ASCP. 81000 - Introduction to American Studies:
History & Methods GC: R, 6:30-8:30 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Alcalay
After an overview of the development of American Studies as a discipline, the
course will focus on the interpretation and transmission of defining moments in
North American life through a diverse range of sources. Beginning with the
peopling of the continent itself, we will consider ways the narrative of the
continent until and following European contact has been told (using the tools of
the shaman, geographer, anthropologist, historian, biographer, novelist, poet,
etc.). These defining moments include crucial periods of narrative consolidation
and reinterpretation: indigenous creation stories; King Philip’s War and Indian
Removal; the Civil War and the abolitionist movement; the Cold War and beat
culture; the American War in Vietnam and decolonization; and U.S. involvement in
the Middle East in the context of identity politics.
We will look at the circumstances through which uniquely American forms emerge
(such as the Indian captivity tale or jazz), and trace their transformation as
key elements mobilized in the creation of new identities and allegiances.
We will pay close attention to the relationship between social and political
struggles, and how those struggles have been inscribed, reinscribed, or obscured
in new versions of history and identity. A major concern will be the differences
between institutionalized forms of knowledge and a poetics of experience that
engages history and culture outside traditional academic categories.
Throughout, we will place ourselves in regional frameworks whose scope is
international; for example, how can early forms of American identity be seen as
the result of the competing forces of French, Spanish, and Anglo colonizing
practices and projections? How does the creation of racial categories obscure
class allegiances and economic imperatives? How is identity performed in the
historical conditions of individual, communal, and national memory transmission?
What is the process of cultural consumption through which utopian forms of
creative consciousness become politically neutralized? These and other questions
will be explored through a diverse range of sources, using materials from
different strata of scholarly and creative work.
Although an introductory course, we will structure the semester around intensive
reading; while the class will read a set of common texts, students will be asked
to pursue further readings in selected areas of research. A detailed
bibliography will be sent out to registered and interested students sometime in
June. The aim of this structure will be to allow students to consider, even at
early stages of their graduate work, taking up research topics within the rich
terrain of explored and unexplored possibilities that exist in American Studies.
Required work for the course can take different forms for different students;
some may want to embark upon an original research project in an area of
interest, while others may want to read as much as possible across a wider range
of topics. In one case, a series of seemingly disparate notes might lead to a
dissertation topic; in another, research on a historical period or subject that
involves unearthing obscured or difficult to get at sources may spark interest
in pursuing very different areas of scholarship than one might have thought when
beginning graduate work. In this sense, the course is envisioned more as a
workshop of ideas and research approaches than a survey.
Enrollment limited. For
permission and/or inquiries, contact Professor Ammiel Alcalay at
aaka@earthlink.net
ASCP 81500 - Greenwich Village: Architecture/Culture
GC: R, 4:15-6:15 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Murphy, Cross listed with ART
87500 Permission of Ph.D. Program in Art History required
This seminar will consider Greenwich Village as
both an architectural and cultural phenomenon. The course will trace its
development from its origins as an actual village to its emergence in the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries as a center of artistic and bohemian culture.
In addition to examining how the Village grew
physically—in relation to its plan and to its architecture—we will also be
considering how it began to have a particular identity within New York City. The
significance of Greenwich Village to the debates about urban renewal in the
twentieth century (it was home to Jane Jacobs who based many of the observations
in her seminal anti-modernist tract, The Death and Life of Great American Cities
[1961], on observations of the Village where she lived) and its place in ongoing
considerations of gentrification in New York, will also be addressed.
Seminar meetings will consist of discussions of common readings, site visits,
and presentations by students of their research projects. The course will
require a research paper and active participation in seminar discussions.
Auditors permitted.
Preliminary reading: Terry Miller, Greenwich Village and How it Got That
Way (New York: 1990).
ASCP 81500 - Mind, Angels & the Jameses GC: R,
11:45 a.m.-1:45 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Richardson, Cross listed with
ENGL. 85000
American literary experience began, and in many cases continues to be practiced
today, as a variety of religious experience. Beginning with selections from
Jonathan Edwards’s Religious Affections and "Notes on the Mind,"
following his stated method of "giving attention to the mind in thinking," we
will investigate the ways in which the desire of Puritan ministers "to make the
invisible visible" becomes the method of William James’s Principles of
Psychology, the subject of The Varieties of Religious Experience, and
the art of Henry James’s fiction, using The Ambassadors as an exemplary
instance.
