Module descriptions – 1st year options
Introduction to American Studies
Autumn core module
What is American Studies? What makes what we do American Studies as opposed to just plain
historical or literary studies? This module will examine the history and development of the discipline
and will explore key debates using an archive of seminal essays by leading figures that highlight key
problems and developments in the field. Issues to be discussed may include: an American ‘tradition’;
interdisciplinarity; popular culture; American ethnicity and race; masculinity and gender; media;
environment and America as ‘global village’.
Roots of America
Autumn core/option module
This module provides a foundational survey of the history, literature, and culture of the United
States (and the colonies which preceded it) to 1900. It begins with the Columbian encounter in 1492,
when two worlds were brought into sharp conflict with each other and continues through English
settlement and colonisation in the seventeenth century to growth, expansion and the articulation of
a specific American identity by the middle of the eighteenth century. It assesses the creation of the
American nation through war with Britain and through the imaginative construction of a new
political relationship between people and government.
We will then proceed to political and cultural formations in the nineteenth-century republic.
Students will focus on why the newly formed nation should ultimately falter on the issue of slavery
and why the concept of the United States and the 'Union' became such contested terms. We will
examine how contested visions of America's future and its 'manifest destiny' cohered and divided
the citizenry, and ultimately ask, as Abraham Lincoln so aptly put it in 1855, 'can we, as a nation,
continue together permanently--forever-half slave, and half free' Our attention subsequently turns
to the mammoth transformations to American life unleashed by the Civil War and Reconstruction;
events, historian James McPherson calls the 'Second American Revolution.' Among the many topics,
we will examine the emergence of a modern activist central government committed, albeit
temporarily, to constitutional protected civil rights; we will address how Americans, in both North
and South, understood the meaning of Union and nation after the carnage of Civil War; and how
industrialists, immigrants, and union activists attempted to shape and influence the rapid growth of
American urban life in the final quarter of the nineteenth century. Finally, we will consider the plight
of black Americans as the promises of emancipation gave way to racial segregation in the South and
the rise of the urban ghetto in the North.
Students will be required to approach these topics from both a historical and a literary perspective,
paying particular attention to formative texts - the writings of John Smith, John Winthrop, Benjamin
Franklin, Thomas Paine, James Fenimore Cooper, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Edgar Allan Poe,
Herman Melville, Henry James, Edith Wharton (among others) will be examined as a distinct
American literary culture evolves in the nineteenth century. That culture--like all social values in the
years preceding Civil War--would split in the North-South divide of the 1850s, but in the final
lectures of the module, students will examine how literary works would ultimately bolster resurgent
American nationalism in the decades following the War. Students will also be encouraged to think
about the imaginative formulation of American identity and American character through
representations of such matters in film.
American Literature to 1890: Part I
Autumn option module
You will be introduced to the major trends and texts of colonial America from the Iroquois Indians
and Christopher Columbus through to Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Paine. These are not simply
'authors,' in the modern sense, writing 'great books' but diverse voices whose class, gender, race,
nationality and religious persuasion influence the sense they make of America, and of themselves, in
their writing. For example, some texts articulate ancient native traditions and myths without the
benefit of a written tradition, while others are trying to come to terms in literary ways with
experiences of migration to an unknown and wild place, captivity by the Indians, conflict, and slavery.
Questions of national identity and the role that literature plays in constructing and communicating
an 'American experience' are therefore central to the module.
We will look at the writing of the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries, beginning with Native American
accounts of creation, the travel journals of Columbus, and an account of the conquest of the Aztec
empire. American literature in this early period does not come in the usual forms of fiction, poetry,
and drama that we are used to studying in European literature, nor is all of it written in English. We
will be reading a variety of forms, such as Native American stories, accounts of conquest in South
America and settlement in the English colonies, Puritan sermons, autobiography, political tracts,
captivity narratives, poetry and letters - some in translation, others in their original English. While
these texts are not all recognisably what you might think of as 'literature,' they are the founding
documents and genres of the Americas and their influence is felt in American culture to the present
day.
American Identities
Autumn option module
'What is an American?' Hector St.John de Crevecoeur asked in the 18th century and that question
has never really gone away. Whether as a self-proclaimed Republic, a slave-holding society, a 'nation
of immigrants', or an imperial world power, America has had to invent and re-invent its identity time
and again, from colonial times to the present. Here we study how different Americans in dfferent
periods have thought, written, and talked about themselves in relation to the nation in
autobiography, poetry, fiction, and film. We will come across contradictory conceptions of American
identity that may surprise us, as well as familiar tropes of optimism, individualism, and pride taken in
achievement.
Historical Controversy (US topic)
Autumn option module
This module introduces you to the study of history through the critical reading of a key historical text.
In this way you will gain an understanding of the complexity of the historical record and an
appreciation of a range of problems associated with the interpretation of evidence. You will also be
made to think about the discipline of history and the nature of historical enquiry. Through a study of
how historians have formulated and deployed their arguments, you will begin to learn to deploy
ideas and to shape your own historical arguments.
