Students
will be able to synthesize an interdisciplinary dialogue among the different
disciplinary methodologies that compose American studies investigation of
American culture across time and space in the history, politics, literature,
and arts of the peoples of the United States, as well as the Americas. Students will be able to write well;
speak articulately; and think critically, analytically, and creatively.
Majors will also be able to complete a basic bibliography in American studies;
demonstrate an understanding of texts such as Benjamin Franklin's
Autobiography, The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Du
Bois' The Souls of Black Folk, Jean de Crèvecoeur's Letters from an American
Farmer, A Narrative of the Captivity and Restauration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson,
Frederick Jackson Turner's "Frontier Thesis," and Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle
Tom's Cabin, as well as Herman Melville's Moby Dick, "The Declaration of
Independence," "The Declaration of Sentiments," "The Gettysburg Address"; discuss a Jackson Pollack painting, a
landscape painting, a Walker Evans' photograph, an Emily Dickinson poem; analyze a scene from Orson Welles's
Citizen Kane; explain patterns in
popular music; and discuss the
evolution of radio, television, and the internet.
Majors will be able to work with evidence drawn from such sources as
political rhetoric, visual or material culture, film, television, music,
advertising, journalism, ethnography, autobiography, congressional testimony,
economic and demographic statistics, diaries, and letters; use and understand
key terms and concepts such as cultural hegemony, politics of culture, the
social construction of race, the social consequences of cultural concerns, the
nation as an imagined entity; conditions under which media is produced and
consumed; and use categories of race, class, gender, and ethnicity for social
and cultural analysis. Majors will
be able to conduct individual research in American studies and honors students
will be able to perform and present original research.
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