We will at the same time consider these texts in the light of current work in
cognitive science, neuroscience, consciousness studies, and neuro-aesthetics
that they prefigure: the research and findings of Andy Clark, Francis Crick and
Kristof Koch, Gerald Edeman, and Semir Zeki, for example. In tracing this
trajectory we will take account of the important contributions made by the work
of Emanuel Swedenborg and Ralph Waldo Emerson to the Jameses’ thinking about
thinking and to the naturalization of religious affections.
Readings will, therefore, include–in addition to what has been indicated above,
which will constitute our primary texts– significant selections from Swedenborg
and Emerson as well as from Henry James Sr.’s The Secret of Swedenborg.
Our discussions will, of course, also take account of 18th and 19th
developments in natural history/science and of Emerson’s and William James’s
familiarity with sacred texts of the East.
ASCP 81500 - Comedy: Method and Meaning GC: T,
6:30-9:30 p.m., Rm. C-419, 3 credits, Prof. Dickstein, Cross listed with ENGL
87400, FSCP 81000, & THEA 81500
This course will take a historical, critical, and theoretical approach to the
evolution of film comedy. It will begin with short films and longer works by
Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton, showing how film comedy develops from
slapstick, sight gags, pantomime, farce, and other vaudeville routines to more
complex forms of drama, pathos, and characterization.
We will examine some of the major comic performers of the 1930s, including the
Marx brothers, W. C. Fields, and Mae West, in the context of their times, and
explore works of screwball comedy by directors like Leo McCarey, Frank Capra,
Howard Hawks, and Gregory La Cava, as well as a parallel tradition of
sophisticated or cynical romantic comedy by Ernst Lubitsch, Preston Sturges, and
Billy Wilder. Along the way we’ll compare the work of American directors to
European counterparts like Rene Clair (Le Million, A Nous la Liberte)
and Jean Renoir (Boudu Saved from Drowning, Rules of the Game).
Later material may include the work of TV comedians like Ernie Kovacs, Lucille
Ball, and Sid Caesar and feature films such as Dr. Strangelove (Kubrick,
1964), M*A*S*H (Altman,1970), Annie Hall (Woody Allen, 1977),
Tootsie (Sydney Pollack, 1982), and My Favorite Year (Richard
Benjamin,1982). There will be readings of works of comic literature from
Shakespeare to Evelyn Waugh and Vladimir Nabokov, along with theoretical
writings on comedy by Henri Bergson and others.
Each student will be expected to deliver one oral report and to write a 15-page
research paper.
ASCP 81500--20C American History: Politics/
Diplomacy/Culture GC: T, 4:15-6:15 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Diggins,
Cross listed with HIST. 75400
ASCP 81500 - The Movie Musical GC: T, 2:00-5:00
p.m., Rm. 3491, 3 credits, Prof. Graziano, Cross
listed with MUS. 86000
An examination of movie musicals and movies with
music from 1928 through the 1990s. We will survey the different genres seen on
film, including the musical short and animated musicals, and analyze the
structure of original book musicals, those adapted from Broadway, and movies
with music, and the music that is heard as the underscore and as part of the
musical.
There will be two papers and several class presentations required.
Limited to 15 students.
ASCP 81500 - American Politics GC: M, 6:30-8:30
p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Rich, Cross listed with P SC. 72300
ASCP 81500 - Sociology of the Arts & Mass
CommunicationGC: W, 6:30-8:30 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Ewen, Cross
listed with SOC. 76900
ASCP 81500 - US in Comparative Perspective GC: W,
2:00-4:00 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Torpey, Cross listed with SOC. 83000
This course examines American life in comparative and
historical perspective. It focuses on the problem of American “exceptionalism,”
and explores a) what that might mean and b) whether the notion of
“exceptionalism” makes any sense.
In assessing these problems, we will consider a number of different dimensions
of American life: religion, politics, social policy, race, power, justice,
education, human rights, and the question of “empire.”
Syllabus Possibilities
Tocqueville, DiA
Weber on “The Protestant Sects “
Gramsci, “Americanism and Fordism”
Merton, “Social Structure and Anomie”
Bellah, “Civil Religion in America” and/or The Broken Covenant
Zolberg, “How Many Exceptionalisms?”
Lipset, American Exceptionalism: A Double-Edged Sword
Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers or Social Policy
Davis, Injuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World
Marx, Making Race and Nation
Fredrickson, Racism: A Short History (and the Tocqueville essay?)
