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Course Criteria
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3.00 Credits
This class will focus on how print and broadcast journalists work--how they think and act as well as the dilemmas they face in delivering news, analysis, and commentary. Several sessions will be devoted to presentations by visiting correspondents, editors, and producers, explaining their approaches to specific stories and circumstances. In addition, students will discuss the issues and questions raised in a few books.
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3.00 Credits
What does it mean to be male or female in America? Where did our ideas about gender come from and how do they influence our lives, institutions, values, and cultures? In this course we will begin by reviewing colonial and Victorian gender systems in the U.S. Our focus, however, is the twentieth century, and the development of modern (early 20th century) and contemporary (post 1970s) gender roles and ideas. How much have they changed over time and what aspects have been retained? We will explore the ways that cultural images, political changes, and economic needs have shaped the definition of acceptable behavior and life choices based on sex and gender. We will also pay close attention to the roles that race, class, culture, sexuality, marital status and other key factors play in determining male and female roles, and influencing images of femininity and masculinity.
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3.00 Credits
Jane Jacobs wrote in The Death and Life of Great American Cities that all cities are governed by a marvelous and complex order. This order, she said, is composed of movement and change; and though it is life, not art, we may call it the form of the city, and liken it to the dance. "The City in American Culture" looks closely at the origins and continuation of that dance as it analyzes some of the forces that have shaped and continue to shape America's cities and their surrounding metropolitan areas. The course will center on a number of literary and nonliterary texts and be guided by a series of questions such as: Does urbanization thrive on a culture of poverty? Are twentieth-century gated communities a continuation of the brownstone mansion? Does the American Dream require vivid urban poverty? Is there such a thing as enough? Who lives in cities today? How are societal changes and the goals of urban development rewriting the role of cities? How has gentrification and evolving patterns of metropolitanism/cosmopolitanism effected the modern city and its composite neighborhoods. Why and how do cities compete for target communities such as arts, gay/lesbian, minority, young, urban, and professional? The course will have a written, research, and a practical/experiential component.
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3.00 Credits
Drawing upon critical work in history, cultural studies, and American studies, this course will explore the history and meanings of the U.S.-Mexican border since 1848. We will pay special attention to American popular culture (located in film, literature, art, music, and even dime novels) to understand the myriad "often contradictory" roles that the border has played in the popular imagination of the United States.
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3.00 Credits
This course surveys gender and American Catholicism, focusing on the following themes: the role of religious belief and practice in shaping Catholics' understanding of gender differences; gender in the context of family and religious life; masculinity, sport, and American culture; embodiment; gender, education, and work; gender and sainthood; and Catholicism and feminism. The class format will involve discussion of assigned primary and secondary sources, supplemented by occasional background lectures. We will take several field trips, including a visit to the Notre Dame Archives for a presentation on Catholic material culture, a tour of the Basilica of the Sacred Heart to enhance our understanding of church architecture and devotional life before the Second Vatican Council, an evening at South Bend's Catholic Worker House, and a visit to Catholic Chicago, an interactive exhibit at the Chicago History Museum.
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3.00 Credits
This is the first of a two-semester senior seminar in oral history theory and methods. By surveying the current field, students will learn how oral history is uniquely suited to both contribute to historical knowledge and challenge dominant narratives. The final project will prepare students to engage in collecting oral histories during the spring semester if they register in Oral History 2: Practicum.
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3.00 Credits
Few figures in American history have so defined the nation as the millionaire. For good or bad, the millionaire has been an object of equally intense scrutiny and fascination. This course will examine the role of the millionaire from several disciplinary perspectives. In the fiction of writers such as Wharton, Fitzgerald, Steinbeck, and DeLillo the millionaire is an object of envy, intrigue, fear, and even contempt. In looking at the millionaire historically, we will devote special attention to the Gilded Age with its "robber barons" such as Andrew Carnegie, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Jay Gould, and John D. Rockefeller; figures whose industry, dedication to the making of money, and greed also fueled the establishment of vast charitable enterprises that helped define American culture. With A.G. Gaston's biography, Black Titan, we will look at the complex and historically unequal relationship between race and wealth attainment in American culture. In politics, we will pay special attention to Theodore Roosevelt who harbored a deep suspicion of inherited wealth and questioned whether or not the "virtuous republic" could sustain the presence and efforts of so many men of "inherited wealth." In contemporary society, we will try to understand how the celebrity millionaire - i.e., Donald Trump, Paris Hilton, Ivan Boesky, Martha Stewart, and the Wall Street/ Hedge Fund Manager millionaire--has become a celebrated (and now vilified) cultural icon. And finally, we'll examine the current credit crisis in the context of America's love of money, conspicuous consumption, and belief that anyone can become a millionaire. Students will write a series of short papers, a longer research paper, make class presentations, and take a final exam.
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3.00 Credits
This course will survey the history of representations of Latinos in American cinema from the silent era to the present. We will examine how stereotypes associated with Latinos have been produced, reinforced, and challenged in American films - from greasers and Latin lovers to gangsters, kingpins, and border crossers. We will explore the fascinating contradiction that, despite a long history of misrepresentation and under representation, Latinos have made significant contributions to Hollywood and independent cinema. We will also examine the rise of Latino directors in recent years and their drive to reframe the Latino image for American audiences. Screenings will range from the silent epic Martyrs of the Alamo (1915) to more recent films such as Maria Full of Grace (2004). Our interdisciplinary approach to the subject will draw upon readings from history, film theory and criticism, and ethnic/American studies. Students will take a midterm exam and make class presentations.
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3.00 Credits
This seminar will re-examine Kerouac and his prose in relation to Beat subculture and the larger context of post-World War II American society. Although the work of other Beat writers such as Allen Ginsberg, Joyce Johnson, and Gary Snyder will be considered, the primary focus will be on Kerouac. Moreover, the seminar will question the cultural 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." 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
Since 1850 Roman Catholics have constituted the single largest religious denomination in the United States. This course explores what the presence of Catholics has meant for the American experience, focusing on themes of church/state separation, religion and politics, education, and social reform. We will also examine how the American context has transformed the practice of Catholicism, with attention to ethnicity, gender, region, race and class as variables that have shaped the American Catholic experience. Assigned readings range from excerpts of anti-Catholic publications to first-hand accounts written by American Catholics from the colonial period to the present. In addition we will study the representation of Catholics in American film, themes of Catholic fiction, material culture relating to Catholic devotional life and the sacraments, and the shifting position of American Catholics in the universal Roman Catholic Church.
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