American Studies
 Certificate Program

The Graduate Center
The City University of New York

COURSES – SPRING 2009

ASCP. 81500 - Jazz Style and Context GC:  T, 4:15-6:15 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Giddins, [95700] Cross listed with ENGL 87300 & MUS 86200. Open to Ph.D. students only.

Jazz is so often viewed through a single, narrow lens—the chronological achievements of its most creative figures—that we underestimate its importance as a mirror of the times.

The familiar narrative of jazz style as a progression of imaginative triumphs (also known as the begat theory, e.g., trumpet player King Oliver begat Louis Armstrong who begat Roy Eldridge who begat Dizzy Gillespie who begat Miles Davis and so forth) ignores the true complexity of musical influence and the historical realities to which jazz actually responds. The Swing Era, bebop, cool jazz, hard bop, soul jazz, avant-garde, fusion, neoclassicism, and other jazz styles could have been born only in the eras that did, in fact, produce them.

So what does jazz tell us about the American century in politics and war, economics, technology, race and gender issues, and the pop culture that borders one side of jazz and the high culture that borders the other?

In this course, we will examine three interrelated narratives in tracing the history of jazz:

1) The chronological l’art pour l’art narrative, in which creativity trumps other concerns and music is viewed as a progressive phenomenon, in producing a succession of freestanding masterworks

2) The fusion narrative, in which jazz reflects (through commercial borrowings, parody, or outright critique) contemporary culture, and 3) The historicist narrative, which is especially useful in considering today’s jazz, and begins with the precept that creativity in jazz is inextricably bound with its past.

Without recourse to musicology (definitely not a requirement for this class), we begin with the basic structures of jazz—blues and pop song form—and focus on the way they were used over time, by examining jazz classics, jazz obscurities, and some of the outside influences that define the broader musical mainstream in which jazz operates.

We also test our narratives against another historical template, in which this new music originated as a local phenomenon, quickly conquered the world, then retreated into an increasingly intellectual and ultimately specialized pursuit, and was finally crowned as classic—finding a home in academia and recognition from cultural support systems precisely at the moment when it could no longer sustain an audience large enough to crease the national conscience.

What is jazz’s role today? What is meant when some argue that it is now “post-historical”?

The course texts will include Visions of Jazz (Giddins) and Jazz (De Veaux and Giddins). Course requirements include active class participation and two reports: Each student will serve as a co-lecturer for a particular class; all students will prepare original reports (oral or written) for the final classes.

ASCP. 81500 - Contemporary Multiculutral American Fiction & Memoir GC:  F, 11:45 a.m.-1:45 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Tolchin, [95909] Cross listed with ENGL 75400 & WSCP 81000.

From N. Scott Momaday's Pulitzer Prize winning novel House Made of Dawn (1968) to Toni Morrison's Beloved (1988), Oscar Hijuelos's Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love (1989), Jhumpa Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies (1999) and Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2008), all 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; Jimmy Santiago Baca’s memoir A Place to Stand recounts his transformation from an illiterate felon into a poet while in prison. We may also read the work of Julia Alvarez and Cristina Garcia.

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 readings may include authors Toni Morrison, Gloria Naylor, Walter Mosley, and John Edgar Wideman.

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 - Blues People: African American Culture in the 20^th Century GC:  T, 6:30-8:30 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Wallace, [95910] Cross listed with ENGL 75600 & WSCP 81000.

This course will use an interdisciplinary method to amplify our consideration of a key series of works in African American culture—literary, musical and visual of the 20th century. We will be focused on this material in terms of how they reflect upon the notion of a blues aesthetic or a blues sensibility.

Historic landposts will range from the Plessy vs. Ferguson Segregation decision in the Supreme Court (1896), the founding of the NAACP (1906) and the Crisis, WWI, the Great Migration, the Depression, the FSA (Federal Security Administration), WWII, the Civil Rights Movement and the Black Power Movement.

