The Graduate Center
The City University of New York

COURSES -- Fall 2003      

ASCP. 81000 - Introduction to American Studies: History & Methods, GC: T, 6:308:30 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof.Grasso, [45203] Cross listed with MALS 73200

This course examines the history, theories, and practices of American Studies from its inception as an academic discipline to the present.

Reading both historical and contemporary scholarship, we will explore when, by whom, and for what purposes American Studies was inaugurated; how the field has developed and why; whether it is possible to periodize American Studies scholarship; and what constitutes an American Studies approach.

One primary concern will be contextualizing the field’s major trends within the historical moments in which they develop. Another will be investigating the relationship between contemporary American Studies scholarship and that of scholars working in other fields such as Gender Studies, Cultural Studies, Sexuality Studies, and Empire Studies.

Course requirements include participation in class and online discussions; several brief writing assignments; a presentation of research findings; and one final paper surveying interdisciplinary scholarship on a particular phenomenon in American culture.

ASCP. 81500 - 19th-Century Amererican Women Writers, GC: M, 4:15-6:15 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Reynolds, [45807] Cross listed with ENGL 88000 and WSCP 81000

Nineteenth-century America produced arguably the greatest woman poet, Emily Dickinson, as well as important literature by other writers reflecting all aspects of women's experience.  This was a vital century of change for women, who saw new vistas of literary expression, employment, political involvement, and reform activity open before them, even as they wrestled with the conventional gender roles of the past.

This course covers the various genres of women's writing produced by both canonical and noncanonical authors. Among the themes addressed are women's rights (Margaret Fuller, Lillie Devereux Blake), the cult of domesticity (Susan Warner),  industrialism (Rebecca Harding Davis), slavery and the African-American experience (Harriet Beecher Stowe, Harriet Jacobs, Harriet Wilson), religious and racial themes (Lydia Maria Child, Catharine Sedgwick), and regionalism (Sarah Wilkins Freeman, Kate Chopin). The life and poetry of Emily Dickinson are held up against this vital cultural background. 

Gender theory and feminist criticism are brought into play, both in class discussion and in oral reports.  A 15-page term paper is required.

ASCP. 81500 - Ethnology/Ethnography of USA, GC: W, 11:45 a.m.-1:45 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Susser, [45804] Cross listed with ANTH 72900

ASCP. 81500 - Jazz & American Writing GC: R, 11:45 a.m.-1:45 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Dolan, [45806] Cross listed with ENGL 85000

"[A]s far as America is concerned [jazz] is our characteristic expression."--Gilbert Seldes

"I don’t know how such extremes as now exist [in jazz] can be contained under one heading."--Duke Ellington

 "Jazz is only what you are. . . . If you don’t know what it is, don’t mess with it."--Louis Armstrong

This course will ignore Armstrong’s (perhaps apocryphal) injunction and mess with the connections between twentieth-century American jazz and twentieth-century American writing. More precisely, we will investigate the ways in which American writers have messed with jazz and American jazz performers have messed with writing.

Starting with ragtime and the "pre-history" of jazz, we will read and listen our way through a series of such encounters from the 1910s until late in the century. Works by such recognized American litterateurs as James Weldon Johnson, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Langston Hughes, William Carlos Williams, Ralph Ellison, Jack Kerouac, Norman Mailer, Allen Ginsberg, and Toni Morrison will be read alongside recordings by such influential jazz artists as Scott Joplin, Paul Whiteman, Duke Ellington, Bunk Johnson, Artie Shaw, Billie Holiday, Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, Gerry Mulligan, and Wynton Marsalis. The writings of these latter artists may also be assigned, as well as excerpts from the writings of Jelly Roll Morton, Sidney Bechet, Hoagy Carmichael, Mary Lou Williams, and Art Blakey.

The ever-changing nature of jazz performance will be a central feature of the course, as will the effect that American writers’ perceptions of those changes may have had on parallel changes in American (and world) literature.

No syllabus is available at this time, but registered students may wish to read Ted Gioia’s History of Jazz (Oxford U P) for introductory historical background in preparation for the course.

ASCP. 81500 - Material & Visual Culture of U.S., GC: R, 4:15-6:15 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Jaffee, [45808] Cross listed with HIST 75400

Americans have always lived in a rich and complex material world. Scholars have increasingly devoted attention to the non-textual sphere of expression. This course will introduce students to that literature (cultural history, art history and architecture, folklore) as well as have them "learn to look" at portraits and monuments, samplers and houses.

