The Graduate Center
The City University of New York

COURSES -- SPRING 2004     (Past courses: Fall 2003; Spring 2003,  Fall 2002)

ASCP. 82000 - America in the 1940s–Interdisciplinary Prespectives GC: W, 6:30-8:30 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Marc Dolan, [62053] Cross listed with ENGL 85000 & MALS 73100

In a way, the 1940s is the overlooked middle child of modern American cultural history. Too often, it is lost in the shadows of its chronological siblings and split down the middle in our historical perceptions: viewed as a comforting aftermath to the Great Depression or a foreboding prelude to the years of the Cold War. Most often, it is probably seen as no more than the time of the Second World War, a conflict that admittedly affected the length and breadth of American life more thoroughly than nearly any historical event of the twentieth century.

When we look closer, however, there is much more to American art and expression in the 1940s than the obvious cultural residue of these three larger historical transformations.

This was the era in which swing gave way to bop, in which abstract expressionism took hold in American painting, and in which Jewish American and African American voices finally arrived at the center of American letters. It was (in Michael Denning’s phrase) "the age of the CIO," as well as the golden age of the Southern literary gothic and film noir, not to mention the transcultural crucible in which three great musical hybrids were formed—country & western, rhythm & blues, rock & roll.

Comic books came of age in the 1940s, and the Hollywood studio system loudly died, soon to be quietly reborn as a supplier for television. In this decade, communists became progressives, and progressives became liberals. American journalism, and indeed nearly all American nonfictional prose, was changed forever by these years, as was the grammar of American gender roles.

This course will examine some (but obviously not all) of these transformations and will feature class visits from faculty members of the American Studies Certificate Program, presenting topics both within and outside their own disciplines.

Course requirements include class participation, a presentation of original scholarship on the period, and a final paper.

ASCP. 81500 - Aesthetics of Film Music GC: T, 2:00-5:00 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Royal Brown, [62767] Cross listed with FSCP 81000 & MUS 81502

The course will examine the entire phenomenon of film music and the technical, artistic, aesthetic, psychological, and political problems it poses.

As an ongoing process, we will track the evolution of film music and how its metamorphoses run parallel to and diverge from those in the art and commerce of the cinema. For the "classical" film score, we will examine essential differences between film and concert music.

Scores will be studied in the light of how the composer has solved both the musical and dramatic problems at hand, and we will discuss the ways in which varying musical styles, from romantic to avant-garde, have been deployed in the cinematic context. In many instances, the musical score opens doors onto deeper readings of the filmic text, and we will explore some of the ways in which this occurs.

The movement of film music into non-classical areas, in particular pop and jazz, will also be examined, as will the recent shift towards electronics (synthesizers, sampling, etc.) and new tendencies in film/music interactions, such as the breakdown of the distinction between source (diegetic) and nondiegetic music.

Numerous examples from films and scores will be presented in class. Video copies of complete films, including documentaries on composers such as Bernard Herrmann, Jerry Goldsmith, Toru Takemitsu, and Georges Delerue, will be available for viewing in the library.

When possible active film composers will be invited to talk about their work. We will also work directly from the manuscript of at least one complete film score.

ASCP. 81500 - American Political Thought GC: T, 6:30-8:30 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Corey Robin, [62770] Cross listed with P SC 72000

This course examines the distinctive nature of reformist and reactionary argument in the United States. We will examine the simultaneous radicalism and weakness of American liberalism, how revolutionary notions of newness, innovation, and individual volition repeatedly founder upon entrenched, and little understood, patterns of inequality and unfreedom.

We will also look at the syncretic nature of American conservatism, and its deep, if ambivalent, commitment to America's old regimes. Readings will include canonical political texts, autobiographies, literary criticism, personal letters, and history.

ASCP. 81500 - Contemporary American Multicultural Novel GC: R, 2:00-4:00 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Neal Tolchin, [62766] Cross listed with ENGL 75400.

From N. Scott Momaday's Pulitzer Prize winning novel House Made of Dawn (1968) to Toni Morrison's Beloved (1988) and Jhumpa Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies (1999), both of which also won the Pulitzer, the neglected fields of Native American,African American, Asian American, and Hispanic/Latino American literature have gradually drawn the attention of scholars and are now often taught together under the rubric Multicultural American Literature.

In contemporary Native American fiction, Leslie Silko's Ceremony and Louise Erdrich's Love Medicine are regarded as key texts. In Hispanic/Latino American fiction, Rudolfo Anaya's Bless Me,Ultima is seen as a foundational text for Mexican American fiction; and Oscar Hijuelos's Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love is similarly viewed as a breakthrough novel for Cuban American writing.

Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior put Asian American literature on the map as an academic area of study; more recently Fay Ng's Bone and Chang-Rae Lee's Native Speaker have attracted the interest of scholars in this field, as has a text appropriated by Americanists from Canadian writing, Joy Kogawa's Obasan.

