COURSES -- SPRING 2003      

ASCP 81000 -- Introduction to American Studies: Histories and Methods. GC: Th 6:30-8:30 p.m. Room TBA, 3 credits. Professor Marc Dolan [55081] Cross-listed with MALS 73100--American Culture and Values  

This course serves as an introduction to many of the methodological and epistemological questions in the interdisciplinary field of American Studies. Its first half will survey the development of American Studies over the last seventy-five years. 

Readings will illustrate prevalent schools of thought within American Studies (e.g., the "Myth and Symbol" group of the 1950s and 1960s, the "New Americanists" of the 1980s and 1990s), as well as the field's interaction with contemporaneous trends (e.g, cultural studies, border studies, empire studies) in other, constituent disciplines. 

The second half of the course will focus on a number of recent works as case studies in Americanist scholarship. These works examine life in the U.S. during the last four centuries through the lenses of philosophy, literary criticism, performance studies, iconography, anthropology, historical scholarship, economics, and political science, among other modes of inquiry. 

Registered students are advised to locate a used copy of Constance Rourke's American Humor (our first text) before the semester begins, since it is currently out of print. Course requirements: class participation; one presentation;one final paper surveying interdisciplinary scholarship on a particular phenomenon in American culture. Limited to 15.

Members of this class study American visual culture at its convergence with a growing literature theorizing the body. It consists of a two-tiered approach. We chronologically examine select groups of paintings, photographs, and sculptures by key figures. And at the same time we read closely seven or eight interpretive texts against which we examine the images. 

One unit centers on the Peale family and Alexander Nemerov's book The Body of Raphaelle Peale. Thomas Eakins and Walt Whitman are analyzed. We re-think the body of nature. Artistic inscriptions of the Black Body are investigated in tandem with the writings of Hazel Carby and Deborah Willis. The appearance of freaks in the thirties paintings by Reginald Marsh and Walk Kuhn are illuminated by Tod Browning's classic film Freaks (1933). The Abject provides a pivot point for a closing unit. 

Class meetings are divided between slide lectures and critical discussions of the readings. Students will produce written critiques of these texts, and take a slide exam on the images. Five (5) auditors are permitted by permission of instructor.

ASCP 81500 - American Slave Narratives GC: T, 2:00-4:00 p.m., Rm. TBA, 2/4 credits, Prof. McKible, [55808] Cross listed with ENGL. 75500 

This course will examine the development and legacies of the African American slave narrative. Beginning with nineteenth century writers who are central the genre (Equiano, Douglass, Jacobs, etc.), we will also examine fictional treatments of slavery (Brown, Crafts, Stowe). In the final weeks of the class, we will turn to the neo-slave narratives of the twentieth century (Styron, Williams, and Reed). Four major concerns undergird the course: the narrative theories and practices of narrating slavery; ninetieth century fictionalizations of the slave experience as shaped by slave narrators; twentieth century reinventions of the genre; and competing gendered responses and representations of slavery. 

There will be one paper (20-25 pages) and an in-class presentation. Auditors are allowed with the permission of the instructor.

This seminar investigates the literary production and the aesthetic experiments by African American intellectuals writing from 1946 to the present. We will consider how the question and the promise of racial integration, marked by the Brown v. Board of Education (1954) decision has influenced the formal and thematic projects of a diversity of well-known and lesser-known writers. 

In particular, we will investigate how the terms of blackness, socially and historically conceived as inassimilable, is redescribed within the work by writers such as James Baldwin, Gwendolyn Brooks, Chester Himes, Zora Neale Hurston, Gayl Jones, Carlene Hatcher Polite, Colson Whitehead, and Richard Wright. Using legal theory to examine questions of race, gender, sexuality, privacy, and psychology, we will extend the common practice of literary and cultural criticism to include an exploration of narrative and aesthetic experiments in African American literature as well as their engagements with concerns that move beyond the color-line. 

Under special circumstances, auditors are allowed with permission.

