Course Descriptions, Fall 2006

American Studies Courses, Fall 2006

AMST 50:  American in the Era of Ragtime

Section 1:  Joy Kasson

12:30 TR, 212 Graham Memorial

This course will examine American culture at the turn of the twentieth century as seen through various lenses.  We will begin with E. L. Doctorow’s Ragtime, a novel written in the 1970s but set in the early twentieth century.  The author mingles fact and fiction, introduces historical figures such as Henry Ford, Emma Goldman, Harry Houdini, and J.P. Morgan, and focuses on three groups of Americans: an affluent family from New Rochelle, New York; an African-American couple; and a Jewish immigrant and his young daughter.  The course will proceed to investigate each area touched by the novel.  We will read autobiographies and literature, and explore photography, film, music, and popular culture.  In the spirit of American Studies, we will attempt to assemble a well-rounded portrait of a pivotal era in American life.  Course requirements include short papers, a biographical paper, and oral reports.  This course will emphasize the connections between the performing arts and literary texts.

AMST 055H:  Birth and Death in America

Section 1:  Tim Marr

11 TR; 212 Graham Memorial

This course explores birth and death as essential human rites of passage that are invested with significance by changing American historical and cultural contexts. Since both remain defining life events that none of us can recall or relate with experiential authority, examining them offers powerful insights into how culture mediates the construction of bodies and social identity. In contrast to much of America’s history, birth and death in contemporary United States are shrouded behind conventions of privacy and medical confidentiality. This seminar uses active interdisciplinary learning to expose the ways that various Americans have historically defined the meanings of these experiences through different processes of cultural power. Readings and assignments are designed to provoke new understandings of birth and death by examining the changing anthropological rituals, medical procedures, scientific technologies, religious meanings, and ethical quandaries surrounding them. We will explore a variety of representations of birth and death in literary expression, film, material culture, and institutional practice.

AMST 110:  Native North America (HIST 110)

Section 6; Kathleen DuVal

12:00 MW; 100 Hamilton

This interdisciplinary course addresses the cultures, histories, arts, and literature of North American Indians.  Lectures focus on general themes, and small discussion sections explore how these themes apply to a particular tribe.

AMST 201:   Approaches to American Studies

Section 1:  Jay Garcia

12:00 MWF, 221 Greenlaw
An introduction to methods and materials in the interdisciplinary study of
American society, including theoretical influences upon research in American Studies. The course explores interpretive practices within the field by focusing on three different historical moments and considering a range of literary and visual artifacts. The course examines the effects of the Spanish-American War on the domestic scene, cultural criticism in the 1910s, and narratives about migration from the 1990s. Throughout the course we will investigate relevant international contexts for understanding developments and changes in American culture and consider scholarship from across the disciplines on "race" and racialized relations in American society.

AMST 253:  Mamas and Matriarchs:  A Social History of Jewish Women in America (JWST 253)

Section 1:  Marcie Cohen Ferris

12:30 TR, 304 Dey

This course will examine the history and culture of Jewish women in America from their arrival in New Amsterdam in 1654 to the present day.  We will explore how gender shaped Jewish women's experiences of immigration, assimilation, religious observance, home, work, motherhood, family, and feminism.  The course will also investigate how factors such as region, race, class, country of origin, and religious denomination influenced the lives of Jewish women in America, and in turn, how Jewish women have shaped the national expression of American Judaism. Texts and discussions consider how these factors have created an American Jewish women's history that is distinctive from men's.  Students will examine a variety of historical sources and artifacts. The central goal of the course is to integrate Jewish women into the American past, and thus, fundamentally transform American Jewish history in that process.

 AMST 256:  Anti-Fifties: Voices of a Counterdecade

Section 1:  Robert Cantwell

12:30 TR, 218 Hanes Art Bldg.

The decade of the nineteen-fifties saw unprecedented prosperity, an expanding middle class, the consolidation of a postwar national security state and the ascendancy of America as a global power, with all that such power implies for culture and popular life. At the same time a passionate social conformity, a crass and overblown consumerism, a fatuous ideology of the family, as well as the usual forms of racism, anti-semitism, homophobia and class resentment in such eruptions as McCarthyism all enjoyed episodes of national assent. But in a general way we continue to regard the period as one of innocence and hope, and tend to treat it as a watershed of value to which we still appeal in order to understand what appears to be the deterioration of the family, the political system, public education and culture in our own time.