We will consider a number of topics such as the complex of material cultures in colonial North America (Indian, Spanish, French, German and British), the relationship between folk and cosmopolitan cultures, the democratization of artistic communities in antebellum United States, the debates over domesticity in the nineteenth century home, and photography and the western landscape.

Authors include Robert St. George, Richard Bushman, Laurel Ulrich, Neil Harris, Angela Miller, Dell Upton, John Vlach, Alan Trachtenberg, Kirk Savage, Joshua Brown, Sarah Burns.

ASCP. 81500 - Minstrelsy from the Civil War-Present, GC: W, 2:00-5:00 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Profs. Graziano & Wallace, [45809] Cross listed with MUS 86100 & THEA 82000

This course examines the development of the minstrel show and minstrelsy from the end of the Civil War through the twentieth century.

Topics to be discussed include the social and racial aspects of the genre; the spread of minstrel songs and routines to other arts genres, including vaudeville, musical theater, and film; and the continuing presence of aspects of minstrelsy in the post-civil rights era.

Topics will be examined from the viewpoint of various disciplines to attempt to construct a context for the confluence of art and society.

A major research project and class presentation are required.

ASCP. 81500 - Realism & Naturalism in Film & Literature, GC: R, 6:30-9:30 p.m., Rm. C-419, 3 credits, Prof. Singer, [45801] Cross listed with THEA 81500

Beginning with representative discourse from science and the humanities, this course will present multiple, international literary and film narratives that exhibit core precepts of Realist and Naturalist ideology: a commitment to social and psychological verisimilitude, issues of genetic/ environmental causality; an anti-romantic/anti-supernatural "objective" observation of the working world; a class-based context that suggests an informing ideological perspective.

Students will be assigned two writing projects, a short, independent project that examines issues and questions arising from the discussion of course precepts and their contextual representation, or an area of personal interest arising from the analysis of the material. A second, longer end-term project will evolve from an interpretation and analysis of course material that the student will develop with the instructor.

ASCP. 81500 - Spaces & Cultures of American Empire, GC: T, 11:45 a.m.-1:45 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Smith, [45805] Cross listed with ANTH 81300

ASCP. 81500 - U.S. Public Policy, GC: M, 6:30-8:30 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Gelb, [45810] Cross listed with P SC 73901

This course will relate theories of the policy making process to actual case studies in decision making in the US. Among the topics to be analyzed will be policies selected from the following: policy toward breast cancer and health , anti tobacco , the environment , family policy (child care and parental leave) , and crime and criminal justice , as well as possible consideration of the decision to invade Iraq or NAFTA .

Sources to be utilized will drawn from: Stone, Policy Paradox; Hayes , The Limits Of Policy Change; Kingdon, Agendas Alternatives and Public Policies and Baumgartner and Jones, Agendas and Instability in American Politics, as well as relevant case studies.

Course work will include a midterm, short paper and take home final.

ASCP. 82000 - American Intellectual History, 1877-Present, GC: W, 4:15-6:15 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Diggins, [45816] Cross listed with HIST 75400

The course deals with the major topics in American intellectual history from the post-Civil War period to the present. Among those to be investigated are Darwinism, Pragmatism, Socialism and Feminism; Afro-American Thought; the Greenwich Village Rebellion and the Lost Generation; the Old Left and the New Left; Postmodernism and Neo-Conservatism.

Some of the assigned texts are John P. Diggins, The Promise of Pragmatism; Alice Rossi, ed., The Feminist Paper; W.E.B. DeBois, A Reader, ed. David L. Lewis; Malcolm Cowley, Exile's Return; Allen Bloom,The Closing of the American Mind.

ASCP. 82000 - Film Noir in Context, GC: W, 6:30-9:30 p.m., Rm. TBA, 2-4 credits, Prof. Dickstein, [45800] Cross listed with ENGL 87400 and THEA 81500

The course will explore the style, sensibility, and historical context of film noir. After tracing its origins in German expressionism, French "poetic realism," American crime movies, the hard-boiled fiction of Dashiell Hammett and James M. Cain, and the example of Citizen Kane, we will examine some of the key films noirs of the period between John Huston's The Maltese Falcon of 1941 and Welles's Touch of Evil in 1958, including such works as Double Indemnity, Mildred Pierce, Out of the Past, Detour, Shadow of a Doubt, In a Lonely Place, Gun Crazy, The Killers, DOA, Ace in the Hole, The Big Heat, and Kiss Me Deadly.

