The Graduate Center
The City University of New York
COURSES -- Fall 2007
ASCP. 81000 - Introduction
to American Studies: History & Methods GC: T, 4:14-6:15
p.m.,
Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Burke [90109]
ASCP. 81500 - African-American
Political Thought GC: R, 6:30-8:30 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof.
Watts, [90906] Cross listed with P SC 82001. Permission of instructor
required for those not enrolled in the Political Science Program.
ASCP. 81500 - American
Intellectual History & Political Philosophy GC: W, 4:15-6:15
p.m.,
Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Diggins, [90905] Cross listed with HIST 75900.
Syllabus available in Certificate Programs Office (Room 5109)
ASCP. 81500 - American
Aesthetics GC: R, 11:45 a.m.-1:45 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof.
Richardson, [90901] Cross listed with ENGL 80200.
Using Perry Miller’s 1948 edition of Jonathan Edwards’s Images or Shadows
of Divine Things to open discussion of the role of typology and,
consequently, the habit of typological reading of experience in the New World
situation, texts considered over the course of the term will demonstrate how
this habit mutates through the 19th century and into the 20th
as the idea of the "divine" changes from substantive to transitive
for the "inquisitorial botanists" and others who took account of
developments in natural history and science.
Primary readings will include, in addition to Images, Edwards’s
"Notes on the Mind", selections from Emerson, from Charles Darwin’s
Notebooks, Thoreau’s Walden, selections from Emily Dickinson,
from William James, Wallace Stevens, and Susan Howe.
The image of mind itself as one, if not the greatest, of "divine
things" as it is revealed "more truly and more strange" in its
evolving landscape will serve as the scrim against and through which the
various linguistic performances staged in the texts are considered.
ASCP. 81500 - Race,
Ethnicity & Pseudoscience in Modern American Literature GC: M, 11:45
a.m.-1:45 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. McKible, [90903] Cross
listed with ENGL 85000.
By 1910,
foreign-born immigrants accounted for one third of the US population, and by 1920,
approximately one half of the nation’s population was first- or
second-generation immigrant.
In addition, the Great Migration of the early twentieth-century entailed the
relocation of as many as 1.5 million African Americans from the South to the
North.
Cultural responses to these demographic changes can be found everywhere in the
texts of the era: in the racial pseudoscience of writers such as Madison
Grant and Lothrop Stoddard, in the popular fiction of mass circulation
magazines, and in the literature of Greenwich Village bohemians and avant
gardists, Lower East Side radicals, Harlem Renaissance writers, and
mainstream modernists.
In this course, we will read examples of American modernism (Fitzgerald,
Larsen, Yezierska, Hemingway, etc.) in conjunction with key statements on
race and ethnicity (Stoddard, Grant, Boas, Locke). We will also trace out
constructions of race in the popular imagination by working closely with the Saturday
Evening Post.
A class presentation and term paper are required.
ASCP. 81500 - Introduction
to African American Literary & Cultural CriticismGC: R, 2:00-4:00
p.m.,
Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Reid-Pharr, [90902] Cross listed with ENGL 80300
& WSCP 81000.
This seminar will introduce students to some of the more significant of
recent critical and theoretical trends within the study of African American
literature and culture.
Participants in the seminar will be asked consistently to wrestle with the
question of whether or not it is possible to produce a specifically black
literary criticism.
In relation to this question we will read a number of authors who seriously
challenge our ability to utilize race as a critical category. We will also,
however, be equally concerned with understanding how one might best define
what has come to be known as the Black American literary tradition. Thus, the
students who will be best served by this course are those who possess at
least a basic knowledge of both nineteenth and twentieth century Black
American writing.
Questions of "black" corporeality, gender and sexuality will figure
prominently in the course. In particular, participants will be asked to think
through the manner in which developments in Feminist Studies, Gay and Lesbian
Studies, Ethnic Studies and American Studies impact African American literary
and cultural critique.
Students will be asked to write several short papers during the course of the
semester. They will also do at least one in class presentation.
Authors whom we will examine include, among others: Paul Gilroy, Brent
Edwards, Hazel Carby, Robert Reid-Pharr, Henry Louis Gates, Claudia Tate,
Philip Brian Harper, Maurice Wallace, and Anthony Appiah.
ASCP. 81500 - Sociology
of the Arts & Mass Communication GC: W, 6:30-8:30
p.m.,
Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Ewen, [90907] Cross listed with SOC 76900.
ASCP 81500 Visual Culture
& US History, 1776-1796 GC: T, 4:15-6:15
p.m.,
Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Brown, [90904] Cross listed with HIST 75400.