This course will consider a handful of counter-texts: voices from literature, politics, and mass culture of the nineteen-fifties that each for one or another reason found life in the postwar world repressive, empty, frightening, or insane, and predicted the social and cultural revolutions that marked the decade that followed.

AMST 258:  Captivity and American Cultural Definition

Section 1:  Tim Marr

3:30 – 4:45 TR; 221 Greenlaw

This course examines how representations of captivity, imprisonment, and bondage in American expression have been crucial to the construction and transformation of communal categories of religion, race, class, gender, and nation. We will study many situations of captivity and how they have been expressed in autobiography, fiction, painting, and film. We will explore a series of transcultural encounters on different contact zones, including the institutional oppression of slavery and imprisonment, captives across various frontiers and borderlands, and hostages and internees in today’s global crises. The course will focus on ways that understandings of captivity both condition cultural myths of American freedom and generate resources for cultural criticism.

AMST 290:  Introduction to the Literatures of Native North American

Section 1:  Tol Foster

9 MWF, 204 Murphey

This survey course will set out the context of Native American cultural and historical life through the exploration of literature in a variety of genres. Native critical terms and concepts, as well as major historical moments in Native history, will be elucidated through oral literature, non-fiction, poetry, short stories, film, and novels, primarily drawn from the twentieth century, and from tribal groups of the continental United States.  Although minor texts and authors will be included, major writers and texts will include Charles Eastman (Indian Boyhood), Leslie Marmon Silko (Storyteller), Pretty Shield (Pretty Shield), James Welch (Fools Crow), Thomas King (Green Grass, Running Water), and Sherman Alexie’s film The Business of Fancy Dancing.

AMST 292H:  Race and Empire in Twentieth-Century American Intellectual History

Section 1:  Jay Garcia
3:00-5:30 M, 200 Stone Center
This upper-level seminar explores twentieth-century writings on race, empire and colonialism by American intellectuals. In a number of genres and in several different contexts, American writers have examined the history of empire, engaging in dialogues with anti-colonial writers from elsewhere in the world. Through commentaries on race and empire in the modern world, American writers have analyzed a wide range of subjects, including the role of the intellectual in society, the rise of fascism, and the relationships between majorities and minorities both domestically and internationally. In turning their gaze outward on various international scenes, many writers revised available perspectives on American society and culture. Readings include select anti-colonial narratives originating in other parts of the world that proved influential during particular moments in American intellectual life. Readings will include books and essays by W. E B. Du Bois, Randolph Bourne, Richard Wright, Erik Erickson, C. L. R.

James, and Frantz Fanon, among others.

 AMST 334H: Defining America

Section 1 (Call# 04143):  John Kasson

 2:00-3:15 TR, 213 Graham Memorial

 Historical Analysis (HS), North Atlantic World (NA) 

INTENDED FOR RISING JUNIORS AND RISING SOPHOMORES

This course will explore the ways various individuals and groups have defined the possibilities of life within what is now the United States of America from earliest European contact through the Civil War.  Among the questions we will ask are: How have native peoples, Northern European colonists, and African Americans together created a new culture and society?  How have "natural" and social definitions been transgressed and challenged, creating new American identities in the process?  How have distinctively American political ideals and institutions, social practices, literature, and arts emerged?  How have concepts of freedom and equality been expressed and advanced?  Readings will include:  John Demos, The Unredeemed Captive; Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography; selections from The Portable Thomas Jefferson; materials on the painters George Caleb Bingham, Thomas Cole, and Lily Martin Spencer; selections from The Portable Margaret Fuller; Herman Melville’s short story, “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass (1855 edition); Frederick Douglass’s Narrative; and selections from The Portable Abraham Lincoln.  The aim of the course is to learn about the rich experience and imaginative life of earlier America and how to think about it in fresh, eye-opening ways.

AMST 375:  Cooking Up a Storm:  Exploring Food in American Culture (FOLK 375)

Section 1:  Marcie C. Ferris

11 TR, 210 Stone Center

This course will examine the history and meaning of food in American culture, and will explore the ways in which food shapes national, regional, and personal identity.  We will investigate how factors such as gender, ethnicity, class, race, religious beliefs, the media, global politics, and corporate America affect the food we eat.  We will discuss food as both a source of healing and a source of conflict, and the ways in which it impacts community.  Students will examine a variety of sources including cook books, recipes, oral histories, film, and artifacts to develop an understanding of food in American culture.

