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AMERICAN STUDIES GRADUATE COURSE DESCRIPTIONS - SPRING 2010 508.001 Cultural Autobiography T 2:00 - 4:30 ORTG 313 Meléndez (AMST Seminar) Autobiography has proven to be particularly useful to readers and to contemporary literary and cultural theorists alike. In large measure this is due to its capacity to inscribe notions of self and to link these to place and history. It is no surprise that autobiography in our own time has become a preferred form of disclosure for elucidating poli-vocal, and multiple subject positions in American life. In this course I wish to survey the ideologies of self, particularly those that represent a discursive space that is intersected by society, culture and ethnicity. I wish to explore the competing constructions of "frontier" and "border" in the American imagination by drawing on an array of personal narratives which disclose the cultural and ethnic self in the fixity and fluidity of social borders, and in what Mary Louise Pratt has called, "the contact zone". Our study will include reading and analyzing nine or so life narratives. We will also become familiar with current critical theory on autobiography, ethno-criticism, cultural studies as these apply to life writing and life narratives. I am particularly interested in theorizing the conjunction of (auto)ethnography, cultural studies and literary criticism. 510.002 Chicano/a Narrative: The Politics of Style TR 12:30 - 1:45 DSH 327 Alemán This course is offered with ENGL 465, Chicano/a Literature. Usually, a course on ethnic American literature focuses on the social issues that beset marginal groups--identity conflicts; class, racial, and gender troubles; language and education angst; family matters; etc. More rarely do ethnic literature classes focus on the second category--literature. So, this course will consider how Chicana/o writers use experimental forms, genres, and techniques to express cultural and social crises. We'll be reading innovative narratives that bend or break the rules of literary representation to give expression to the complex individual, social, and cultural lives of Mexican Americans. We'll encounter traditional genres turned topsy-turvy; disjointed narratives induced by drug use; vignettes, multiple narrators, and meta-fiction; and political postmodern play in contemporary Chicana/o literature. We'll also view films that synthesize celluloid innovation with identity matters. We'll still consider the cultural pressures that characterize Chicana/o literature, but I hope to foster an understanding of those pressures through an appreciation and analysis of literary style. Probable texts include: Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo; Canícula; The Mixquiahuala Letters; Eulogy for a Brown Angel; The Rain God; The Rag Doll Plagues; and short stories. [There might be some tinkering with text selection between now and the start of the spring semester]. 510.005 US/Middle East Cultural Politics TR 11:00 - 12:15 MITCH 102 Lubin This course is offered with AMST 310.005, US/Middle East Cultural Politics. This course historicizes contemporary United States military and economic involvement in the Middle East by considering the cultural history of U.S./Middle East relations from the mid-19th century to the present. An emergent area of transnational study within American Studies, studies of U.S./Middle East cultural relations are focused on policy, economic, cultural, and affective dimensions. Students will engage the field by analyzing primary documents, reading literature, and viewing visual and popular culture. 520.001 Writing Nature W 1:00 - 3:30 ORTG 313 Norwood/Harrison (AMST Seminar) This collaborative course will investigate several aspects of nineteenth- and twentieth-century nature writing in Britain and the United States. Examining key texts in a variety of genres that negotiate the nineteenth-century turn to nature (the green world), the course will examine the relationship between the natural world and human consciousness under the rubrics of home (place); rural life and gardening; animals and husbandry; pastoral and wilderness; and catastrophe, apocalypse, and futurity. Within and across the historical frames, we will consider how voice and perspective may differ depending on class, gender, and race--as in the case, say, of John Clare and Dorothy Wordsworth, or bell hooks and Wendell Berry. The course will be structured under these rubrics as a dialogue between nineteenth century writers in Britain and the United States and twentieth-century or contemporary writers. Thus, for example, Dorothy Wordsworth, John Clare, Harriet Jacobs, and Susan Fenimore Cooper will be placed into conversation with bell hooks and Wendell Berry; William Cobbett, Mary Collier and Henry David Thoreau, into conversation with Jamaica Kincaid and Leslie Silko. In addition to primary texts, we will read a variety of theoretical, critical, and eco-critical works that place our readings into the aesthetic, social, and historical contexts. Our reading of contemporary texts will consider the extent to which nineteenth-century traditions have been recuperated, modified, or subverted in response to new environmental and social realities. Assignments will involve a reflective journal or several short written assignments, as well as a comparative book review, and either two shorter or one longer paper. 523.001 Environmental Justice W 10:00 - 12:30 ORTG 313 Correia (AMST Seminar) This course is designed as a multicultural/interdisciplinary approach to the study of environmental (in)justice that seeks to define the issue, theoretically and empirically, more broadly than understood in traditional academic work. We will start by building a theoretical foundation that includes: (1) the epistemology and history of social nature and social difference; (2) method in environmental justice work and; (3) the political economy of nature and its intersections with the politics of difference. We use this theoretical foundation to then explore a series of environmental justice case studies that expand the usual theoretical and empirical frames of environmental justice scholarship and activism. 530.002 Post Colonial Queer Theories M 4:00 - 6:30 MVH 2131 Brandzel 540.001 Performance Theory W 3:00 - 5:45 CTRART B434 Herrera This course is offered with THEA 503, Performance Theory. This seminar ventures into the emerging field(s) of performance theory and examines the scholarly work created at the convergence of cultural theory and theories of theatre, dance and performance. The work of the seminar draws extensively from a variety of disciplines in the humanities, arts and social sciences, always considering how - at the intersection of critical inquiry and performance practice - scholars and performing artists alike have theorized performance. 550.001 History & Politics of Public Health R 1:00 - 3:30 ORTG 313 Goldstein (AMST Seminar) This graduate seminar examines the social, economic, and political construction and context of health, illness and public health care in the United States during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. We will focus on how changing normative definitions of health and disease, gender and the body, the nation, and race, ethnicity, and class have shaped our understanding of the health of individuals, specific populations, and "the public," as well as how public health policy is shaped at the intersection of states, markets, and social movements. Course readings will include texts by Nayan Shah, Warwick Anderson, Alexandra Minna Stern, Jennifer Nelson, Esther Yazzie-Lewis, Julie Sze, Jill Quadagno, Maren Klawiter, and João Biehl. 557.001 African American Literature TR 2:00 - 3:15 MVH 4022 Matthews This course is offered with ENGL 566, African American Literature. An introduction to traditional and/or contemporary African American texts. Topics have included Survey of the African American novel and Toni Morrison.
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