ASCP 81500 - Religion in Early Amererican Republic 1776-1844 GC: T, 4:15-6:15 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Sassi, [558l0] Cross listed with HIST 75000 

This course examines what is arguably the most significant period for the history of American religious culture, the period of the early republic. It focuses on the intersections between politics, religious revivals, and reform campaigns in the years between the American Revolution and the antebellum era. Over the course of the semester, students will be required to write five reviews or thematic essays on the assigned texts of 3-5 pages in length. 

At the end of the semester, each student will produce an essay of 20-25 pages. The final essay can be either an original synthesis of the semester's readings or a historiographical essay on a topic chosen in consultation with the instructor. (Reading Schedule available in Certificate Programs Office, Room 5109)

ASCP 81500 - American Popular Song B: W, 4:50-7:20 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Taylor, [55811] Cross listed with MUS. 76500 I

Informatio: Ph.D. Program in Music 212/817-8602

The governments of all western industrial societies have developed an array of programs to protect people against certain risks such as unemployment or ill health, and also to protect specified groups who are considered to beparticularly at risk, such as the very young or the very old. 

However, there are large differences in the timing, type and scale of these interventions. The first American national social welfare programs were inaugurated in the United States during the Great Depression, some fifty years after comparable programs were begun in Western Europe, and these programs remained relatively niggardly. 

Moreover, while both European and American programs were inscribed with distinctions that differentiated among people by gender, American programs also reflected and reproduced the racial distinctions that pervaded other American institutions. There are, in other words, both provocative parallels and provocative contrasts in the development of the American and European welfare states.

In this course, we will explore these differences and similarities in the light of major theories of welfare state development, particularly those theories that fasten on gender, class or race as explanatory variables in institutional development. We will pay particular attention to what is sometimes called the contemporary "crisis of the welfare state," and to the influence of gender, class and race in the unfolding of this so-called crisis. We will also consider the implications of current developments for the future of the welfare state. 

This course has been designed in three main parts. Part I takes up some of the main theoretical perspectives which have guided work on the welfare state. Part II draws on these perspectives to examine the historical origins of the welfare state in old poor relief arrangements, the emergence of the modern welfare state in the 20th century, and the distinctive pattern of American welfare state development . Part III deals with the contemporary crisis of the welfare state. In this section we will consider arguments that root the so-called crisis in the economy, and arguments that root the difficulties in politics, (including the politics specifically generated by the consequences of the operation of welfare state programs.) 

We will also consider some of the proposals for resolving these contemporary problems, using a case study of the recent debacle over health care reform as an illustration. And finally, we will draw on theory and history to consider the question of the political future of the welfare state in the United States. Do postindustrial (or postmodern) transformations in our society demand new ways of thinking about welfare state development?

Now that the brave new world of the twenty-first century is upon us it is time to take stock of the science fiction realities of the 'borg and body. The course will begin with several definitions of the cyborg which we will consider alongside significant early representations (Shelley's Frankenstein, Lang's Metropolis, and a few salient clips from Bride of Frankenstein). 

Next, we will analyze the components of early Cold War Cyborgania (Forbidden Planet, The Day the Earth Stood Still) and its relationship to the cyborg of the nuclear apocalypse (Terminator and its myriad "progenies"). The third topic, the cyborg and capital, could easily be a course in itself, but we will restrict ourselves to the alien and alienation in the Alien series and the trenchant dystopia of muties and replicants in Blade Runner--the touchstone of the cyborganic intellectual --(and its contrast with Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and Gibson's Neuromancer). These readings will connect to the no less important problem of engendering the cyborg--a space, in particular, where feminist theory and fiction have been a good deal more radical than most high-profile film narratives.

A fifth case study on cyborg narrativity will feature memory and the fate of history (the memory chip/clip as the memorial to the death of Time in Total Recall, but also the time/space reversals of cyborgania in Twelve Monkeys or The Matrix). Finally, we will consider whether AI stands for artificial imagination and whether this sense of artifice might ground rather than universalize cinema in the digital age.