The blues aesthetic, as initially defined by Leroi Jones in Blues People (1963) and as elaborated upon by so many scholars before (Langston Hughes, Sterling Brown, Zora Neale Hurston et al) and subsequently, including most notably Steven Tracy in Langston Hughes and The Blues (2001), will help to provide our critical armature. As Tracy writes, "A particular misery and sadness, a particular blues, unites African Americans whose common heritage—in Africa, slavery, and a theoretical freedom—often provides a bond which is difficult for middle class blacks to break."

The blues, and African American music generally, will provide us with a coherent way of interpreting the range of African American performance traditions in a range of fields since the turn-of-the-century and the publication of W.E.B. Du Bois's Souls of Black Folk (1903).

Other crucial works to be touched upon in this survey will include in literature, besides DuBois’s The Souls of Black Folk and Jones's Blues People (Baraka): James Weldon Johnson's Autobiography of an Ex Colored Man, Jean Toomer's Cane, Langston Hughes's Weary Blues (1926), Zora Neale Hurston's Mules and Men (1935), Richard Wright's 12 Million Black Voices (1941), Gwendolyn Brooks's A Street in Bronzeville (1945) and Maud Martha (1953), Ralph Ellison, Flying Home and Other Stories (1934-1956), Albert Murray, Stomping the Blues (1976) and Steve Tracy's Langston Hughes and the Blues.

In music: "Steal Away" Bernice Reagon and Toshi Reagon, Wiliam and Walker (1902), Bessie Smith and Louis Armstrong's "St. Louis Blues" (1925), Louis Armstrong's "Black and Blue (1932)," Duke Ellington's "Black and Tan (1929)" and "Diminuendo in Blue," and Son House's "The Death Letter," Richie Haven's "Freedom (Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child)," Woodstock 1969.

In visual art and Photography: Du Bois's "Negro Exhibition" at the Paris Exposition (1900), Frances Johnston Benjamin's The Hampton Album, Henry O. Tanner's "The Banjo Lesson," Jacob Lawrence's "The Migration Series," Gordon Park's FSA Photographs, Roy de Carava's “The Sweet Flypaper of Life,” Romare Bearden's "The Block" and Faith Ringgold's "Street Story Quilt."

ASCP. 81500 - A Workshop in Contexts of 20-Century North American Poetry GC:  T, 6:30-8:30 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Alcalay, [95911] Cross listed with ENGL 86200. Permission of instructor required.

“Since 1955, poetry or verse as some would prefer it called has, despite all forebodings that it was dying, taken through a handful of writers in the United States, a stranglehold on established modes of thought, analysis, and attention.” John Wieners, 1972

This is a specialized course that assumes some familiarity with at least some of the writers we plan to read and research. The course will be structured as a workshop in which the aim will be for each student to choose a single writer or text, or a cluster of writers and texts, and work on creating and documenting a dense historical context for those texts/writers.

This will entail extended research into the formal, biographical, social, political, geographic and other contexts that the writers(s)/text(s) might suggest, as well as reading and thinking through other investigative and interpretive models that might have nothing to do with poetry or poetics.

Particular emphasis will be put on examining original publications, tracing publication history and decisions (i.e. Gwendolyn Brooks moving from a major publisher to Dudley Randall’s Broadside Press), and comprehending the context of small press publishing and personal correspondence in the context of the cold war and “official verse culture.” The general goal will be to develop a new and common critical vocabulary while producing a publishable work on some neglected or under-written about aspect of 20th c. North American poetry.

Hopefully, these initial investigations may also lead into further recuperative projects involving editing, textual scholarship, and critical commentary. We will take into account a wide range of poets thought of as major or minor and associated or clustered around designations such as The New Americans, the Objectivists, the San Francisco Renaissance, Black Mountain, Umbra, and the Black Arts Movement (for example: Lorine Niedecker, Charles Olson, Gwendolyn Brooks, Kenneth Patchen, Jackson MacLow, Madeline Gleason, Robert Duncan, Jack Kerouac, Philip Whalen, Jack Spicer, Joanne Kyger, Diane di Prima, Amiri Baraka, David Henderson, Jack Hirschman, John Wieners, Sister Mary Norbert Korte, Ed Dorn, Diane Wakoski, etc.).

