The American Culture Syllabus
Smyth
Lectures Friday 12-1 H3.03 and seminars the following Tuesday 10-11 and 11-12,
locations: S1.141 in term 1, H0.01 in term 2, and H3.22 in term 3. Screenings
occasionally on Wednesdays 2-4pm in S0.17.
1. Introduction: Frank Sinatra and American Culture
Suggested: Leo Marx, “American Studies: A Defence of an Un-Scientific Method,”
New Literary History I:1 (1969): 75-90. And I like Warren Susman, Culture as
History: The Transformation of American Society in the Twentieth Century (1984)
and Robert and Helen Lynd, Middletown (1929) for background for term 1. The
Antonio Gramsci Reader, ed. David Forgacs (New York, 2000) offers interesting
perspectives, as well as Raymond Williams’ standard Keywords (1976) and
Television: Technology and Cultural Form (1974)
Fall: 1876-1929
2. The Immigrants
See Charles Chaplin, The Tramp (1915) and The Immigrant (1917)
Read: Gilbert Seldes, “I am Here To-Day: Charlie Chaplin,” (1924/57); Charles
Musser, “Work, Ideology and Chaplin’s Tramp” in Resisting Images: Essays on
Cinema and History (1990)
3. America, Incorporated
Read: Thomas Zeiler, “Basepaths to Empire: Race and the Spalding World Baseball
Tour,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 6:2 (2007): 179-207.
Suggested additional: Alan Trachtenberg, The Incorporation of America (1982)
4. Virginians and Dudes: Selling the West
Read: Jane Kuenz, “The Cowboy Businessman and ‘The Course of Empire’: Owen
Wister's "The Virginian," Cultural Critique 48 (2001): 98-128.
Suggested: Owen Wister, The Virginian (1902)
5. Yellow Journalism, Relativists, and Social Critique
See Citizen Kane (1941)
Read: Carl Becker, “Detachment and the Writing of History,” Atlantic Monthly
(1910) and Viviane Serafaty, “Passionate Intensity: Political Blogs and the American
Journalistic Tradition,” Journal of American Studies 45: 2 (2011): 303-316.
6. Reading Week
7. The New Woman
Watch It (1927)
Read: Nan Enstad, “Dressed for Adventure: Working Women and Silent Movie
Serials,” 21: 1 (1995): 67-90. Suggested: Kathy Peiss, Cheap Amusements: Working
Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York (1986)
8. Black Masks and Pulp Fiction
Sean McCann, “Constructing Race Williams: The Klan and the Making of HardBoiled Crime Fiction,” American Quarterly 49: 4 (1997): 677-716. Suggested:
Dashiell Hammett, Red Harvest (1929)
9. Vaudeville and Theatrical Cultures
M. Alison Kibler, “Rank Ladies, Ladies of Rank,” American Studies, vol. 38, no. 1
(spring, 1997): 97-115. Suggested: M. Alison Kibler, Rank Ladies: Gender and
Cultural Hierarchy in American Vaudeville (2009); Eric Lott, Love and Theft,
Blackface Milstrelsy and the American Working Class (rev. 2013)
10. Tramps, Vamps, and Gangsters
Read: J. E. Smyth, Revisioning Modern History in the Age of Scarface,” Historical
Journal of Film, Radio, and Television 24:4 (2004): 535-63; Marybeth Hamilton,
“Mae West Live: Sex, The Drag, and 1920s Broadway,” TDR 36:4 (1992):82-100.
Suggested: Gilbert Seldes, The Seven Lively Arts (1928); Fred Pasley, Al Capone:
Biography of a Self-Made Man (1930)
Winter: 1930-1985
11. Documenting the Depression
Read: Chris Vials, “The Popular Front in the American Century: ‘Life’ Magazine,
Margaret Bourke-White, and Consumer Realism, 1936-41,” American Periodicals 16:
1 (2006): 74-102. See also Michael Denning, The Cultural Front (1997); Studs
Terkel, Hard Times (rev. 2005).