Through a study of the painting and sculpture of the era, this course will explore the construction of the American fine arts tradition during the Gilded Age. Influenced by the return of many American artists, trained abroad, it was deemed essential that a national art exhibit the sophistication and aesthetic finesse of contemporary European art--academic and modern. This ambition was furthered by the establishment of America's great museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the patronage of private collectors such as Isabella Stewart Gardner, Charles Lang Freer, and Louisine and Henry Havemeyer. They, in turn, patronized and sought the advice of the expatriate artists John Singer Sargent, James Abbott McNeill Whistler, and Mary Cassatt. 

Other artists who were trained in Europe--among them, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, John LaFarge, and Edwin Blashfield--returned to this country and became consultants on the planning, design and decoration of new parks, churches and libraries. While painters such as Thomas Eakins and William Merritt Chase, devoted themselves to teaching and introducing new generations to the essentials of European high art. Collectively their efforts established a new cosmopolitanism in American art along with an openness to modernist innovation that extended the evolution of the American fine arts tradition. 

Auditors permitted.

ASCP 82000 - Federal Period: Architecture & Material Culture GC: M, 11:45 a.m.-1:45 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Murphy, [55815] Cross listed with ART 78200 

This seminar will focus on architecture and material culture produced during the Federal period (c. 1780-1820) in the US. The fundamental question posed will be that of the relationship between the new political entity of the U.S. and its material expression in landscapes, buildings, furnishings, and other works of art. Readings and discussions will cover New England, the Mid-Atlantic, and the South. The first part of the semester will be devoted to group discussions of common readings as well as visits to Federal-period sites. 

In the second part of the semester, students will present their research findings to the group. These presentations will guide students as they revise they develop their term papers. Topics for independent research could include the work of specific carpenter-builders, architects, particular landscapes or buildings of the period, makers of decorative arts objects, or painters and sculptors (although the group readings will not focus on paintings or sculpture. 

Auditors permitted.

ASCP 82000 - American Women Artists: From the Armory Show to the Dinner Party GC: W, 4:15-6:15 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Levin, [55816] Cross listed with ART 87100 

This seminar will explore American women artists from the Armory Show in 1913 to Judy Chicago's landmark work, The Dinner Party in 1979, now on view at the Brooklyn Museum of Art. 

We will examine work by women in the context of both American and art world culture. Key political events include the suffrage movement, which culminated in the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920 and the Women's Liberation Movement of the late 1960s and 1970s. 

The course will look at discrimination that took place in art schools, galleries, and museums, often leading to the erasure of women's work, and at the impact and attitudes of female patrons and collectors. 

The instructor's experience as a curator at a major American museum during the 1970s will provide an eyewitness account of one institution's treatment of women artists during that era. 

Preliminary reading: Judy Chicago, Through the Flower: My Struggle as a Woman Artist (New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1975; Penguin Books, 1993); Charlotte Streifer Rubinstein, American Women Artists (Boston: Avon Books, 1982). Be sure to see The Dinner Party at the Brooklyn Museum of Art. Auditors by consent of the instructor; please email request to: gail_levin@baruch.cuny.edu

This course will examine the profound changes in American society between the two world wars as seen primarily through some of its best fiction writers, including (possibly) Sherwood Anderson, Sinclair Lewis, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Willa Cather, Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Nella Larsen, Michael Gold, James T. Farrell, Henry Miller, William Carlos Williams, Henry Roth, Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, John Steinbeck, and Nathanael West.

 There will be comparisons with the new poetry and the visual arts, especially painting and photography. Attention will be paid to the impact of the war, the revolt against the genteel tradition, the currents of modernism and naturalism, the expatriate scene, the prosperity of the 20s, the growing urbanization, the economic crisis of the 30s, the effects of race and ethnicity, the impact of New Deal programs, and the transformation of popular culture, including the growth of radio, the changes in popular music and musical theater, the shift from silent to sound films, and the development of advertising and public relations. 

Secondary reading will focus on both literary movements and the social history of the 1920s and 1930s. A term paper and a brief oral report will be required. 

Auditors are allowed.

