ASCP 81500 - African-American Art GC: R,
4:15-6:15 p.m., Rm. GSUC3421, 3 credits, Prof. Vendryes, Cross listed with ART.
77300
Africa-American art is a cornerstone in American art
enriched by western and nonwestern influences. From African cultural retentions
evident in the material remnants of enslaved 19th-century Africans in
America to the modernisms and postmodernisms of the 21st Century that
reveal multi-textured black cultural identities, this course investigates the
lives and art of African-American artists significant to the evolution and
revolutions of African-America in the fine arts.
Time will be allotted for student presentations on approved topics.
Four (4) auditors allowed.
Preliminary Reading:
Sharon F. Patton, African-American Art (1998)
Michael Harris, Colored Pictures: Race & Visual Representation (2003)
ASCP 81500 - Melville GC: R, 2:00-4:00 p.m., Rm.
TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Tolchin, Cross listed with ENGL. 85000
Melville's contemporaries first knew him as "The
Man Who Lived with Cannibals," the author of exciting, racy travel narratives;
and later in his career a New York newspaper ran the headline "Herman Melville
Crazy," after the publication of Pierre, a parody of the popular domestic
novels of the 1850s.
When Melville died in 1891, his obituary surprised readers, who assumed the
forgotten author had passed on decades earlier. His reputation kept alive in
England by a coterie of readers, Melville was rediscovered in the 1920s and soon
his novel Moby-Dick was regarded as perhaps the greatest American novel.
Recently, literary critics have argued for his subversiveness, his conservatism,
the possibility he may have been physically abusive towards his wife, and
questions surrounding his sexual identity.
Melville remains a highly elusive, wonderfully provocative writer, whose
experimentations in literary form and voice were a century ahead of his time.
We will read the novels Typee, Mardi, Redburn,
White-Jacket, Moby-Dick, Pierre, The Confidence Man,
Billy Budd, and selected short stories.
Requirements: research paper, oral reports, class participation and attendance.
ASCP 81500 -African-AmericanLiterary/Cultural Theory
GC: W, 4:15-6:15 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Reid-Pharr, Cross listed with
ENGL. 85500
In this course we will ask whether the now well
established idea that Black American literary theory and Black American cultural
theory are distinct (because they are among the only American intellectual
traditions built upon the need to prove the innate humanity of a people)
continues to be a useful point of departure for contemporary students.
In particular, we will pay attention to how the rather significant challenges
posed by feminism and queer theory, cultural studies, postmodern theory and
psychoanalysis have forced many Afro-Americanists to rethink some of their most
sacrosanct notions regarding what does and does not compose Afro-American
literature and culture.
The readings will be chosen from a selection of key texts published over the
last two decades. In every case the focus will be on the rather
self-conscious manner in which Afro-Americanists have approached theory and
criticism. That is to say, we will examine in detail the mechanisms
utilized by scholars to announce and maintain Afro-American specificity even as
their efforts become increasingly complex and abstract.
Among the authors whom we will examine are Hazel Carby, Paul Gilroy, Stuart
Hall, Brent Edwards, Robert Reid-Pharr, Fred Moten, Samuel Delany, Claudia Tate,
Hortense Spillers, Houston Baker, Anthony Appiah, Manthia Diawara and Toni
Morrison.
Students will write a series of short papers and prepare annotated
bibliographies in consultation with the instructor.
ASCP 81500 - New World Slavery Comp Prspctv GC:
T, 2:00-4:00 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Oakes, Cross listed with HIST.
75200
This is a broadly comparative course that traces
the evolution of slavery in the Atlantic world. Every major slave region will be
covered: Africa, Brazil, the Caribbean, and North America.
Topics will include slavery and religion, the Atlantic slave trade, the
so-called "sugar revolutions," slavery and capitalism, racial ideology, slave
resistance, and the transition from slavery to freedom.
Tentantive Reading list:
David Goldenberg, The Curse of Ham: Race and Slavery in Early Judaism,
Christianity, and Islam (Princeton, 2003)
Paul Lovejoy, Transformations in Slavery: A History of Slavery in Africa. Second
edition. (Cambridge University Press, 2000)
Hugh Thomas, The Slave Trade: The Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade:
1440-1870 (New York, 1997), pp. 1-445, 791-798
Stuart Schwartz, ed., Tropical Babylons: Sugar and the Making of the Atlantic
World, 1450-1680 (Chapel Hill, 2004)
Paul Lovejoy, ed., Identity in the Shadow of Slavery (New York, 2000)
Stuart Schwartz, Slaves, Peasants, and Rebels: Reconsidering Brazilian
Slavery (Urbana, 1996)
James Walvin, Black Ivory: Slavery in the British Empire Second ed.