African American literature is further along in its development as a field of study and possible readings include Edward P. Jones' recently published The Known World. This course will be run as a seminar, with oral reports and a research paper required.

A good historical introduction to this field is Ronald Takaki's A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America.

ASCP. 81500 - Current Scholarship on US Art GC: M, 11:45 a.m.-1:45 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Sally Webster, [62764] Cross listed with ART 87100

This seminar will review the state of scholarship on historic American art (Colonial period to 1950) based on John Davis’ analysis in, "The End of the American Century: Current Scholarship on the Art of the United States," Art Bulletin, LXXV, no. 3 (September 2003): 544-80. I

n conjunction with Davis’ article, four recent textbooks on American art by Wayne Craven, Frances Pohl, Barbara Groseclose, and David Bjelajac, will be examined.

Students will be required to write weekly reviews, give occasional short in-class presentations, and submit a final research paper.

This is an ideal course for students studying for orals in American art or who are teaching or are planning to teach an American art survey. Auditors are permitted with the proviso that they do all the reading and give one, short, in-class report.

ASCP. 81500 - History/Theory/Criticism of Hip-Hop GC: R, 10:00 a.m.-1:00 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Ellie Hisama, [62769] Cross listed with MUS 86900 & WSCP 81000

This seminar will explore hip-hop culture, including MCing, DJing, breakdancing, and graffiti, from its beginnings to the present by using historical, analytical, and critical perspectives.

We will examine hip-hop's complex relationships to race, gender, sexuality, class, and nation as manifested in recordings, performances, music videos, films, fashion, and popular culture.

Readings by Juan Flores, Robin D. G. Kelley, Sunaina Marr Maira, Cheryl Keyes, Tricia Rose, and others. Enrollment limited to 15 students.

Non-Graduate Center students need permission of instructor to enroll.

ASCP. 81500 - Theatre & Popular Culture GC: T, 4:15-6:15 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. David Savran, [62771] Cross listed with THEA 82000

For most of their long histories, theatrical entertainments have been closely associated with "the people," whether one defines that collective as the working-class, rural peasantry, urban proletariat, or even the white-collared middle class.

From Roman comedy to the Elizabethan public theatre, from medieval farce to nineteenth-century melodrama, theatre routinely functioned as a popular cultural practice. With the consolidation of the binary opposition between highbrow and lowbrow at the end of the nineteenth-century, however, and with the unprecedented success of motion pictures in the following decades, most U.S. and European theatre forms became distinctly minoritarian (i.e., highbrow or upper-middlebrow) entertainments.

This course studies the long and torturous relationship between theatre and "the people," with an emphasis on twentieth-century theatre practices in the U.S.

The readings will include foundational texts for the analysis of popular culture (Stuart Hall, Raymond Williams, Tony Bennett, Pierre Bourdieu), classic studies of popular entertainments (Bakhtin, Stallybrass and White), and histories of non-literary theatrical forms (burlesque, melodrama, vaudeville, minstrelsy, musical comedy).

ASCP. 81500 - Themes of the American Road GC: W, 9:30-11:30 a.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Harriet Senie, [62765] Cross listed with ART 87100

This course will consider changing conventions and critical issues in landscape art from the postwar period to the present.

The major focus will be on art in all media that depicts themes of the American road, establishing links to American road literature, film, and music.

Other topics will include the debate over landscape vs. abstraction, the landscape as utopia/dystopia, and sculpture as landscape.

Five (5) auditors permitted but will be required to participate in some gallery-based assignments.

ASCP. 81500 - U.S. & the World Since 1890 GC: M, 6:30-8:30 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Robert Johnson, [62768] Cross listed with HIST 75700

This course will examine the US interaction with the world community since 1890. We’ll be taking a historiographical approach, reading a book weekly plus reviews and occasional review essays.

The course will focus on both how US foreign policy and intersected with domestic politics and scholarship that places US foreign policy as part of the broader context of 20^th century international relations.

The reading list is available the in Certificate Programs Office, Room 5109

ASCP. 82000 - American Literature from 1820 to 1865: From Jefferson to Lincoln: American Writing before the Civil War GC: T, 6:30-8:30 p.m., Rm. TBA, 2-4 credits, Prof. William P. Kelly, [62774] Cross listed with ENGL 75100

This course will consider a wide range of American writing produced in the decades between the Revolution and the Civil War.

We shall attend closely to each of the assigned texts, locating them in their appropriate historical and social contexts.

Among the themes that we shall pursue are the following: the invention of cultural tradition, the anxieties of revolutionary influence, the reciprocal construction of self and nation, the determining force of slavery, the countervailing representations of public and private space, the cultural consequences of an emerging market economy, and the precarious character of antebellum subjectivity.

One seminar report; one final essay.

