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Course Criteria
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0.00 Credits
Certain films will be viewed for further discussion in class.
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3.00 Credits
Examining monographs, novels, film, photography, poetry, government records, and court cases, we will explore a variety of immigrant groups and time periods - from the Irish of the mid-19th century to Jamaicans, Mexicans, and the Vietnamese today. We will focus on questions of identity - how immigrants have come to understand themselves racially and ethnically over time - and questions of power - where immigrants have been located within America's developing racial order and what difference this has made in their everyday lives-their jobs, homes, families, and opportunities.
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3.00 Credits
The purpose of this seminar is to examine the conditions of extreme poverty and homelessness within the broader context of American culture and society. In order to confront the nature of these conditions, this seminar will draw upon insights from history, literature, documentary film and photography, and the social sciences. We will focus on the degree of permanence and change in our approach to both traditional and modern forms of the social problem. There will be an experiential component to the seminar as well.
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3.00 Credits
This seminar analyzes dominant American beliefs about the significance of race and gender primarily through the focusing lens of the experiences of women of color in the U.S. How did intersecting ideologies of race and gender attempt to define and limit the lives of women of color as well as other Americans? How have women of color responded to and reinterpreted white American ideas about their identity to develop their own self-defenses and ideologies?
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3.00 Credits
A seminar exploring how historians, archaeologists, art historians, folklorists, geographers, and cultural anthropologists use material culture as important evidence in interpreting the American historical and contemporary experience. Research fieldwork in area museums and historical agencies such as the Snite Museum, the Northern Indiana Center For History, National Studebaker Museum, and Copshaholm/Oliver Mansion will be part of the seminar.
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3.00 Credits
A comparative survey of the multiple histories of several natural and human-made environments created in America from the New England common to the Los Angeles freeway. Using specific cases studies, the course will analyze sites such as the Mesa Verde pueblo, Rockefeller Center, the southern plantation, the midwest Main Street, the prairie-style residence, the Brooklyn Bridge, New Harmony (Indiana), US Route 40, the American college campus, Pullman (Illinois), the skyscraper, Spring Grove Cemetery (Cincinnati), the Victorian suburb, Grand Central Station, Golden Gate Park, Coney Island, Yosemite National Park, Chautauqua (New York), and the 1939 New York World's Fair.
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3.00 Credits
This seminar will reexamine Jack Kerouac and his prose in relation to Beat subculture and the larger context of post World War II American culture and society. Along the way, we¿ll challenge the codification of Kerouac as ¿King of the Beats¿ and advance the notion that he was a prose artist on a spiritual quest. Or, as Ginsberg aptly put it¿an ¿American lonely Prose Trumpeter of drunken Buddha Sacred Heart.¿ Also, the work of other Beat writers and figures, such as Allen Ginsberg, Joyce Johnson, and Gary Snyder, will be considered. Finally, in order to trace the development of the Beat influence, we¿ll examine Bob Dylan and his songs as the representation of sixties¿ social consciousness and expressive individualism.
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3.00 Credits
This course takes students beyond the basics of reporting the news to work on longer journalistic projects and the editing process involved in completing more extended features and pieces of analysis. Students will review assignments completed for the class and act as editors to make suggestions for improving individual efforts. Several projects will make up the principal work of the semester.
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3.00 Credits
This course traces the social changes that accompanied America's movement from early retailing to a full-blown consumer culture. Beginning with representations from the later part of the nineteenth century, particularly of the development of Chicago as a mail order capital of the world and moving into the present through an examination of television shopping networks, this course will use material from a variety of perspectives and disciplines to examine what became a wholesale transformation of American life. In attempting to trace the trajectory of change from a country often identified by its rural isolation to a country of relentless publicity, from the farm to Paris Hilton, (who returned to The Simple Life), we will look at a series of linkages each of which played a specific and contributory role in the cultural shift toward a fully saturated consumerism. For instance, the early mail order catalogue empires of Aaron Montgomery Ward and Richard Warren Sears depended on the capacity of the railroad and postal service to transport their goods from shopping catalogues to country kitchens, goods which went beyond kitchen utensils, clothes, ornaments and shoes to include assembly-ready homes. South Bend has several Sears and Roebuck homes, and part of our class time will be spent in looking at these houses in the context of the course themes. All of our discussion will take place against the backdrop of a larger question about the democratization of desire, about whiter American culture became more or less democratic after the introduction of the mail order catalogue. Thus the linkage between the catalogue, the home shopping network, and the notion that freedom to desire goods is a measure of democratic freedom. Of course, the possibilities for manipulation and control are also limitless.
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3.00 Credits
In viewing any film, we must ask ourselves what the filmmakers want us to think. To answer that question for a specific genre, we will be studying portrayals of 20th century- women in film and how these images have evolved in reaction to, and as a backlash against, the modern feminist movement.
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