"Historical
understanding is like a vision, or rather like an evocation of images."
Inspired by Johan Huizinga's insight, this course will explore the ways
visual culture illuminates and alters our understanding of major themes and
eras in U.S. history.
We will investigate the manner in which different visual media documented,
articulated, and embodied conditions, relations, ideas, identity, and issues from
the American Revolution to the Cold War.
Critically evaluating a range of historiographical approaches, this course
also will consider the impact and efficacy of using visual evidence to study
the past.
My syllabus is online at: http://www.joshbrownnyc.com/viscult2007/
My office hours: By appointment (jbrown@gc.cuny.edu
or 212-817-1970), Room 7301.09
ASCP. 82000 - American Women's History GC: M, 6:30-8:30
p.m.,
Rm. credits, Prof. Welter, [90914] Cross listed with HIST 75500 & WSCP
81000
ASCP. 82000 - American Renaissance GC: M, 4:15-6:15
p.m.,
Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Reynolds, [90910] Cross listed with ENGL 75100.
The three
decades between 1835 and 1865 are arguably the richest period in American
literary history.
This period saw the dazzling innovations in philosophy, literary style, and
social criticism brought about by Emerson and Thoreau; the metaphysical depth
and cultural breadth represented by the novels of Melville and Hawthorne; the
breathtaking poetic experimentation of Whitman and Dickinson; and the
psychological and artistic achievement of Edgar Allan Poe.
The issues of race and chattel slavery were powerfully depicted by Frederick
Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, and Harriet Beecher Stowe. Class conflict was
dramatized in popular novels by George Lippard and George Thompson, and
women's issues in the fiction of Sara Parton and others.
In addition to reading these authors, we shall discuss key theoretical and
critical approaches to their writings. An oral report and a 15-page
term paper are required.
ASCP. 82000 - Race & Performance in US Cinema, 1895-1930s
GC: M, 6:30-9:30 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof.
Wallace, [90913] Cross listed with THEA 81500 & FSCP 81000.
Cultural
stereotypes and clichés of blacks as inept and clownish were rife in the
illustrated press at the time (the turn of the century) that the earliest
films were brief and cheap to produce, allowing for a range and variety of
imagery that quickly overwhelmed the most compelling racial stereotypes on
stage and in performance.
In the teens, as the U.S. film industry began to consolidate Westward in
California, there was the emergence of a powerful new set of racial
stereotypes mobilized around the perception of slavery as having been most
beneficial for all concerned, culminating in such films as Gone with the
Wind in 1939.
In the meanwhile, in the 20s and 30s, the U.S. film industry remained capable
of a modicum of diversity and self-contradiction as black entertainers and
peoples of color were becoming internationally famous for their extraordinary
gifts as musicians, dancers and performers. The intention of the course will
be to weave together the histories of African American recorded music,
movies, theatre and performance in a manner designed to enrich the
traditional negative stereotype perspective on race images in U.S. cinema. We will endeavor to
collectively produce a fuller, less antagonistic and more satisfying
understanding of the hybridic nature of technologically produced modern
popular culture. The requirements would be class attendance, as well as
completing the assigned readings and viewings. The final assignment will be a
c15-20 page paper on a pre-approved topic drawn either from required films or
recommended films and performance. (Listings of readings and films to be
screened available in the Certificate Programs Office, Room 5109.)
ASCP. 82000 - Role of American Public Intellectual GC: T, 4:15-6:15
p.m.,
Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. O'Brien, [90917] Cross listed with P SC
79003. Permission of instructor required.
The third and
final course that fulfills the [Ph.D. Program in Political Science] Writing
Politics Specialization, this course examines the unique role American public
intellectual plays in politics. The course is divided into three parts.
First, it explores whether the classic argument that the American public
intellectual is less effective than his or her European counterpart is
correct.
Second, was there more of a role for journalists than political thinkers?
What do some exposés say about how timing effects ideas shape political
discourse? How has the transformation in the media affected the political
effect either journalists or public intellectuals have?
And third, the course analyzes a specific theme within American political
thought - the rise of the right and the role of religion - and how the
neoconservatives have contributed to it.
To that purpose the course reviews texts in American political thought by
Alexis De Tocqueville, Herbert Croly, John Dewey, Robert Bellah, and Gertrude
Himmelfarb, among others. Therefore, the course also helps students
interested in American political thought.
ASCP. 82000 - Socializing Experience: Subjects & Subjectivity in
American Culture, 1945-1975 GC: R, 6:30-8:30
p.m.,
Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Alcalay, [90912] Cross listed with ENGL 85000.