Tentative Syllabus:

Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia
Crevecoeur, Letters from an American Farmer
C.B. Brown, Wieland
Irving, The Sketch Book
Cooper, The American Democrat
Poe, Selected Tales
Hawthorne, Selected Tales and Sketches
Emerson, Selected Essays
Thoreau, Walden; Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Melville, Benito Cereno
Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl;
Lincoln, Selected Speeches

ASCP. 82000 - America as Empire GC: M, 6:30-8:30 p.m., Rm. TBA, 4 credits, Prof. Ruth O'Brien, [62777] Cross listed with P SC 82602

This 8000 level seminar studies American political development with a particular focus on the political and economic origins of "America as Empire."

First, the seminar examines the political development approach. It places this framework in context with other methodological inquiries.

Second, it reviews the American versions of republicanism, liberalism, and capitalism, with an eye to explaining how the state and society has helped and hindered them and what the consequences have been for empire-building. Third, it probes the source of other isms, namely racism and sexism, and the impact that the state has had on mitigating them in the latter half of the twentieth century.

The seminar asks how the rights era has shaped the American identity. It also explores how the inclusion of women and people of color has lent itself to a critique of capitalism and liberalism.

Finally, the seminar explores how the U.S.’s unique political and economic identity has contributed to the growth of America as empire.

ASCP. 82000 - American Art 1900-1940 GC: R, 4:15-6:15 p.m., Rm. GSUC3421, 3 credits, Prof. Katherine Manthorne, [62773] Cross listed with ART 77100.

American Modernism, according to museum curators, has now become the new Impressionism. The art-going public -- once blissfully ignorant of all but the most famous figures -- now line up to see any exhibition covering the Stieglitz Circle, Ashcan School, or so-called American Surrealists.

Who are these artists, and how has public perception of them altered so dramatically? This course functions as a survey, encompassing central figures such as Sloan and O’Keefe as well as more peripheral characters like Kuhn or Daugherty.

Major collectors John Quinn, Duncan Phillips and others are added to our repertoire. Fine art’s borders with print culture, decoration, and popular entertainment are also explored. And we analyze ethnicity and its relation to how the story of American art has been told, and possibilities for future narratives.

Several class meetings are held in the galleries of the Whitney and Metropolitan Museums and the Studio Museum, Harlem, to work directly with the objects.

Five (5) auditors permitted.

ASCP. 82000 - Race, Reform, Resistence in the Early American Republic GC: T, 4:15-6:15 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Jonathan Sassi, [62776] Cross listed with HIST 75000.

This course examines recent literature on the social construction of race in the era of the early American republic. In the wake of the American Revolution, "race" was one of several social and ideological issues that had to be renegotiated.

This course explores the struggles over race and racism that engaged a diverse array of thinkers and activists.

In addition to the weekly readings, students will be required to review two additional books over the course of the semester.

Other course requirements are a midterm paper and a final essay of 20-25 pages, which can be either an original synthesis of the semester’s readings or a historiographical essay on a topic chosen in consultation with the instructor.

Preliminary Reading Schedule available in Certificate Programs Office, Room 5109

ASCP. 82000 - Samuel Delany & His Times GC: W, 2:00-4:00 p.m., Rm. TBA, 2-4 credits, Prof. Robert Reid-Pharr, [62775] Cross listed with ENGL 75700.

In this course we will treat much of the most prominent work that has been produced by novelist and essayist, Samuel Delany. In particular, we will look at his early novels, Babel-17 and The Einstein Intersection, and then turn to those novels that helped establish him in the mid-seventies as one of the most significant speculative fiction writers of his generation, especially Dhalgren and Triton.

We will then read the whole of Delany’s Neveryon series and then continue with his later works, especially Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand and his memoirs, The Heavenly Breakfast and The Motion of Light in Water. We will end the course with Delany’s controversial late novel, The Mad Man.

All the while we will pay particular attention to Delany’s own methods of critique and self-critique. One of the most significant questions before us will be how one might place Delany within debates surrounding Semiotics, Deconstruction, Black American Literary and Cultural Theory and Queer Theory.

And we will be especially concerned to understand what the example of Delany can tell us about the interdependency of presumably distinct theoretical and artistic traditions.

ASCP. 82000 - Social Movements in America GC: W, 4:15-6:15 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Frances Fox Piven, [62778] Cross listed with P SC 72905, SOC 84600, & WSCP 81000.

This course has two main parts.

We will begin with an examination of the major theories which purport to explain the origins of movements, the forms they take, and their consequences. We will give particular attention to the understandings of power implicit or explicit in different perspectives on movements and their impact. I will use this occasion to discuss what I think is a distinctive perspective on power and movements which I am developing in connection with my own work.

The second part of the course is empirical. We will look at a series of twentieth century American protest movements which, in complex ways, altered the patterns of American politics, and may have also changed American political institutions. In particular, we will focus on labor protests, black protests, some of the "new social movements" (including the movements that focus on sexual behaviors and gender identities), and the new anti-corporate protests spreading in the U.S. and elsewhere.

The requirements for this course include regular participation in discussion, which means timely completion of reading assignments.

Your grade will be based on your participation in class, and a take-home examination or a research paper, designed in consultation with me.

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