AMST 378H:  Nation-Building and National Identity in Australia and the United States:  A Comparative Study of Settler Societies

Section 1, Robert Allen

6-8:50 Mondays, Graham Memorial 038

In 1788, as the new nation of the United States of America was emerging from its war with Great Britain, the first convict ships arrived from London in what was to become Sydney, Australia.  Some of the soldiers sent to guard the convicts and help establish a new British colony in Terra Australis had spent time in the American colonies.   In some respects Australia and the United States share a common heritage and cultural development: the establishment of both nations involved the

forcible displacement of indigenous peoples; both nations share a common language and British cultural links; both are "settler" societies; the frontier has held a special place in the national imagination of both

countries.  In other respects, however, Australian nationhood was shaped by quite different forces from those that conditioned the history of the United States.

This course asks, "What can we learn by comparing the social and cultural histories of these two nations?  How are the processes of nation-building in each country similar/different?   In addressing these questions, we will examine a range of cultural materials from both countries: novels, films, paintings, first-hand accounts, and historical scholarship among them.  We will also take advantage of current events as they affect and are reported in both countries.

This course will be linked to a similar course taught at the University of Sydney by Richard Waterhouse, Bicentennial Professor of Australian History and Head of the School of Historical and Philosophical Inquiry.   We will use Blackboard and weekly teleclass sessions to connect the two courses and to conduct joint discussions of common reading and activities. 

The course will be organized around a set of comparative topics.  Among those investigated in previous offerings of the course are: women on the frontier, captivity narratives, heroes and outlaws, early labor systems, representation of the land, war and remembrance, popular music, and encounters between indigenous peoples and European settlers. 

This course is open to students from all majors and is particularly  appropriate for students who are considering studying abroad in Australia.

Please note:  The somewhat unusual class meeting time for this course has been set to allow us to hold a number of “live” teleclass sessions with the University of Sydney and to accommodate shifts in time difference between our two locations over the course of the semester.  Because this class meets only once each week, regular and timely attendance is crucial.  We will set aside time each week for dinner as a part of our class meetings.

AMST 385:   Women and Economics (ECON/WMST 385)
Section 1:   Rachel A. Willis
TTH 12:30- 1: 45, Greenlaw 221
AMST 385 is a social science examination of US gender patterns of time allocation which requires a standard final, significant discussion, and a group report which includes written product, class presentation, and web documentation. Project development and presentation uses multiple media and presentation formats.   AMST 385 includes a full-day field experience in a work place as well guest speakers related to the core topic.  Groups assign additional appropriate readings, data, and other resources on distinct immigrant groups to supplement the class textbook with transnational comparisons.   While the specific project format changes each semester, the fundamental requirements include use of core social science methodology to examine the impact of gender, race, age, education, occupation, household formation, and other characteristics.

AMST 390:  Major Native American Novelists

Section 1: Tol Foster

1 MWF, 204 Murphey

Through the major canonical Native American novelists of the twentieth century, this course will explore the contestation of knowledge and identity between Native and non-Native people on this continent.  Writers and novels to be considered will be John Joseph Mathews (Sundown), N. Scott Momaday (The Names), Leslie Marmon Silko (Gardens in the Dunes), Louise Erdrich (The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse), Sherman Alexie (The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven), and Thomas King (Green Grass, Running Water).

AMST 390:  Southwest as Contact Zone:  Reading "Chicana/o" and "Native American" in Relation