This course
will be framed by political and cultural events: on one end, by the almost
total socialization of experience following the end of the American war in Indochina , and, on the other, by the
aftermath of World War II and its effects on categorizations of disciplinary
knowledge in the Cold War.
Within this framework, we will look at the exploratory and radical culture of
American writers whose impact on this period was pervasive. In particular, we
will filter much of our reading through the thought and work of Charles
Olson,
However, rather than make this an "Olson" course, we will explore
Olson's work as an intersecting point through which we can explore paths
taken or not taken by American society as a whole.
Significant areas to be looked at will include segments of the Black Arts
Movement, the writing of American veterans of the war in Vietnam, and cultural movements and
clusters from the West Coast. Throughout, we will consider questions of
subjectivity and experience, and their place within socializing processes,
particularly disciplinary/educational structures and national narratives.
Students enrolling in the course will get a more detailed syllabus and
reading list.
For further information, please write to Ammiel Alcalay at: aaka@earthlink.net
ASCP. 82000 - The Ashcan Painters & the Material Culture of their
Urban Environment: Ongoing Exhibitions, Historical Collections, New
Scholarship GC: T, 2:00-4:00 p.m., Rm. 3421, 3 credits, Prof.
Manthorne, [90909] Permission of instructor and executive officer required.
Cross listed with ART 87100.
The centenary
of the landmark exhibition of The Eight will be marked in 2008. John Sloan,
Robert Henri, and their colleagues in the so-called Ashcan School are
receiving intense scrutiny beginning in Fall 2007, which will be at the heart
of this course.
Since Katherine Manthorne contributed to the first major retrospective of
John Sloan in fifty years (to open at the Delaware Art Museum in October), the class will get
a first-hand view and the opportunity to see behind the scenes, talking to
staff there.
An exciting retrospective of the group, organized by the Detroit Institute of
Arts, will come to the New York Historical Society in late November.
We will work with photographs and material culture objects of the N-YHS and the
Museum of the City of New York, building knowledge of this
urban culture. Visits to other major holdings of artworks B the MMA, Brooklyn, Newark and Whitney Museums are also scheduled, including
discussions with curators and conservators there.
One class is devoted to early motion pictures of the period, and another to
an architectural tour of the neighborhood where the artists lived and worked,
with special attention to their work spaces. We also investigate those
excluded from Henri & Sloan's inner circle, including women (a recent
exhibit focused on Henri's female students) and people of color.
Our goal is threefold: to revise our understanding of this infamous group of
painters and its subsequent impact on art history, to gain first-hand
experience with art and exhibitions, and to acquire unique insight into the
urban environment of NYC in the early decades of the 20th century.
Semester-long investigations will culminate in individual student research
papers.
The course is taught in collaboration with Dr. Linda Ferber, Vice-President
and Museum Director, New-York Historical Society.
Five (5) auditors accepted.
Preliminary readings:
Rebecca Zurier, Picturing the
City. Urban Vision and the Ashcan School. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2006.
ASCP. 82000 - The Philosophy of John Dewey GC: M, 2:00-4:00
p.m.,
Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Cahn, [90916] Cross listed with PHIL 76400.
John Dewey, the
preeminent American philosopher of the first half of the twentieth century,
made contributions to virtually every area of philosophical inquiry. This
course will offer a critical examination of his epistemology, moral and
political theory, and philosophy of education. We shall read in their
entirety Democracy and Education, The Quest for Certainty, Experience and
Education, Freedom and Culture, and Theory of Valuation.
Grades will be based on mid-term and final examinations.
Dewey's complete works are available in paperback in a 37-volume edition from
Southern Illinois University Press. The volumes we shall read are The Middle Works, Vol. 9, The Later Works,
Vol. 4, and The Later Works,
Vol. 13.
ASCP. 82000 - US Since WW II: Politics & Society GC:
M, 4:15-6:15 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Freeman,
[90915] Cross listed with HIST 75700.
ASCP 89000- Dissertation Workshop GC: W, 4:15-6:16 pm., Room TBA, 0
credits, Prof. Watts [90110]Open only to registered ASCP
students at Levels 2 and 3
Students
prepare and read each others' work (including drafts of the dissertation
prospectus), as well as discuss the job market and the academic profession.
Level 2 students writing prospecti, and Level 3 students at any stage in the
dissertation process, are welcome to register for the class, but the permission
of the program coordinator is required for registration.
(Past courses: Spring 2007; Fall 2006; Spring
2006; Fall 2005; Spring 2005; Fall
2004; Spring 2004; Fall 2003; Spring 2003, Fall 2002)