Lieven, America Right or Wrong
Agnew, Hegemony:
Putnam, Bowling Alone
Wolfe, The Transformation of American Religion
Whitman, Harsh Justice
Offe, Reflections on America
Maier, Among Empires: American Ascendancy and its Predecessors
(coming Fri, Oct. 13)
Ignatieff, American Exceptionalism and Human Rights
Foner, In a New Land
Jerome Karabel, The Chosen
Something on health care/medicine
ASCP 82000 European Training of 19C American Artists
GC: T, 11:45 a.m.-1:45 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Webster, Cross listed
with ART. 77300 Permission of the Ph. D. Program in Art History required
This lecture course will trace the development of American art in the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries through a review of the impact of European instruction
on American artists. The course will begin with an examination of the experience
and training in Benjamin West's London studio of such artists as John Singleton
Copley, Charles Willson Peale, John Trumbull, and Gilbert Stuart.
Further along there will be a review of the education American painters received
in Düsseldorf, and sculptors in Italy, but the majority of the lectures will
focus on the training of American artists in Paris culminating with a review of
the exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, "Americans in Paris,
1860-1900." Curators of the exhibition have been invited to lecture in class
and/or the museum.
There will be written assignments throughout the semester, a midterm and final
exam. Auditors permitted
Preliminary Readings:
Required
Kathleen Adler, Erica E. Hirshler, and H. Barbara Weinberg, Americans in
Paris, 1860-1900 (London: National Gallery, 2006).
Recommended
Lois Fink, American Art at the Nineteenth-Century Paris Salons (New
York: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
H. Barbara Weinberg, The Lure of Paris, Nineteenth-Century American Painters
and Their French Teachers (New York: Abbeville, 1991).
ASCP 82000 American Literature of Colonial & Federal
Periods GC: W, 4:15-6:15 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Reynolds, Cross
listed with ENGL. 75000 This course covers the
formative phase of American literature, from early writings of exploration
through Puritanism to the American Enlightenment. Among the topics considered
are encounters between European settlers and ethnic "others"; the culture and
aesthetics of Puritanism; the evolution of American religion; African Americans
and slavery; women’s writings; shifting definitions of America; literary
self-fashioning in journals and autobiographies; revolutionary writings that
fueled separation from England; and the rise of American poetry and fiction. We
examine the entire range of early American writings, canonical and noncanonical,
with full ethnic and gender representation. Active participation in class
discussion is encouraged. A 15-page term paper is required.
ASCP 82000- Zora Neal Hurston in her Times GC: T,
2:00-4:00 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Wallace, Cross listed with ENGL. 85000
This course will look at the traditions of
African American literature, folklore and music and, in particular, their impact
on the ethnographic and literary production of the great black woman writer Zora
Neale Hurston. Her works provide an ideal opportunity for salvaging the largely
unrecovered, often inscrutable, and too frequently neglected cultural and
philosophical traditions that are the legacy of the African American
population's passage through slavery and segregation in the South. As an
exemplary native-born Modernist, Hurston's approach to the black condition and
black folklore was always celebratory. Nevertheless, since she was always
signifying, her work can also be used to provide a first-rate map guiding us
nimbly through a range of perspectives on the black experience. Through reading
a selection of her writings, autobiographical, ethnographic and fictional, we
will reconstruct her path, supplementing her observations with substantial
infusions from other collections of, and observations about the folk tradition,
including the efforts of prior folklorists and novelists, including Joel
Chandler Harris, Paul Lawrence Dunbar and Charles Chesnutt.
ASCP 82000- Stars GC: W, 6:30-8:30 p.m., Rm. TBA,
3 credits, Prof. Koestenbaum, Cross listed with ENGL. 87300 & FSCP 81000.
"Authority, idiosyncrasy,
velvetiness—these are what make a star," writes Susan Sontag in her final novel,
In America.
This seminar will examine the phenomenon of screen embodiment by reading
star-struck texts and by closely watching the works of several great performers.
Our reading matter may include Edgar Morin’s The Stars, Clarice
Lispector’s The Hour of the Star, Manuel Puig’s Betrayed by Rita
Hayworth, James Baldwin’s The Devil Finds Work, Jean-Jacques Schul’s
Ingrid Caven, Adrienne Kennedy’s A Movie Star Has To Star in Black and
White, Stanley Cavell’s Contesting Tears, D.W. Winnicott’s Playing
and Reality, Roland Barthes’s "The Third Meaning," Freud’s Totem and
Taboo, essays by Mary Ann Doane and Patricia White, and the epic poem
Phoebe 2000 (a 600-page exegesis-in-verse of All About Eve, composed
collaboratively by Jeffrey Conway, Lynn Crosbie, and David Trinidad).