Section 2:  Maria DeGuzman

8:00 TR, 302 Greenlaw

Southwest as Contact Zone:  The Southwest: Southern California, Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, perhaps Louisiana to the extent that half of it lies west of the proverbial "frontier" dividing line of the Mississippi River, and the interior provinces of New Spain and later the northern provinces of Mexico which prior to the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo extended into present-day Utah.  The US Southwest/Northern Mexico borderzone was "home" to and "contact zone" of the following Native American nations, among others: the Natchez, the Comanche, the Apache, the Pueblo, the Navajo, the Hopi, the Mohave, the Papago, the Tarahumara, the Chumash, the Cochimi, etc. Additionally, the Southwest (as both the US and northern Mexico) is populated by millions of Mexicans and Mexican-Americans many of whom, particularly as politicized Chicanas/os, claim Aztec "heritage" both as a genealogical and a cultural concept. The Aztecs were concentrated in the central Valley of Mexico (quite far south of the US/Mexico borderlands). However, their imperial dominion extended up into the northern deserts of Mexico now the southwestern United States.  Although it is the Aztec civilization that has been emphasized in much Chicana/o literature claiming indigenous "heritage," other native cultures are claimed as well, among them, many of those cited above. Hence, for example, a recent academic conference "All Women of Red Nations: Weaving Connections" includes writers who identify as "Chicana" as well as artists and scholars whose primary identifications are as "Native American" and yet have Spanish names. Reading a diverse set of works by writers of the Southwest we will explore connections between what have often been treated as distinct literatures--Chicana/o and Native American. These connections may be made by the writers themselves in their invocation of shared space, motifs, and kinship. Commonality may also take the form of shared struggle for socio-economic justice and representation (both specifically legal and more broadly cultural) against the ways in which "red" and "brown" people are managed by the US government, stereotyped, and compelled to cohabit in regions of increasingly scarce resources as a result of legacies of occupation. Sometimes connections appear as their seeming opposite, deliberate rejection and boundary-drawing and we will inquire into the causes and effects of these kinds of territorialities. Writers include, but are not limited to Paula Gunn Allen, Leslie Marmon Silko, Joy Harjo, Ines Talamantez, Kathleen Alcala, Rudolfo Acuña, Gloria Anzaldúa, Sandra Cisneros, Ana Castillo, Jimmy Santiago Baca, Alfredo Vea, and Graciela Limón.  Course format is mini-lectures/much discussion. Assignments involve 4 1-2-page written responses to the readings, an oral presentation & active class participation, and two essays (one 8 pages and the second 10-12 pages).  Assignments and grade distribution: 1. 4 1-2-page responses on different works that we read), 25%  2. Class participation and one 20-minute presentation (on the course readings), 15% 3. One short essay, 8 pages, 25% 4. A second longer seminar essay, approx. 10-12 pages, 35%.

AMST 393:  Back to the Future: Chicago, 1893

Section 1:  Robert Cantwell

9:30 TR, 304 Dey

A frontier outpost in 1820, Chicago had become by 1893 a metropolis of over a million people, half of whom had arrived in the previous ten years--the most powerful engine of environmental and human exploitation urban industrial capitalism had yet produced.  This course will explore, mainly through works of fiction such as The Jungle and Sister Carrie, the lifeworld of Chicago at the end of the nineteenth century from the perspective of our own global condition. Students will develop presentations and papers from among a broad range of topics, including industrial incorporation, urbanization and suburbanization, central place theory, urban architecture and planning, utopianism and millenialism, electricity, communication, public transportation, social welfare and socialism, the labor movement, the rise of the department store, ward politics, ethnicity, the settlement house, new gender roles and definitions, feminism and the sacralization of art. The World's Columbian Exposition of 1893 will be a central topic, problem, and theme.

AMST 398:  Service Learning

Section 1:  Rachel Willis

2:00 – 4:30, 212 Graham Memorial

AMST 398 explores the history and theory of volunteerism and service learning in America. Requirements for the course include an academic seminar and significant placement in a service learning project.  Students produce published websites from their specific internship.  This is supplemented by visual and audio documentation as relevant.  Additionally students are required to keep a digital diary of their internship experience and respond to specific prompts in electronic discussion forums on a bi-weekly basis throughout the term.

AMST 483:  Seeing America: Visual Culture and American Studies

Section 1:  Joy Kasson

3:30 TR, 204 Murphey

This course will explore visual culture throughout American history; that is, it will examine the ways in which visual objects—paintings,  photographs, sculpture, architecture, film, advertising images, and other images—communicate the values of American culture and raise questions about American experiences.  Topics will include American artists such as Charles Willson Peale, Winslow Homer, Thomas Eakins, Mary Cassatt, and Georgia O’Keeffe; American architecture; museums and historical sites; and topics such as gender, ethnicity, family, and commercialism.

