Seminars
Spring 2010
311/ENG 357 Uncreative Writing
Kenneth Goldsmith
It's clear that long-cherished notions of creativity are under attack, eroded by file-sharing, media culture, widespread sampling, and digital replication. How does writing respond to this new environment? This workshop will rise to that challenge by employing strategies of appropriation, replication, plagiarism, piracy, sampling, plundering, as compositional methods. Along the way, we'll trace the rich history of forgery, frauds, hoaxes, avatars, and impersonations spanning the arts, with a particular emphasis on how they employ language. We'll see how the modernist notions of chance, procedure, repetition, and the aesthetics of boredom dovetail with popular culture to usurp conventional notions of time, place, and identity, all as expressed linguistically.
321 (AAS 323) The Black Melting Pot: Interrogating Race, Difference, and Identity
Imani Perry, Center for African American Studies
As the demographics of Blacks in America change, we are compelled to re-think the dominant stories of who African Americans are, and from whence they come. In this seminar, we will explore the deep cultural, genealogical, national origin, regional, and class-based diversity of people of African descent in the United States. Materials for the course will include scholarly writings as well as memoir and fiction. In addition to reading assignments, students will be expected to complete an ethnographic or oral history project based upon research conducted within a Black community in the U.S., and a music or visual art based presentation of work.
332 (THR 331) Performance and Politics in the 1960s (Special Topics in Performance History and Theory)
Stacy Wolf, Program in Theater
This course will explore performance of the 1960s U.S. – from mainstream, Broadway theatres to the avant-garde to political theatres – in the context of the social, cultural, and intellectual politics of the decade. We’ll consider production practices and intentions, “texts” both scripted and unscripted, and reception, both critical and popular. Our goal will be to construct a complex and nuanced “thick description” of performance and politics of this volatile period, while also questioning the value and limitations of decade-oriented historiography.
336/AAS 344 Asian American History in a Global Context
J. Emmanuel Raymundo, African American Studies
This course will explore Asian American history in a global context. This goal has three investigative foundations. First, we will examine the roots of Asian migration and settlement to the United States. What were the historical and economic parameters through which Asians migrated to the U.S.? Consequently, we will examine the various legal processes by which Asians became Americans. How does the category of Asian American reconfigure ideas about ethnicity, race and nation? Furthermore, as we examine the roots of the category Asian American, we will also investigate the rise of Asian American Studies as an academic and cultural movement. Looking at the nation and the diaspora, looking both inside and outside of the United States, this course investigates the registers through which we can understand “Asian American” identity.
344 Suburban Nation: The Rise and Sprawl of Modern American Suburbs
Kevin Kruse, Department of History
This seminar will explore the many meanings of suburbia in modern American history. First, we will examine the onset of the urban crisis and the attendant rise of suburbia as an attractive alternative for many. We will then focus on the ways in which the movement to suburbs intersected with the civil rights movement. Finally, we will examine how a diverse array of social and political movements of the postwar era – from liberal causes like feminism and environmentalism to the mobilization of modern conservatism – sprang from suburbia.
353/ENG 355 Moby-Dick Unbound
William Howarth, Department of English, Emeritus
This seminar undertakes a close reading of Moby-Dick (1851), often acclaimed as the greatest American novel. Why was this story of a tragic sea voyage so neglected in its day, and so celebrated by later generations? To explore its twin lines of action—Ahab’s drive to kill a white whale versus Ishmael’s quest to know it—we use the methods of history, literature, art, religion, economics, philosophy, and ecology. Of special interest are the ways Melville anticipates recent environmental thought, depicts a globalized culture, and dramatizes the national struggle to reconcile faith and fact, race and justice.
358 (ENG 358 / WOM 358) Desirous Plots: Queer Narrative and US Popular Culture
Ricardo Montez, Society of Fellows and Department of English
This course will examine queer narrative production in literature and visual culture alongside the historical development of queer studies in the United States. Moving between novels, art, and film, the course explores multiple strategies for communicating and enacting queer desire. The material of the course positions queer studies as being in conversation with, yet distinct from, gay and lesbian studies. Students will not simply look to narratives involving same-sex desire but will be asked to consider reading and writing practices that challenge the limitations and normative impulses of gay and lesbian politics.
372 (AAS 372 / ART 374) Postblack
Chika Okeke-Agulu, Department of Art & Archaeology; Center for African American Studies
Chika Okeke-Agulu, Department of Art & Archaeology; Center for African American Studies
As articulated by Thelma Golden, Post-black refers to the work of African-American artists who emerged in the 1990s with ambitious, irreverent, and sassy work. Though hard to define, “Postblack” suggested the emergence of a generation of artists removed from the long tradition of black affirmation of the Harlem Renaissance, black empowerment of the Black Arts movement, and identity politics of the 1980s and early 90s. This seminar provides an opportunity for a deep engagement with the work of African American artists of the past decade. It will involve critical and theoretical readings on multiculturalism, race, identity and contemporary art.
375/ ART 375 Defining Moments in American Culture
John Wilmerding, Department of Art and Archaeology, Emeritus
A focused look at three key turning points in American history: 1800, 1850, and 1900. The course will study selected expressions in art, politics, literature, and science or technology to see how they embody national aspirations or anxieties of each period. Two continuing themes will receive special attention: the consciousness of self and of nature in American culture.
