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Course Criteria
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3.00 Credits
AMST 30050 America in the 21st Century at UCD; This course explores the political, cultural and social issues that shape the contemporary United States. Key themes include: the end of the Cold War and the reshaping of domestic politics and foreign policy; 9/11 and responses to terrorism; the "culture wars;" the impact of religious fundamentalism on American culture and politics; and the effects of new media technologies on cultural production. The sources of our analysis will include foreign policy documents, political campaign ads and debates, photographs, music, movies, television reportage and internet sources.
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3.00 Credits
ENG 30590 Post-War American Fiction at UCD; This course will introduce students to a selection of post-World War II US fiction, and will analyse these works as representations of and responses to conflicts- both beyond the borders of the United States and within US society and culture itself. The course will examine war as a historical event and cultural trope in this period, and will encourage students to consider the possibilities and limitations of such a model for discussions of US culture in this period. Topics and themes to be addressed will include the aftermath of World War II and US national culture; the Cold War and the postmodern novel; trauma, narrative and cultural memory; representations of race, ethnicity and gender in the wake of the Civil Rights Movement and the Women's Movement; media, mediation and popular culture. Listed in AMST course catalog as English 40739
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3.00 Credits
At a meeting in 2003, R. Allen Stanford, accused multibillion-dollar Ponzi embezzler and president of Stanford International Bank, is said to have taken a "blood-oath" with the chief regulator of his Antiguan bank. When news of this oath broke in the fall of 2009 Stanford joined Bernard Madoff in the league of the most undignified "gentlemen" in American culture. Like Madoff, Stanford had committed a "capital crime" which robbed many and riveted the nation's attention. Like Stanford and many another "capital" criminals (Al Capone comes to mind), until his arrest Madoff enjoyed the welcome of society's elite and was generally regarded as a celebrity. "Capital Crimes" is thus about American culture's love affair with money. The course begins with Mark Twain's blistering satire The Gilded Age and moves through the current economic crises - which some critics like Paul Krugman and Kevin Phillips have referred to as coming at the tail end of America's second Gilded Age. Twain's satire was aptly called "A Tale of Today." In looking over the time between the two Gilded Ages, this course will try to construct a coherent account of the uneasy relationship between the period's major literary figures and its political and mercantile elite. We'll see if and how writers and artists who set themselves up as the voices of culture often share much in common with political and business leaders - both a Ponzi scheme and a political campaign are after all "fictions in progress" which require an audience and a fairly complete willing suspension of disbelief. In looking over material drawn from literature, film, television, news media, politics, and academia we'll try to measure the personal and cultural benefits and consequences associated with American culture's embrace of money, its hagiographic celebration of the CEO, its adoration of celebrity culture, and its elevation of the market as an idol.
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3.00 Credits
The techniques of nonfiction writing from the basic journalistic news story to the magazine feature to the personal essay. Students will complete a wide range of assignments and also discuss examples of various kinds of nonfiction prose.
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3.00 Credits
A historical and thematic account of the rise and achievement of African-American authors over several centuries.
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3.00 Credits
American War Literature is multifaceted, highly charged with personal agonies and national interrogations. Viewed as a broad field, these texts offer opportunities for diverse research into national ideology, the views and interpretations of the enemy, the accounts of interior conflicts, and the historical moments that shape these tales. How should we read works that contemplate collective and individual violence? What kinds of analysis and historical recovery bring us to points of understanding and meaning? Our panoramic explorations will include the canonically familiar such as Mary Rowlandson's captivity narrative; the Civil War poetry of Whitman and Melville, and The Red Badge Of Courage by Stephen Crane; the more recent such as Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse- Five, and Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried; and the ongoing such as writings from the wars in Iraq. Our texts will serve as entry points for aesthetic, historical, and theoretical studies aimed at illuminating the functions and values of war writing in the United States. This course will require several short papers, a long final essay, and active student participation.
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3.00 Credits
An examination of poetry and poetics by black Americans from the beginnings to the present. Formal attention concerning the aesthetics of poetry is considered within their historical and intellectual contexts. Poets include Phillis Wheatley, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Claude McKay, Langston Hughes, Robert Hayden, Gwendolyn Brooks, LeRoi Jones, Audre Lorde, Michael Harper, Yusef Komunyakaa, and Rita Dove.
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3.00 Credits
Using concepts of tragedy as a linking principle, this course reads several Shakespearean plays and then Moby Dick, noting Shakespeare's influence on the American novelist.
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3.00 Credits
A look at what makes a film American. The course will be structured by pairing films from the "classic" period with films from the more recent past in order to highlight essential features, particularly genre characteristics, the work of directors, and the performance of "stars." Possible films: It Happened One Night, French Kiss, The Lady Eve, Double Indemnity, Body Heat, Basic Instinct, Zero Effect, Shane, Unforgiven, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Die Hard, The Godfather, Bound, Silence of the Lambs, Crimes and Misdemeanors, Don Juan de Marco, Moulin Rouge, Crash, The Hours, The Maltese Falcon and others.
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3.00 Credits
This course will explore life writings and issues of self-representation in the African-American expressive cultural tradition from 1850 to 1905. This course is concerned with the concept of citizenship, its implied universalism, and the necessity of critiquing this universalism that maintains a unified notion of democracy.
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