Enrollment is limited. In order to register, please send a very brief statement of interest to Ammiel Alcalay at: aaka@earthlink.net.

ASCP. 81500 - Science Fiction Film & TV GC:  R, 4:15-8:15 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Hendershot, [95912] Cross listed with THEA 81500 & FSCP 81000.

This class examines the historical evolution of science fiction, with a primary focus on American film and television.

We will consider issues of aesthetics, authorship, and genre (in particular the complicated interrelationship between sci-fi and horror), while also contextualizing discussion within the broader framework of the political issues raised by the films under discussion.

In particular, we will examine the genre’s historical push-pull between a conservative fear of “the other” and a more progressive allegorical use of the genre to explore issues such as racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, and McCarthyism.

Students will consider key early shapers of the genre, such as Fritz Lang (Metropolis, Woman on the Moon), then move on to examine the explosion of science fiction during the Cold War years.

Films viewed from the post-war era may include: Invasion of the Body Snatchers, It Came from Outer Space, The Man from Planet X, The Day the Earth Stood Still, Creature from the Black Lagoon, and Forbidden Planet.

Next, we will turn to the 1960s, a transitional period aesthetically, technologically, and politically, as seen in films such as Andromeda Strain, Planet of the Vampires, and 2001: A Space Odyssey.

The class will also examine key dystopic films of the 1970s such as A Boy and His Dog, Planet of the Apes, and Soylent Green.

The film component of the class culminates with Alien, Blade Runner, and Starship Troopers.

Television programs discussed will include: The Twilight Zone, the new Battlestar Gallactica, and the Star Trek franchise, with forays, where appropriate, into Buffy the Vampire Slayer, a breakthrough show in terms of both its political use of allegory and its manipulation of genre paradigms (horror, sci-fi, fantasy, comedy, the musical).

Our discussion of the Star Trek franchise will lead us into examination of the important role that fandom has played in the history of American science fiction. We will focus in particular on the work of writer/producer Ronald D. Moore, who got his start on Star Trek: The Next Generation, hit his stride with Deep Space 9, and boldly went where no man had gone before with Battlestar Galactica.

Readings will include: Bukatman, Blade Runner; Hills, Fan Cultures; Jenkins, “Out of the Closet and into the Universe: Queers and Star Trek”; Jenkins, “Welcome to Bisexuality, Captain Kirk”; Kuhn, ed. Alien Zones: Cultural Theory and Contemporary Science Fiction Films; Lucas, “U-I Sci-Fi: Studio Aesthetics and the 1950s Metaphysics.”; Rickman, ed. The Science Fiction Film Reader; Sontag, “The Imagination of Disaster.”

In addition to weekly readings, to prepare for most classes students will also be required to see a film on their own ahead of time. We will also view a film in class each week.

Students will complete two assignments, a short (5-7 page) study of the marketing and reception of a single film not studied in the class, and a longer (15-17 page) final original research project. The topic of the final project will be formulated in consultation with the instructor.

ASCP. 81500 - American Labor History GC:  R, 4:15-6:15 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Freeman, [95913] Cross listed with HIST 75000.

ASCP. 81500 – Seminar in Music History: Topics in American Music Studies GC:  F, 10:00 a.m.-1:00 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Taylor, [95914] Cross listed with MUS 86300.

This seminar will examine the variety of ways American music is currently being studied, with particular emphasis on the influence of scholarship produced since 1990.

Readings will be drawn from musicology, ethnomusicology, literature, art history, and other disciplines. Central to the class will be the exploration of an “identity” for American Music, and its historical equation (now frequently challenged) with music of the United States, as well as the current interrogation of issues of race, gender, class and sexuality.