(Blackwell, 2001)
Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Social Control in Slave Plantation Societies: A
Comparison of St. Domingue and Cuba (Baton Rouge, 1971: 1996)
Herbert S. Klein, Slavery in the Americas: A Comparative Study of Virginia
and Cuba (Chicago, 1967: 1989)
James F. Brooks, Captives and Cousins: Slavery, Kinship and Community in the
Southwest Borderlands (Chapel Hill, 2002)
Alan Galay, The Indian Slave Trade: The Rise of the English Empire in the
American South: 1670-1717 (New Haven, 2002)
Henry Wiencek, An Imperfect God: George Washington, His Slaves, and the
Creation of America (New York, 2003)
Peter Kolchin, American Slavery: 1619-1877 (New York, 1993: 2003)
ASCP 81500 - American Musical Theater GC:T,
2:00-5:00 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Graziano, Cross listed with MUS. 87300
ASCP 81500 - Consumer Society and Consumer Culture
GC: W, 2:00-4:00 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Zukin, Cross listed with SOC.
84000 & WSCP 81000
Through common readings, intensive discussions,
and collaborative research, this seminar develops a critical analysis of the
"production of consumption" in terms of institutional structures and cultural
fields.
We examine the social construction of both products and desires through various
spaces (stores, websites), stories (autobiography, interviews, personal
experience), and texts (consumer guides, advertisements, reviews), with the view
that consumption is a public sphere of modernity coequal with production and
politics, often constructed by and for women.
We will specifically examine these processes historically across gender, ethnic,
and age groups.
Readings include Sharon Zukin, Point of Purchase: How Shopping Changed
American Culture; William Leach, Land of Desire; and Lizabeth Cohen,
A Consumers’ Republic.
Students will do research projects of topics of their choice, including fashion,
branding, consumption in the home, and group identity.
ASCP 81500 - American Electoral Politics GC:W,
4:15-6:15 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Fox Piven, Cross listed with SOC.
84600 & P SC 72900
This course will examine the interplay between
the distinctive American party system, the issues and cleavages which emerge at
different periods in American politics, and the changing shape of the American
electorate, as well as shifting patterns of electoral alignment.
We will begin by considering some of the main perspectives which purport to
explain the behavior of voters, the role of parties, and the origins of
electoral systems.
Then we will turn to a review of long term shifts that have occurred in the
United States in the scale of voter participation, in the class, racial and
gender skew of the electorate, and in the cleavages which organize the
electorate, paying particular attention to the character of the party system
that developed after the Civil War, and its persisting impact on national
electoral politics.
Lastly, we will turn to developments in American electoral politics in the past
two decades, including the evidence of recent realignment or dealignment, and
changes in the character of the American parties.
Finally, we will consider the prospects for a democratic reinvigoration of
electoral politics in the United States.
ASCP. 82000 - America in the 1850s GC: R, 11:45
a.m.-1:45 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Dolan Cross listed with ENGL
75100 & MALS 73100
Has there ever been a more central moment
in U. S. culture than the 1850s?
Most obviously viewed as the decade during which the nation moved toward civil
war, the importance of the 1850s looms large even when that period is viewed
from perspectives not exclusively related to sectionalism or slavery.
This was the decade during which American literature came into its own, not just
in the widely noted works of the "American Renaissance," but also in the
explosion of domestic and sentimental writing, as well as in the turn from
nonfiction to fiction by African American authors.
In performance rather than print, it was the decade in which the minstrel
show—arguably the first indigenous form of U.S. entertainment—spread throughout
the nation, bringing with it the notable success of the first widely-known
American songwriter, Stephen Foster.
American reform changed forever in the 1850s, as did the nation’s political
parties. In this decade, too, the heterogeneity of the American national
character became nearly undeniable, as the changes wrought during the previous
decade by immigration from the east and imperialism in the west began to show a
perceptible impact on the "face" of the United States.
Sectionalism and slavery were the crucibles into which all these revolutions
(and more) were poured, so that even those phenomena not directly shaped by
region or race could not help being affected by them, and by each other.
This course will examine some, but obviously not all, of these transformations
and will feature in-class visits from faculty members of the American Studies
Certificate Program based in the Art History, English, History, and Music
doctoral programs.
Most of our work will be with primary rather than secondary sources. These
sources may include Henry David Thoreau’s Walden (1854), John Rollin
Ridge (Yellow Bird)’s Life and Adventures of Joaquin Murieta, the Celebrated
California Bandit (1854), Fanny Fern’s Ruth Hall (1855), The Life
of P.T. Barnum as Written by Himself (1855), Herman Melville’s The Piazza
Tales (1856), John Brown’s "Address to the Virginia Court" (1859), Harriet
Beecher Stowe’s The Minister’s Wooing (1859), Martin Delany’s Blake
(1859-62), and Abraham Lincoln’s "Address at Cooper Institute" (1860), as well
as selected congressional deliberations over the Compromise of 1850, anti-popery
tracts, minstrel songs, and paintings of the Hudson River School. We will
probably also avail ourselves of the online reconstruction of Barnum’s "Lost
Museum."