During the period of his life that he was writing Moby-Dick at Arrowhead, his farm in the Berkshires, Melville visited the little red cottage above the Stockbridge Bowl where he met Hawthorne for the first time. Hawthorne's wife Sophia marveled at Melville's "fluid consciousness," as she witnessed Melville open his soul to her receptive but mostly silent husband. Melville remarks in a letter to Hawthorne that he looks forward to talking "ontological heroics" with him. 

Melville scholars have speculated that his friendship with Hawthorne had a profound effect on Melville's development as an artist; however, Melville seems to have made an equally powerful impression on his older mentor. The character Hollingsworth, in Hawthorne's The Blithedale Romance may well have been modeled, at least in part, on Melville. In Pierre, the bizarre send-up of the domestic novel that Melville wrote immediately after Moby-Dick, he seems to parody Hawthorne in some aspects of the characters Isabel and Plotinus Plinlimmon. 

Later in life, in his long narrative poem Clarel, Melville is thought to have addressed a mysterious rift with Hawthorne. To gauge the influence these writers had on one each other, we will read Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, The House of the Seven Gables, The Blithedale Romance and Melville's Typee, Moby-Dick, and Pierre, as well as selected short fiction by each writer. 

Requirements: The class will be conducted as a seminar, so attendance and participation in class discussions are crucial. Informal Response Papers; Oral Reports on the criticism; and Research Paper.

ASCP. 82000 - Modern American History, 1945-1990 GC: W, 4:15-6:15 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Diggins, [55827] Cross listed with HIST 75700 

The course is presented in the form of a colloquium consisting of reading and discussion of several books and articles. 

In chronological order, the subjects are the Cold War, its Origins and Causes, and its Domestic Implications in McCarthyism; The Truman Administration and the Korean War; Economic and Social Policy and the Plight of Labor; The Election of 1952 and the two Eisenhower Administrations; the Changing Character of American Society with the Coming of Suburbia and Consumerism; Popular Culture and High Culture; The Election of 1960 and the Kennedy Administration; the Bay of Pigs and the Cuban Missile Crisis; The Johnson-Goldwater Campaigns of 1964 and the New Society Programs; the Civil Rights Movement; the Vietnam War and the anti-War Resistance; the Sixties New Left and the Counter Culture; The 1968 Election and the Nixon Administration and Watergate; From Ford to Carter and the Oil Crisis and the Iran Hostage Standoff; the Reagan Years, Supply Side Economics, the Iran-Contra Controversy, and "The Present Danger"; The Bush Administration and the Fall of Communism; The Clinton Years and Prosperity and Impeachment; the Recent Bush Presidency, the Trauma of September 11, the Finance Scandals, and the Iraq Showdown. 

We shall read such authors as Ambrose, Blum, Cohen, Diggins, Gitlin, Hamby, Hodgson, Kessler-Harris, Leffler, Powers, Schlesinger, Steele, and Whitfield. 

For each meeting a student will choose a topic and do some secondary reading in order to present a report on the literature. There will be a final term paper of roughly 25 pages on a topic or your choice within the scope of the course.

Paying specific attention to literature that addresses race/ethnicity, gender, class, and sexual orientation, this course provides a critical consideration of the contributions of Black intellectual thought in the United States. 

The course will follow a timeline that moves from slavery, to the rise and fall of Jim Crow, to the Civil Rights Movement, through the counterculture 1970s, the conservative 1980s, the prosperous (for some) years of the Clinton administration and 1990s, up to and including the years of "compassionate conservativism" (please, stop laughing) of this century. 

Students who have no experience in this area are welcome, as are students with more advanced knowledge in the field. 

Unlike many other courses addressing the issue of Black intellectual thought, throughout this entire course particular attention will be given to the intellectual contributions of women. 

Because students will be exposed to (and contribute from) a wide variety of perspectives on the subject, this course is appropriate for students in the traditional social sciences (e.g. sociology, anthropology, psychology, urban education, and history) as well as more contemporary ones (e.g. women's studies, race studies, American studies, cultural studies, lesbian and gay studies).

HOME