The course is not a survey, though it will move more or less chronologically and music from a variety of periods will be examined. Rather, the seminar will use a variety of repertories and styles to examine how tools currently available to scholars, from both music and related disciplines, help them understand and appreciate both music of the United States and the art within the larger context of the Americas.

Topics will include (but not be limited to) early hymnody, black-face minstrelsy, the music of Charles Ives, musical modernism of the 1920s and 30s, musical theater since 1950 (especially Bernstein and Sondheim), Motown in the 1960s, jazz (especially since 1960), and the contemporary music scene.

Final projects will be based on the students’ individual interests

ASCP. 81500 - American Politics GC:  R, 4:15-6:15 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Polsky, [95915] Cross listed with P SC 72000. Open to Political Science students only. Permission of EO required for all others.

This seminar offers an overview of the American political system and an introduction to major scholarly controversies in the American politics subfield of the discipline.  Throughout the course a strong emphasis will be placed on the historical development of political institutions.

Following a session on various approaches to the study of American politics, the first unit will focus on the framework of American politics, including American political culture(s), the constitutional foundations of national politics, and the patterning of inclusion/exclusion in the political community. 

Next the course will turn to political participation and linkage institutions (public opinion, parties, elections, interest groups). 

The final unit will cover key national institutions the presidency, Congress, the courts, and the bureaucracy.  An overview session at the end of the course will highlight connections across units and emerging scholarship about American politics. 

We will regularly address issues and problems in teaching an introductory undergraduate course in American politics

ASCP. 81500 -The Psychology of Immigration & American National Identity GC:  W, 4:15-6:15 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Renshon, [95916] Cross listed with P Sc 84608 & IDS 81610. Open to Political Science students only.  Permission of EO required for all others.

This course focuses on the nature of American national identity and its implications for a wide range of political and policy questions concerning citizenship, national security, and the American national community more generally.

What does it mean, psychologically and politically, to be an American? Is a national identity useful, or even possible, in an age of globalization? Is there something distinctive about national identity and citizenship in the United States? If so, what is it?

American national identity is challenged domestically by the difficult, and as yet, uncompleted task of integrating almost a million new immigrants a year into our national community, and by four decades of identity politics. It is challenged from abroad by efforts of many foreign countries to bind their nationals in the United States to their “home countries,” and by those who argue that Americans ought to be “international cosmopolitans,” more at home in the world rather than in just the United States.

All of this is happening at a time when the United States is at war and the integration, cohesion, and attachment of the various communities that make up the United States are maters of national security as well as of political theory.

Just how does patriotism fit in with American national identity? Is it “the last resorts of scoundrels,” or is it crucial psychological glue for national attachment?

Course readings with be drawn from American history, political psychology, the sociology of immigration, and political theory.

Interested students are asked to contact Professor Renshon (srenshon@gc.cuny.edu) for a brief orienting reading assignment to be completed for the first class.

ASCP. 81500 - As American as Apple Pie: Violence in the United States GC:  W, 6:30-8:30 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Watts, [95917] Cross listed with SOC 85910.

Violence is a fundamental component of contemporary American social life. The United States has by far the highest murder rate of any nation not involved in civil war. Many Americans organize their entire lives around their fear of violence. 

Violence against American women is at epidemic levels. Some studies claim that more American women are murdered inside their homes by known assailants than by strangers in public spaces.

Yet, Americans spend enormous amounts of our leisure time viewing television shows and movies that glamorize and normalize murder-and perhaps desensitize us to it.  Prisons are spaces in our society where violence is legalized and popularly supported .

The United States has the largest or second largest number of persons incarcerated.  In poor and working class neighborhoods in cities throughout the nation, violent gangs proliferate. In these same neighborhoods law enforcement officials regularly engage in brutal police practices.

The psychological needs of soldiers returning from overseas combat are ignored and/or belittled. Real men can cope with killing and witnessing death! 

Corporations pursue higher profits with indifference to the violent nature of their products (ie. cigarette companies).  