Course requirements include class participation, an oral presentation of
original scholarship on U. S. life during the period, and a final paper that
expands on the presentation.
ASCP. 82000 - Modern & Contemporary Memorials GC:
W, 9:30-11:30 a.m., Rm. GSUC3421, 3 credits, Prof. Senie, Cross listed with ART.
86040
This course will consider the history of modern
and contemporary memorials since WWII in terms of commissioning methods and
intentions, built solutions (both works by artists and entire museums), and
audience response (including spontaneous memorials and issues of controversy).
There will be meetings with directors of public art programs who commission
memorials. Students will observe actual memorials in the city, engage their
immediate audience, and analyze the range of responses.
Throughout the course we will be considering the way memory is framed and
experienced.
Auditors permitted (up to 5) but will be required to do some work.
Preliminary reading:
Daniel L. Schacter, The Seven Sins of Memory (Houghton Mifflin, 2001).
Constructions of Memory, Harvard Design Magazine, Fall 1999 issue
ASCP. 82000 - Before the American Renaissance GC:
R, 6:30-8:30 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Kelly, Cross listed with ENGL.
75000
This course will examine American cultural
expression in the decades between the Revolution and the American Renaissance.
The intellectual and artistic range of the period is extensive, and our scope
will be correspondingly broad.
Among the topics we will address are the following: national originality and the
anxiety of cultural influence; post-coloniality and transatlantic negotiation;
gender, class and the conflicting legacies of the Revolution, the representation
of racial and class differences; history, natural history, and the delineation
of the American landscape; the crisis of cultural authority and the construction
of subjectivity; republicanism, democracy, and the emergence of a market
economy.
Among the writers we will consider are the following: Jefferson, Crevecoeur,
Equiano, Hannah Foster, Lewis and Clark, Audubon, Irving, and Child.
ASCP 82000 - Politics of American Fiction, 1930-1980
GC:W, 2:00-4:00 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Dickstein, Cross listed with
ENGL. 85000
With a few important exceptions, major 20th-century
American novels have rarely grappled with politics directly, though they often
have serious political implications.
Starting with the Depression, however, and continuing with World War II, the
cold war, the 1960s, the Vietnam war, and the rise of movements such as black
nationalism and feminism, American writers developed new forms of social and
historical fiction that often carried a strong political valence.
Beginning with contrasting examples of radical fiction by Michael Gold, John Dos
Passos, and Nathanael West, this course will examine how political ideas worked
their way into novels, including satiric fiction by Mary McCarthy and Tess
Slesinger, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, Richard Condon’s The
Manchurian Candidate, E. L. Doctorow’s The Book of Daniel, and more
contemporary novels by Toni Morrison, Philip Roth, and Don DeLillo.
The course will emphasize the uses of history to illuminate present conflicts
and the contrast between realistic or journalistic techniques and postmodern
methods.
Some attention will be paid to films that parallel the approaches of these
novels or adapt them to another medium, including Ford’s The Grapes of Wrath,
Frankenheimer’s The Manchurian Candidate, and Kubrick’s Dr.
Strangelove.
Assignments will include a brief oral report and a term paper.
ASCP. 82000 - American Political History: 1787-1860
GC: W, 6:30-8:30 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Robertson, Cross listed with
HIST. 75100
ASCP. 82000 - From Civil Rights to Black Power
GC: M, 4:15-6:15 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Taylor, Cross listed with HIST.
75700 & WSCP 81000.
ASCP. 82000 - Seminar: Recent American History
GC: W, 4:15-6:15 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Diggins, Cross listed with HIST.
85700
This course is designed for students who have a
research topic in mind, whether a possible dissertation thesis or a matter of
curiosity they would like to explore.
We shall be reading some texts that deal with both the theoretical and practical
aspects of investigating and writing history, but for the most part each
participant will be proceeding with a particular subject and presenting a report
on it to the class.
To this end, I ask that participants select from their field the leading article
on the subject they are investigating, a seminal interpretation that illuminates
the state of the field and the arguments and debates that have been generated
from it. The article will be distributed in class.
The paper for the course should be around 30 pages with footnotes at the end, to
be submitted on June 30, 2005. You are encouraged to turn in drafts before that
date and I shall make criticisms and suggestions.
Below is a list of the assigned texts.
Barbara Tuchman, Practicing History
Strunk and White, Elements of Style
E. H. Carr, What is History?
R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History
Richard Evans, In Defense of History
Francois Furet, The Workshop of History
(Past courses:
Fall 2004;
Spring 2004;
Fall 2003;
Spring
2003, Fall
2002)