Major Works in American Studies

MAJOR WORKS IN AMERICAN STUDIES

American Studies 200Prof. Joyce E. Chaplin

Fall 2016Barker 225

Thursday, 2-4

Robinson Basement Seminar RoomOfc Hrs: Tues. 2-4(sign up)

America doesn’t exist. I know. I lived there.

Alain Resnais, dir., Mon Oncle d’Amérique (1980).

In this class, G-1 and G-2 students in the American Studies program will considersome of the key works that are being circulated and debated in the field. Whatever else these titles represent, they are good to think with. The course does not (cannot) offer full coverage of all the texts, authors, questions, methods, and disciplines in the field. Rather, it will teachstudents how to argue about American studies and define their place within it.

Each student will:

1. participate actively and productively in weekly discussions (30% of grade),
2. write a synthetic 1500-word review of one week’s set of readings, due by 5 pm the day after they are discussed in class (20%),
3. make oral presentations on two primary sources, each for a different class. You willselect the sources and, for each, speak for at least 5 minutes but no more than 10, explaining how at least one of the readings for that day’s class would be useful in analyzing your chosen source (10% each; 20% total; for help selecting a source:
4. write a 300-word lesson plan/explanation/mini-lecture/elevator speech on one of the readings that explains clearly, to a non-academic person or audiencewhy the heck it matters; due before the class in which we do that reading (10%, to be posted on course website for general discussion),
5. review one additional book, due at the end of reading period. Many of the readings below are selections from full books (or essays drawn from books); you will finish reading one of these books and write a 1500-word review of it (20%). Please note that you cannot review a book from the week you do the synthetic review.

Because the GSAS counsels that students should take an INC grade in a class only very infrequently, I must ask that you consult with me if you need to request extra time for any work or an absence from any class—such requests cannot easily be granted.

All readings are required but none needs to be purchased: links to electronic texts are embedded below; those available as PDFs on the course website are marked +; those available at Lamont Reserve are marked *.

Sept. 1: Background

+Julie Thompson Klein, Interdisciplinarity: History, Theory, and Practice (Detroit: Wayne State

University, 1990), 11-39, 104-17.

Michael Bérubé, “American Studies without Exceptions,”PMLA 118, no. 1 (Jan. 2003): 103-13.

+Michael Denning, Culture in the Age of Three Worlds (London: Verso), 2004), 1-14, 169-226,

Caroline Levine, Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network (Princeton: Princeton University

Press, 2015), 1-23, 132-50.

Sept. 8: Precedents

W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches(Chicago: A.C. McClurg, 1903).

+Vernon Louis Parrington, Main Currents in American Thought: An Interpretation of American

Literature from the Beginnings to 1920. Vol. 1: 1620-1800. The Colonial Mind(New

York: Harcourt, Brace, 1927), iii-15.

Herbert E. Bolton, “The Epic of Greater America,” American Historical Review 38 (1933): 448-

74.

+Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York, 1964), 7-32.

Sept. 15: Nature

*Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Idea in America (New

York: Oxford University Press, 1964).

+Raymond Williams, “Nature,” in Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (New York,

1976), 184-89.

+Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge, MA: Harvard

University Press, 2011), 1-44.

Sept. 22: Politics

+Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America: An Interpretation of American Political

Thoughtsince the Revolution (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1955), 3-32, 259-83.

+Samuel Huntington, American Politics: The Promise of Disharmony (Cambridge: Harvard

University Press, 1981), 1-60.

+Gary Gerstle, Liberty and Coercion: The Paradox of American Government from the Founding to the Present (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015) , 1-54, 311-43.

Sept. 29: Intersectionality

Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence

against Women of Color,”Stanford Law Review 43 (1991): 1241-99.

Martha Hodes, “The Mercurial Nature and Abiding Power of Race: A Transnational Family

Story,” American Historical Review 108 (2003), 84-118.

Nicole R. Fleetwood, “Visible Seams: Gender, Race, Technology, and the Media Art of Fatimah

Tuggar,” Signs 30 (2004), 1429-54.

Sarah Haley, No Mercy Here: Gender, Punishment, and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity

(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016), 1-16, 156-94.

Oct. 6: Music

Charles Hiroshi Garrett, Struggling to Define a Nation: American Musicand the Twentieth

Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008).

Andrew Ross, “The Mental Labor Problem,” Social Text 18 no. 2 (Summer 2000): 1-31.

Oct. 13: Literature

*Rita Felski, The Limits of Critique (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015).

Sianne Ngai, “’A Foul Lump Started Making Promises in My Voice’: Race, Affect, and the

Animated Subject,” American Literature 74 (2002), 571-601.

+Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands: The New Mestiza = la Frontera (San Francisco: Aunt Lute

Books, 2012), 1-23, 77-98.

Oct. 20: Indigeneity

*Audra Simpson, Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life Across the Borders of Settler States

(Durham: Duke University Press, 2014).

Lisa Brooks, The Common Pot: The Recovery of Native Space in the Northeast (Minneapolis:

University of Minnesota Press, 2008), xix-50.

Oct. 27: Space and Place

Nicole Guidotti-Hernandez, Unspeakable Violence: Remapping U.S. and Mexican National

Imaginaries(Durham: Duke University Press, 2011).

+Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (1974), trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford

Blackwell, 1991), 1-67.

Nov. 3: Material Culture

+Igor Kopytoff, “The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as Process,” in Arjun

Appadurai, ed., The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (1986),

64-91.

+Jean Baudrillard, “The System of Collecting,” in John Elsner and Roger Cardinal, eds.,

Culturesof Collecting (London: Reaktion, 1994), 7-24.

+Peter Stallybrass, “Marx’s Coat,” in Patricia Spyer, ed., Border Fetishisms: Material Objects in

Unstable Spaces (New York: Routledge, 1998), 183-207.

Bill Brown, “Reification, Reanimation, and the American Uncanny,” Critical Inquiry 32 (2006):

175-207.

+Caroline Frank, Objectifying China, Imagining America: Chinese Commodities in Early

America(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 1-26, 175-202.

Nov. 10: Performance

Adria Imada, Aloha America: Hula Circuits Through the U.S. Empire(Durham: Duke

UniversityPress, 2012).

+Christopher Breward, The Suit: Form, Function and Style (London: Reaktion Books, 2016),

1-36, 77-112.

Nov. 17: Food

Kyla Wazana Tompkins, Racial Indigestion: Eating Bodies in the 19th Century(New York: New

York University Press, 2012).

Heather Paxson, “Post-Pasteurian Cultures: The Microbiopolitics of Raw-Milk Cheese in the

United States,” Cultural Anthropology 23 (2008): 15-47.

Dec. 1: Science, Medicine, Technology

Susan Reverby, Examining Tuskegee: The Infamous Syphilis Study and its Legacy(Chapel Hill:

University of North Carolina Press, 2009).

Naomi Oreskes, “The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change,” Science,New Series, 306,

no.5702 (Dec. 3, 2004):1686.

Deborah A. Bolnick, et al., “The Science and Business of Genetic Ancestry Testing,” Science,

New Series, 318, no. 5849 (Oct. 19, 2007): 399-400.

December 8: final paper due by 5 pm.

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