12. The Legend of Dorothy Thompson
See Woman of the Year (1942)
read: Lynn Gordon, “Why Dorothy Thompson Lost Her Job: Political Columnists and
the Press Wars of the 1930s and 1940s,” History of Education Quarterly 34:3 (1994):
281-303.
13. Wartime Censorship and the Zoot Suit
Jennifer Frost, “Dissent and Consent in the ‘Good War’: Hedda Hopper, Hollywood
Gossip and World War II Isolationism,” Film History (2010): 170-181; Elizabeth
Escobedo, “The Pachuca Panic: Sexual and Cultural Battlegrounds in World War II
Los Angeles,” The Western Historical Quarterly 38:2 (2007): 133-56. See Clayton
Koppes and Gregory Black, Hollywood Goes to War (1990); Catherine Ramirez, The
Woman in the Zoot Suit (2009) if you want more.
14. The Organization Man
read: Jesse Berrett, “Feeding the Organization Man: Diet and Masculinity in Postwar
America,” Journal of Social History 30:4 (1997): 805-825; R.C. Lutz, “On the Road
to Nowhere?: California’s Car Culture,” California History 79: 1 (2000): 50-55.
Suggested: William Whyte, The Organization Man (1956).
15. The Second Wave and Intimate Revolts
Read Shira Tarrant, “When Sex Became Gender: Mirra Komarovsky's Feminism of
the 1950s,” Women Studies Quarterly 33:3/4 (2005): 334-55; Ann McGrath, “Being
Annie Oakley,” Frontiers 28: 1/2 (2007): 203-31. Suggested: Susan Douglas, Where
the Girls Are (1995)
16. Reading Week
17. Lenny Bruce: Underground
Listen to all of Bruce on YouTube.
Ioan Davies, “Lenny Bruce: Hyperrealism and the Death of Jewish Tragic Humor,”
Social Text 22 (1989): 92-114. See David Kaufman, Jewhooing the Sixties (2012).
18. The Revolution Will Not Be Televized
Watch Shaft (1971)
Read: V.P. Franklin, “Jackanapes: Reflections on the Legacy of the Black Panther
Party for the HipHop Generation,” Journal of African American History 92: 4 (2007):
553-60; Winston A Van Horne, “The Concept of Black Power: Its Continued
Relevance,” Journal of Black Studies 37:3 (2007): 365-89. See also Bobby Seale,
Seize the Time (1996)
19. States of Decay
Watch Three Days of the Condor (1973)
Gillian Frank, “Discophobia: Antigay Prejudice and the 1979 Backlash against
Disco,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 16:2 (2007): 276-306; Mark Meister and
Ann Burnett, “Rhetorical Exclusion in the Trial of Leonard Peltier,” American Indian
Quarterly 28: 3/4 (2004): 719-42.
19. Star Wars Generation
Read: Roddey Reid, “Foucault in America: Biography, Culture War, and the New
Consensus,” Cultural Critique 35 (1996-1997): 179-211; Jennifer Holt, “In
Deregulation We Trust: The Synergy of Politics and Industry in Reagan Era
Hollywood,” Film Quarterly 55:2 (2001): 22-29. See: Michael Rogin, Ronald
Reagan, The Movie, and Other Episodes in Political Demonology (1988)
Spring: 1986-2000
1. Postmodern America from Jameson to Madonna
Read: Darren Jorgensen, “Death Star, Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love
Globalization,” symploke 15: 1/2 (2007): 206-217; Stephen Brown et al., Teaching
Old Brands New Tricks: Retro Branding and the Revival of Brand Meaning,” Journal
of Marketing 67:3 (2003): 19-33. See Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The
Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1990)
2. SoCal and the Erasure of History
Watch Chinatown (1974)
Dydia Delyser, “Ramona Memories: Fiction, Tourist Practices, and Placing the Past
in Southern California,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 93:4
(2003): 886-908; Madeline Y. Hsu, “ ‘Smoke and Mirrors’: Conditional Inclusion,
model Minorities, and the Pre-1965 Dismantling of Asian Exclusion,” Journal of
American Ethnic History 34: 4 (2015): 443-65.
3. Revision