AMST 499:  Re-imagining the Documentary

Section 1:  Karen Michel

3:30 – 6:00 W. 204 Murphey
Making and talking about possibilities for the documentary form; defining what that may mean.  Re-conceiving docu-narrative for the very small screen (video iPods, PDAs, telephones, eyeglasses), installation, performance, radio, video; for all media known and otherwise rendered possible.  The class will read some of the classics ("Through Navajo Eyes", "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men," Coles, Mead, McLuhan, others), listen to and see some of the classics (Flaherty, Kamerling, Isay, Murrow, Deveare Smith, others) and especially make some inventive new work.  Class members will produce individual projects and collaborate on a video podcast.

AMST 880:  The History of Social Experience of Moviegoing

GRADUATE STUDENTS ONLY

Section 1:  Robert C. Allen

6-9 pm Tuesdays, 222 Murphey

The past decade has seen a turn toward "reception" in American media and film historiography, as historians consider not only the history of the production of popular media texts, but also (or instead) the history of audiences, exhibition practices, moviegoing, the spaces and places of movie culture, advertising, fan culture, and the activation of cinematic texts by historically situated viewers.  Similarly, film theory has moved from a notion of the ahistorical "spectator" to a more historically grounded understanding of reception.  As film and media historiography embraces reception and the social circumstances of moviegoing and other forms of media consumption, this field moves closer to the concerns of social history, cultural studies, oral history, “local” history, transnational/comparative history, and cultural history more generally.

This course will explore these topics through reading and discussion of key works in the history of film spectatorship, audiences, exhibition, and reception and through original research on the history of movies and moviegoing in North Carolina.  Our weekly class meetings will be supplemented by a parallel “virtual” international seminar.  Using Blackboard, we will conduct weekly discussions with 8-12 graduate students from around the world who are also interested in and pursuing research projects in this field. 

The co-leader of our virtual seminar will be Dr. Kate Bowles, Senior Lecturer at the University of Wollongong, and convenor of the Communication and Cultural Studies Program in the School of Social Science, Media and Communication.  Dr. Bowles is co-chief investigator of the Australia Research Council project, “Regional Markets and Local Audiences,” which combines research into the trade practices of Australian film distribution and exhibition with oral histories of the audience experience, to produce a comparative study of the historical circumstances of cinema consumption in Australia.

UNC students will engage in original archival and field research on the history of moviegoing in North Carolina, taking advantage of the university’s extensive archival holdings on the social and cultural history of the state.  Our research focus will be “space, place, and race,” as we trace the rise of movie exhibition in towns and cities across North Carolina during the Jim Crow era.  Our archival research will be complemented by oral history interviews conducted with local residents old enough to recall the experience of moviegoing before the 1960s.

Students from a wide variety of disciplinary backgrounds are welcome.  No previous coursework in film studies is required. 

AMST 890:  U.S. Civil War Media

GRADUATE STUDENTS ONLY

Section 1:  Eliza Richards

3:30 - 6:30 T, 202 Murphey

This course analyzes the relations between Civil War media and the irretrievable events they shaped, expressed, and creatively interpreted. The development of mass media networks and new information technologies—especially telegraphy and photography—converged with a time of national crisis. The work of photographers, sketch artists, poets, journalists, and prose writers of all kinds mingled in the popular press and informed readers’ understanding of events. The home front’s hunger for unadulterated news and images from the battlefields blended with a fascination with war as spectacle or fantasy, and the outpouring of visual and verbal representations of wartime mingled fact and fiction. We will explore the circulation of words and images at this crucial point in American history.

Topics include:  relations among propaganda, testimony, journalism, and art; exchanges between visual and verbal forms of representation; print mediations between home and war fronts; the relation between vicarious and direct experiences of physical violence; the figuration of death in terms of national ideals; the place of artistic expression in wartime.

Readings include: northern and southern periodical publications (The Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s Illustrated Weekly, The New York Tribune, Southern Magazine, The Rebellion Record); photographs by Matthew Brady and Alex Gardner; sketches by Winslow Homer and others; poetry and prose by Abraham Lincoln, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Walt Whitman, Louisa May Alcott, Julia Ward Howe, Ambrose Bierce, and others; histories of the U.S. Civil War, journalism, and information technologies; theories of mass media.