In this seminar we will attempt to grasp the reasons behind the epidemic of violence in the United States. 

ASCP. 82000 - America in the 1960s GC:  R, 4:15-6:15 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Levin, [95055] Open to Ph.D. students only. Cross listed with ART 87300.

“People today are still living off the table scraps of the sixties. They are still being passed around - the music and the ideas,” commented Bob Dylan, alluding to the political, social, and cultural changes that took place during the 1960s, which can be seen as setting the stage for the deep divide in American politics and culture that exists today.

This seminar will focus on the 1960s as a time of challenges, with specific focus on the Civil Rights Movement, the Women’s Movement, anti-Viet Nam war protests, college student activism, environmental activism, and the struggle for gay rights.

The War on Poverty, the Black Power Movement, Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers’ campaign, Rachel Carson's launch of the environmental movement with the 1962 publication of Silent Spring, women’s struggles for the right to birth control and abortion as well as for equal job opportunity and equal pay, and the 1969 Stonewall riots in Greenwich Village all contributed to changes in society.

Cultural production responded to these shifts with developments such as the folk music revival, Rock music, Pop art, Earth art, and feminist art and literature, and theatrical events that ranged from Edward Albee’s plays to Happenings and Performance art.

This course will feature in-class visits from faculty members of the American Studies Certificate Program (drawn from doctoral programs such as English, History, Music, and Theater), as well as from some artists who will serve as witnesses to the decade.

Readings will include both primary documents and secondary sources.

Course requirements include class participation, a bibliography of secondary sources on a particular aspect of U.S. life during the decade, an oral presentation of original scholarship within that field, and a final paper that expands on the presentation.

ASCP. 82000 - US Memorials: Vietnam to 9/11 GC:  W, 11:45 a.m.-1:45 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Senie, [95919] Cross listed with ART 77300 & IDS 81640. Open to Art History students only. Permission of EO required for all others.

This course focuses on memorials (the most traditional form of public art) to recent critical events that challenged aspects of national identity.

Vietnam was a lost war; Columbine manifested the dark side of high school culture; Oklahoma City and 9/11, terrorist attacks from within and without, revealed a previously unthinkable lack of security in the nation’s heartland and critical urban centers. 

We will discuss issues of site and selection criteria and analyze built and proposed memorial projects as well as pertinent films and novels in the context of aesthetic strategies, definitions of memory, and audience response. 

Texts pertaining to Holocaust and other memorial studies will be included. 

Guest speakers will include artists who have designed memorials and representatives of commissioning agencies.

Requirements: Term paper, several short in-class presentations, a few short reaction papers, no exams.

ASCP. 82000 - American Modernisms, 1900-1935 GC:  M, 4:15-6:15 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Corn, [95920] Cross listed with ART 87300. Open to Art History students only. Permission of EO required for all others   

A close look at art movements in early twentieth-century New York with particular attention the Ash Can School, the Stieglitz circles, the Dadaists, the Precisionists, and the artists of the Harlem Renaissance.

Readings will be drawn from a growing literature that argues for several schools of modernism, not one. We will probe the ways in which these new studies have changed the shape and history of modernism as it has been traditionally understood. Readings will range widely from the highly theoretical to focused case studies. 

No auditors allowed.

Preliminary Reading:

JoAnne Marie Mancini, Pre-Modernism: Art-World Change and American Culture from the Civil War to the Armory Show, Princeton University Press, 2005.

ASCP. 82000 - Race and Sentiment in 19^th-Century American Writing GC:  F, 2:00-4:00 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Hoeller, [95921] Cross listed with ENGL 75100 & WSCP 81000.

This course will investigate the role sentimental expression played in debates on issues of race—concerning both Native Americans and slavery-- in 19th century American literature before the Civil War.

If race was a central concern in 19th century American culture, sentimentality was one of its dominant cultural modes. The complicated convergence of the two is the focus of this course.

How, and why, did writers use sentiment as a way to address issue of race? What were the potentials and limits of such a use of sentiment?