Modern America
Spring core module
The early years of the twenty-first century have witnessed the United States achieve unsurpassed
global economic and cultural power. This module assesses the dramatic developments that have
shaped the U.S. during the twentieth century, often described as the 'American century'. We will
explore the transformations in American political and social life as the U.S. achieved economic
supremacy, and extended this power on the world stage. As the nation increased its influence
abroad, of module, it underwent a parallel series of turbulent changes at home. Hence we will also
consider an America seen through the critical (and sometimes not-so-critical) lenses of writers,
artists, commentators and filmmakers as they articulate the tensions and anxieties of modern U.S.
life. The module addresses many social contradictions. The `Roaring Twenties, for example, was a
period of consumerism and cultural experimentation that also gave rise to religious fundamentalism
and Prohibition. Similarly, while the United States government in the 1950s was trying to `keep the
world safe for democracy' in the face of communist expansion, it abused the constitutional liberties
of its own citizens during the McCarthy witch-hunts. Although the country as a whole attained
unprecedented levels of affluence in these years, poverty remained a persistent problem, and
Americans continued to struggle with the repression of women, political dissidents and racial
minorities. A crisis in American liberalism accompanied this proliferation of social and political
protest, primarily due to American involvement in the Vietnam War. We will seek to understand
how this war shaped protest politics, altered the relationship between Americans and the liberal
state, and led to the Conservative resurgence in the 1980s. These events shattered the consensus
belief in a modern America. We will evaluate what it then meant to live in a post-modern America,
and how people adapted the conditions of post-modernity to cope with new and recurrent crises of
difference, inequality, and insecurity. Through lectures that focus on the historical, literary and more
broadly cultural aspects of the modern United States, students will learn to recognise the
importance of cross and interdisciplinary work as they pursue the dynamic relationship between
cultural forms and social, political and economic realities.
The Look of America Spring core/option module
'The Look of America' takes as its premise the notion that ever since the explosion of mass media
and mass society in the industrial age, the United States has taken an increasingly dominant place in
the global visual imagination. This process reached its peak at the beginning of the twentieth century,
America henceforth generating for the world innumerable iconic and hegemonic visual
representations of its own cultural narratives. The task of the module will thus be to 'get behind' and
deconstruct some of the products of this visual field, along with the ideologies and narratives that
sustain and refract them. Hence we begin by introducing students to visual theory, especially as it
applies to the American context, and provide students with the critical tools necessary for the
module. We then locate the period under scrutiny (1860 - 2000/2001) within a broader visual and
cultural 'prehistory', illuminating the roots of the modern world and its visual scene. After this, the
module concentrates more particularly on the culture of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Following a more or less thematic pattern, 'The Look of America' examines the issues that emerge
over the module of the twentieth century, referring forwards and backwards in order to generate
connections where appropriate (for example, linking the FSA projects to Matthew Brady's Civil War
photographs). The intention here is to introduce students to aspects of visual culture and its criticism
as well as to defamiliarise and explore some of the more familiar American iconography surrounding
us.
American Literature to 1890: Part II
Spring option module
American Literature to 1890 II introduces you to the major trends and texts of a multi-ethnic
America from Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper to Emily Dickinson and Henry James.
These are not simply 'authors', in the modern sense, writing 'great books', but diverse voices
constructed by class, gender, race, nationality and religious persuasion. Some texts articulate ancient
native traditions and myths, others come to terms in writing with experiences of migration, captivity,
conflict, and slavery. Central to the module are questions of national identity, and the role that
literature plays in both constructing and communicating an 'American experience'.
American Humour
Spring option module
Humour is probably among the most approachable of ways to introduce first year students to core
issues in American Studies, and one of the most telling. Jewish humour, for example, which clearly
informs, say, the films of the Marx Brothers, Heller's Catch-22,or the TV comedy of Seinfeld, can
teach us much about the history and culture of immigration and assimilation so integral to American
identity. Likewise, African-American comedians from the 70s to the 90s exemplify a particular,
'signifying' tradition, in Henry Louis Gates' phrase, as well as providing comment on the politics of
the day. Or we might view the relationship between American economy and culture - a grand
narrative of the twentieth century - as dramatised in the Fordist dystopias of Chaplin, the Southern
Gothic of Flannery O'Connor and the acceleration from post-war boom in Thomas Pynchon to the
vision of Wall Street excess in Ellis' American Psycho. In all these cases, humour provides both
spectator or readerly pleasure and a form in which a more covert critique takes place, making it an
invaluable mode for students to experience and consider key cultural and historical questions.
Incorporating literature, film, TV, live performance and visual art, the module will thus address the
social, political and philosophical issues each topic raises and the context from which it has sprung,
from the 19th century 'Connecticut wits' to more recent 'gross-out' comedy. By way of materials, an
on-line module reader will be made available to students composed of a number of readable essays
on the theory of humour as well as selected essays more directly relating to each specific topic
and/or work. Interdisciplinary in nature, the module will hence encourage students to investigate
how ideas about humour can work with other texts to become forms of critical thinking: Bergson's
notion of comedic automatism, for example, read alongside accounts of the factory system can
illuminate Keaton or Chaplin's cinematic commentary on the fate of the American industrial worker.
Through such connections, students will be introduced to influential writers like Bergson and Freud
in an accessible fashion and find ways to apply and adapt their ideas in the wider cultural field.