
  What Causes Almost All Americans to Follow an Industrial Calling,
  How an Aristocracy may be Created by Manufacures,
  How Customs are Softened as Social Conditions become more Equal,
  Influence of Democracy on the Family,
  How Americans Understand the Equality of the Sexes,
  Of Honour in the United States and in Democratic Communities,
  Why Democratic Nations Naturally Desire Peace and Democratic Armies War,
  Why the Idea of Democratic Peoples about Government Naturally Favors the Concentration of Politieal Power,
  What Sort of Despotism Democratic Nations have to Fear,
  General Survey of the Subject.

• AS Lab

10/14: The Middle Ground (continued)

• Noah Webster, Preface to The American Dictionary of the English Language
• Edgar Allen Poe, The Man of the Crowd, and The Man That Was All Used Up,
• Ralph Waldo Emerson, The American Scholar
• Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Maypole of Merrymount
• Nathaniel Hawthorne, Roger Malvin's Burial
• Nathaniel Hawthorne, My Kinsman, Major Molineaux
• Abraham Lincoln, The Gettysburg Address.
• Abraham Lincoln, Second Inaugural Address.
• Walt Whitman, fromDemocratic Vistas.
• Walt Whitman, The Eighteenth Presidency
• Jacob Riis,Introduction and Genesis of the Tenement from How the Other Half Lives.
• William Graham Sumner, Selection from What the Social Classes Owe Each Other
• Frederick Jackson Turner, The Significance of the Frontier in American History.
• Thorstein Veblen, Industri al Exemption and Conservatism from The Theory of the Leisure Classes
• Andrew Carnegie, Wealth
• George Santayana, Materialism and Idealism in American Life from Character and Opinion in the United States.
• Henry Adams, Chicago and The Dynamo and the Virgin, from The Education of Henry Adams.
• * V.L. Parrington, The Chief Stewards of Theocracy and The Contributions of Independency from Main Currents in American Thought Vol. I (R)
• * William Carlos Williams, Voyage of the Mayflower and The May-Pole at Maerry Mount from In the American Grain
• Constance Rourke, Corncobs Twist Your Hair
• Constance Rourke, The Gamecock of the Wilderness from American Humor
• John Crowe Ransom, A Statement of Principles
• Lionel Trilling, Reality in America
• Reinhold Niebuhr, Where Have We Been? Where are We Going?
• AS Lab