The most well-known example of such a convergence is perhaps Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a novel that literally tried to, and arguably did, move a nation towards change.

But, as literary criticism of the last ten years has made abundantly clear, sentimentality was, and needs to be recognized as, a pervasive cultural mode as well as an important literary tradition.

In this course we will delve into much of the recent critical work on sentimental writing in 19th century American literature to explore the role sentiment played particularly in writings about race.

Following the initial groundbreaking work of rediscovery of women’s sentimental writing by Jane Tompkins and Nina Baym, and arguments about its great ideological limits such as Ann Douglass’s work, an expansive body of critical work has emerged-- by critics such as Julia Stern, Mary-Louise Kete, Jocelyn Moody, Cindy Weinstein, Glenn Hendler, Kristin Boudreau, Lori Merish, Joseph Fichtelberg, and many others-- that examines and theorizes sentimental expressions in a wide variety of texts and context. What is so exciting about this critical work on sentimentalism is that it opens up our understanding of the canon and the American tradition itself and that it creates space for much new critical work still to be done—some of it hopefully initiated in this course.

The seminar is designed to explore this critical work and to use it as a way to examine sentimental expressions and their engagement with issue of race in a wide range of writers such as James Fenimore Cooper, Lydia Maria Child, Catherine Maria Sedgwick, William Wells Brown, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Harriet Wilson, Harriet Jacobs, Hannah Crafts, William Apess, and others.

ASCP. 82000 - The Emergence of Cultural Criticism, 1800-1950 GC:  W, 2:00-4:00 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Dickstein, [95922] Cross listed with ENGL 80600.

This course will study the origins and growth of cultural criticism from its modern beginnings to the middle decades of the twentieth century.

The early stages can be traced to the eighteenth century when political upheavals, religious and philosophical shifts, and economic changes contributed to new ways of understanding society. Jűrgen Habermas has traced the origins of the public sphere to this period.

Another key term was culture, a notion that served to integrate language, geography, ideas, and social formations.

The Romantic reaction to the Enlightenment and the French Revolution put great emphasis on tradition, folk culture, national identity, and the organic continuity of manners and morals. In reaction to the radicalism and rationalism of the Revolution, it highlighted the power of the irrational, the affective, and focused attention on the arts as an expression of the individual and collective mind.

With the failure of the political revolutions, the critical energy of the Enlightenment took on a cultural form. The new cultural criticism came about as a synthesis of aesthetic and social criticism that has continued to develop up to the present day.

The course will study some of the key moments of its development in their historical context. It will begin with a look at what Isaiah Berlin called the Counter-Enlightenment as represented by Burke in England, Rousseau in France, Herder in Germany. This introduction will be followed by a reading of brief texts by nineteenth-century writers such as Wordsworth, Carlyle, Emerson, Matthew Arnold, Baudelaire, Ruskin, Nietzsche, and Oscar Wilde, then a handful of essayists from the first half of the twentieth century, including William James, Van Wyck Brooks, Virginia Woolf, Lewis Mumford, George Orwell, Walter Benjamin, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Mikhail Bakhtin, Theodor Adorno, Lionel Trilling, and Susan Sontag, as well as key secondary works such as Raymond Williams’s Culture and Society. Writers not included in formal assignments may be covered in oral reports. We’ll also consider other significant uses of the idea of culture - in anthropology, for example. Assignments will include a 15-page research paper and an oral report.

ASCP. 82000 - The Plight of Sympathy: Benevolence and Self-Interest in “Early” America GC:   R, 6:30-8:30 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Faherty, [95923] Cross listed with ENGL 85000.

Towards the conclusion of Charles Brockden Brown’s quixotic novel Arthur Mervyn, a lawyer informs Mervyn that if he wanted to profit from his restless efforts to help others he “should have known his own interest better.” Despite occupying a chaotic city populated by counterfeiters, convalescents, madman, and failed speculators, Mervyn seems driven to wildly circulate in the service of benevolence.

