Course |
AS 101 Introduction to American Studies |
|
Professor |
Geoffrey Sanborn |
|
CRN |
15122 |
|
Schedule |
Wed Fr 1:30 -2:50 pm OLIN 201 |
|
Distribution |
OLD: B / C
|
NEW: History
|
Rather than a survey of any one aspect or period of
American history, literature, or popular culture, this course is an
introduction to the interdisciplinary field of American Studies, a field
defined both by the range of texts we read (essays, novels, autobiographies,
photographs, films, music, architecture, historical documents, legal texts),
and by the questions we ask of them.
Those questions include: How have different Americans imagined what it
means to be an American? What ideas about
national history, patriotism, and moral character shape their visions of
Americanness? How do they draw the
boundaries that define who belongs within the nation and who gets excluded? What uses have been made of the claim to an
American identity, and what is at stake in that claim? How have Americans imagined a national
landscape, a national culture, and to what ends? The course will drive toward a consideration of the place that
September 11 has begun to assume in American cultural memory.
Course |
AS 334 Topics in Sexual Identity |
|
Professor |
Aureliano DeSoto |
|
CRN |
15035 |
|
Schedule |
Fr 2:00 -4:20 pm OLIN 307 |
|
Distribution |
OLD: C
|
NEW: History
|
Cross-listed: Gender Studies, SRE
This course focuses on the emergence and development of lesbian and gay identities in the USA from World War Two to the present. Reading a variety of textual genres (history, sociology, memoir, literature) as well as documentary visual media, the course will examine the consolidation of lesbian and gay identities in the years before 1969 (Stonewall), the effect of the Stonewall Rebellion, the divergence of lesbian and gay male subcultures in the 1970s (with their different utopian variations: separatism and hedonism), the AIDS crisis and racialized lesbian feminisms of the 1980s, and the new queer activism and subsequent commercialization of gay identity in the 1990s.