We'll examine the role of French critics in defining and revaluing this style, and delve into its influence on French directors like Melville (Second Breath), Truffaut (Shoot the Piano Player), and Chabrol (La Femme Infidele, Le Boucher). Finally, we'll look at the post-1970s noir revival in America in such films as Chinatown, Blade Runner, Body Heat, and Red Rock West.

Readings will include materials on the historical background of this style, key critical and theoretical texts on film noir, and hard- boiled fiction by writers such as Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain, and Patricia Highsmith.

ASCP. 82000 - Hist of Women & Family: US 1820-Present, GC: M, 6:30-8:30 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Welter, [45817] Cross listed with HIST 75500

This course considers the way in which gender has had an impact on all areas of life on the United States in the 19th and 20th century. It relies heavily on primary sources. Particular attention is paid to the changes in family structure over the period and to the reforms generated by these changes.

Among the major topics discussed are religion, popular culture, education, childhood, and role definition.

ASCP. 82000 - History of American Theatre GC: Instructor/Day TBA, 4:15-6:15/Rm. 3305, 3 credits, [45818] Cross listed with THEA 86100

ASCP. 82000 - Modernism & Historicism in Architecture and Design Between the Two World Wars, GC: R, 6:30-8:30 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Bletter, [45813] Cross listed with ART 88300

The Machine Age in America 1918-1941 (1986) will form the core of a critical discussion that will differentiate, more clearly than this publication, between the social underpinnings of the free-wheeling twenties and the Depression-era thirties. It will also attempt to define the flowering of the American skyscraper in the twenties as a phenomenon of the Jazz age rather than the "Machine Age."

The course will expand H.-R. Hitchcock’s layered historical model to deal with the avant-garde, the historicizing Beaux-Arts, as well as popular commercial styles (Art Deco and Streamlined Moderne). Further, it will explore institutional structures such as the Metropolitan Museum’s and MoMA’s influence on architecture and crafts together with the newly conceived profession of industrial design.

The impact of exhibitions (Chicago Century of Progress, the 1939 New York World’s Fair) will be examined for their projection of a synthesized modernity. Sheldon Cheney’s Art and the Machine will be contrasted with Lewis Mumford’s critical stance against technology.

Among the individuals to be discussed are architects Frank Lloyd Wright, Eliel Saarinen, Hugh Ferriss, Raymond Hood, Rudolph Schindler, Richard Neutra, and Julia Morgan; industrial designers Norman Bel Geddes, Raymond Loewy, Walter Dorwin Teague, Donald Deskey; and artist-designers Eva Zeisel, Frederick Kiesler, and Isamu Noguchi. It will conclude with the influx of European Modernists in the thirties and the conflict this created for many American practicioners.

A research paper based on the seminar presentation of the student’s choice is required. Auditors permitted. Preliminary Reading: Richard Guy Wilson et. al., The Machine Age in America (Brooklyn Museum/Abrams, 1986); Lisa Phillips, et.al., High Styles: Twentieth-Century American Design (Whitney Museum/Summit, 1985): first three essays by Hanks, Gebhard, and Bletter.

ASCP. 82000 - Social History of the Roots of Mass Culture, GC: W, 5:30-7:30 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Ewen, [45819] Cross listed with SOC 76900

The seminar will explore the crossroads between the rise of the mass media, the development of a modern commercial society, and the emergence of a consumer society. Relations between visual culture, language and social power will be an ongoing concern, as will changes in the character of public life and public interaction that have evolved alongside the rise of the modern media system.

Throughout the course we will examine media artifacts and aesthetic currents in relation to distinct cultural outlooks and important social and/or historical changes. Historical junctures linking popular culture with the mass media will be explored as well.

ASCP. 82000 - Wallace Stevens: Rude Aesthetic, GC: T, 11:45 a.m.-1:45 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Richardson, [45815] Cross listed with ENGL 75400

In "The Comedian as the Letter C" Stevens’s mock hero, Crispin, searches for the sources of his "rude aesthetic," "an aesthetic tough, diverse, untamed/ Incredible to prudes, the mint of dirt,/ Green barbarism turning paradigm."

In this seminar we shall search for the same, following Stevens’s in his reading, in his "soil," in his time.

There will be a term paper and 12-15 minute seminar reports required.

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