Our roster of movie stars will begin with Setsuko Hara (in Yasujiro Ozu’s
Tokyo Story) and Toshiro Mifune (in Akira Kurosawa’s High and Low).
We will then enjoy Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s ensemble of actors, especially
Margit Carstensen, Ingrid Caven, Hanna Schygulla, Irm Hermann, Brigitte Mira,
and El Hedi ben Salem. (We will probably see Ali—Fear Eats the Soul, Fear of
Fear and The Merchant of Four Seasons.)
Next, we will discuss Jeanne Moreau, probably in Tony Richardson’s
Mademoiselle (screenplay by Jean Genet) and Jacques Demy’s Bay of Angels.
For classic Hollywood melodrama, we will watch Bette Davis (Irving Rapper’s
Now, Voyager) and Joan Crawford (Robert Aldrich’s Autumn Leaves). We
will conclude with the Marx Brothers.
Students will write three essays (eight pages each), the more idiosyncratic and
detailed the better, due at appropriate intervals during the semester.
ASCP 82000 - Revolution & Early Republic, America
1763-1800 GC: M, 2:00-4:00 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Berkin,
Permission of instructor required Cross listed with HIST. 75000
This course examines the causes and consequences
of the American Revolution and the creation of an independent United States.
Students will be required to write a 3-5 page critique of ONE of the reading
assignments under each topic. These papers will provide the basis for class
discussion. The papers will not be book reports, but will evaluate the author's
central arguments, the methodologies employed, the evidence cited, and the place
of the book in the current historical debate over its topic.
Syllabus available in Certificate Programs Office (Room 5109)
ASCP 82000 - Topics in American Urban History,
1840-19GC, W, 2:00-4:00 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Kessner, Permission of
instructor required. Cross listed with HIST. 75200
ASCP 82000- Incorporating Immigrants in Urban America
GC: M, 4:15-6:15 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Profs. Mollenkopf/Kasinitz, Cross
listed with SOC 85700 & P SC. 83501
Since 1965, the U.S. has admitted over 30 million legal immigrants from the
Caribbean, Latin America, Asia, and Europe, with a possible 6 million or more
being present without proper legal status.
Immigrants have mainly settled in the largest cities of California, New York,
Texas, Florida, Illinois, and New Jersey, but they have also been spreading to
virtually every corner of the U.S. Their arrival has profoundly affected the
racial and ethnic composition of these cities, transformed their neighborhoods,
and in many ways revitalized their industries and labor markets.
They are also having children who grow up “in between” their immigrant parents
and the dominant culture of those whose ancestors have lived here many
generations. They are the most recent group to follow a long historical path by
which immigrants become American ethnic groups. As such, they are a critical
lens through which to understand the processes that are transforming America.
This research seminar uses New York as a case study for analyzing this profound
transformation and learning about how American changes immigrants and immigrants
change America.
After reviewing the literature, seminar members will undertake "hands on"
research to investigate the trajectory of various “in between” groups.
ASCP 82000- History of American Theatre: NY before 1900
GC: M, 2:00-4:00 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Carlson, Cross listed with THEA.
86100
This course will study the social, cultural, and literary development of the
stage in New York from the colonial period until 1900. The work of major
dramatists, from Royall Tyler through John Augustus Stone, Anna Cora Mowatt,
Dion Boucicault and Augustin Daly, to Bronson Howard and Clyde Fitch will be
read but also placed in their historical context, particularly that of the
changing New York theatre scene.
Special attention will be given to the various forms of ethnic theatre and of
reform and sensational melodrama, and some attention will be given, especially
in the later nineteenth century, to such popular forms as the minstrel show, the
operetta, and vaudeville.
If possible, the class will attend performances of plays of the period in the
city presented by such groups as the Metropolitan Playhouse.
Two papers will be required
ASCP 89000- Dissertation Workshop GC: F, 11:45am
-1:45pm., Room TBA, 0 credits, Prof. Dolan. 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 2006;
Fall 2005;
Spring 2005;
Fall 2004;
Spring 2004;
Fall 2003;
Spring
2003, Fall
2002)