The tensions between benevolence and self-interest that Brown maps in Arthur Mervyn are hallmarks of many early American novels, as a range of post-Revolutionary writers sought to redefine what social cohesion meant in a nation comprised of supposedly liberal individuals. Many of these writers deployed a language of feeling to grapple with the unprecedented ways in which the Revolution had called into question operant definitions of citizenship and identity. Amid the uncertainties of a culture seeking to define itself in the wake of revolution, many “American” writers sought to discern the cultural effects of unregulated self-interest on “national” cultural.

In this course we will examine a range of early American texts which question both the limits of self-interest and the complex social utility of benevolence. In so doing, we will consider how many of these writers explored “deviant” behavior in order to demonstrate how artifice and elusion had permeated the social fabric of the early Republic, a situation which made it almost impossible to discern the truth of anyone’s character or identity.

Possible texts include: Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography, Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative, Charles Brockden Brown’s Arthur Mervyn, Robert Montgomery Bird’s Sheppard Lee, James Fenimore Cooper’s Lionel Lincoln, Herman Melville’s Israel Potter, Lenora Sansay’s Secret History, or The Horrors of St. Domingo, Hannah Webster Foster’s The Coquette, Peter Markoe’s The Algerine Spy, Isaac Mitchell’s The Asylum, Lucy Brewer’s The Female Marine, Tabitha Tenney’s Female Quixotism, Hannah Craft’s The Bondswoman’s Narrative, William Hill Brown’s The Power of Sympathy, Walt Whitman’s Franklin Evans, and Stephen Burroughs’ Memoirs.

In addition to our examination of primary texts, we will be reading a broad range of recent critical work to think about the conventions and limitations of disciplinarity, and to consider the challenges of writing about canonical and non-canonical texts (to contemplate, among other questions, whether or not the canonical “status” of a novel demands a different kind of scholarly engagement).

Requirements will include one oral report and a final seminar paper.

** Please note: seminar participants should read Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments in preparation for the first class meeting.

ASCP. 82000 - Slavery, Anti-Slavery and Emancipation in the US GC:  M, 2:00-4:00 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Oakes, [95924] Cross listed with HIST 75700.

ASCP. 82000 - New York City in the 20th Century GC:  T, 6:30-8:30 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Wallace, [95925] Cross listed with HIST 75800.

ASCP. 82000 - History of American Theatre: American Theatre Practice and Theatrical Modernism GC:  T, 6:30-8:30 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Case, [95926] Cross listed with THEA 86100.

This course will explore the production models and aesthetic development of theatre companies that influenced the direction of Modern American drama and theatre.

Particular emphasis will be placed on the creative role of the producer, and how the unique intermingling of financial and aesthetic concerns influenced American theatre practice.

Students will explore the strategies different companies used to compete in the marketplace, and how these strategies created not merely competing operational practices, but competing visions for the American theatre itself.

Particular attention will be paid to the operations of the Syndicate, the Shuberts, the Provincetown Players, the Washington Square Players, the Lafayette Players, the Theatre Guild, the Group Theatre, the Civic Repertory Theatre, the Federal Theatre Project, the Playwrights Producing Company, and ANTA.

In particular, we will study the relationships between groups (such as the development from the Washington Square Players to the Theatre Guild to the Group Theatre), and examine the production practices associated with particular companies.

Throughout the course, we will be asking whether any of the theatres under consideration approximate the idea of an American national theatre, and whether such a theatre is desirable or even possible in the United States.

ASCP. 89000 - Dissertation Workshop GC: T, 6:30-8:30 p.m., Rm. TBA, 0 credits, Prof. Burke, [95051] Prerequisite: Permission of American Studies Certificate Program Coordinator. Open to level 2 and 3 students only.

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:  Fall 2008; Spring 2008; Fall 2007; Spring 2007; Fall 2006; Spring 2006; Fall 2005; Spring 2005; Fall 2004; Spring 2004; Fall 2003; Spring 2003,  Fall 2002)

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