401 At Home in New Jersey
Bill Gleason and Hendrik Hartog
A team-taught seminar designed as a capstone course for AMS concentrators, intended to offer students who have already been introduced to themes in American Studies an opportunity to work at a more sophisticated and advanced level than has been the case previously in the Program. The course will reflect on how various Americans have constructed worlds – spatial worlds as well as worlds of meaning – in and on this little place, this state where we live. To paraphrase Karl Marx, we are interested both in how we have produced our own varying and diverse histories in New Jersey and, at the same time, how and why we produced those histories on “terrain not of our own choosing,” on a New Jersey that shaped us, even as it was shaped by us.
Fall 2009
(**Please note: AMS 341 and 351 are not being offered in Fall 2009. AMS 462 is now open to enrollment.)
201 American Places: An Introduction to American Studies
William Gleason, Department of English
Ricardo Montez, Society of Fellows, Department of English
An interdisciplinary introduction to the materials and methods of American Studies, focusing on the significance of place in U.S. history, society, and culture. We will look at place through several interpretive lenses, including social history, environmental studies, and cultural studies. For Fall 2009, the course will focus on four iconic cities: Los Angeles, New York, Detroit, and San Antonio. Specific topics may include: colonial contact zones; race and the built environment; migration and labor; music and citizenship. Texts and contexts will be equally wide-ranging, drawing on film, photography, architecture, history, music, and fiction.
301 Listening In: Sound, Music, Noise, and Technology In American History
Emily Thompson, Department of History
Emily Thompson, Department of History
This American Studies seminar explores the historical meaning of sound, music, and noise in American culture, and examines how new sonic technologies shape, and are shaped by, the values of the cultures that produce them. Topics range from the sonic characterization of Native Americans by European colonists, to the transformation of musical culture through digital technologies like the iPod. We will consider sound on slave plantations, in modern cities, in cinemas and shopping malls. We will examine how -- in all these places -- people’s lives were shaped by what they heard.
323/JDS 323/ REL 394 America in Judaism
Rabbi Lance Sussman, Visiting Professor, Department of Religion
Although the idea of an “American Judaism” emerged in the early decades of the nineteenth century, scholars have yet to define this concept in precise terms and explain how it differs from a simpler historical understanding of “Judaism in America.” Our seminar will examine the Americanization of Judaism beginning with earliest transplanted Iberian concepts of Judaism in the “new world” to the transformation of Jewish religious life in the United States. Special attention will be paid to Jewish theology, the rabbinate, gender, denominationalism and the polity of the American synagogue.
324 American Trials, American Stories
Clayton Marsh, Office of the General Counsel, Department of English
This seminar will examine how high-profile trials produce competing “stories” in the courtroom (and beyond) that reveal and shape fundamental conflicts and aspirations in American culture. We will study, for example, the Boston “massacre” trials (1770), the trial of John Brown (1859), the Scopes “monkey” trial (1925), the Rosenberg espionage trial (1951) and the O.J. Simpson murder trial (1995) as highly charged spectacles that divided Americans along socio-economic, religious, political and racial lines. Readings will include trial transcripts and historical materials as well as literary and other artistic responses to these events. Particular attention will be given to the narrative strategies and theatrical arts of trial advocacy.
350 (WWS 325) Civil Society and Public Policy
Stanley N. Katz, Woodrow Wilson School
Civil society is the arena of voluntary organizations (churches, social welfare organizations, sporting clubs) and communal activity. Scholars now tell us that such voluntary and cooperative activities create “social capital” – a stock of mutual trust that forms the glue that holds society together. The course will be devoted to the study of the history of these concepts, and to the analysis of their application to the United States and other societies. This will be an interdisciplinary effort, embracing history, philosophy, anthropology, sociology and other disciplines.
356 (AAS 356) Migration, Urban Space, and African-American Culture
Noliwe Rooks, Center for African American Studies
Between 1910 and 1940, African Americans migrated from rural to urban areas. This interdisciplinary course will focus on cultural geography, or how the resulting changes and realignments of place and space shaped American culture and continue to affect understandings of African American identity and culture.
408 (ENG 408) Women in American Theater: Doing Gender, Race, Sexuality-- Onstage and Off
Jill S. Dolan, Department of English; Program in Theater and Dance
This course addresses the history and theory, practice and polemics, of women working in American theater and performance. We’ll concentrate on contemporary examples, but will look at theater’s role in the struggle for women’s visibility advanced by American feminism of the 1960s and ’70s. We’ll study women playwrights, solo performers, collective theatre companies; delve into feminist, queer, critical race, and performance theory; and host many guests currently practicing in the field. Our conversations will be polemic and forward-thinking: What is the future of women’s work in this field?
462 (HIS 462) Life Writing, Writing Lives: Biography, Autobiography and Memoir in Britain and America, c.1700-c.2000
Linda Colley, Department of History
Linda Colley, Department of History
Nicholas Dawidoff, Visiting Professor, Department of English
This course, taught by a historian and a writer, will study signal autobiographical writing in trans-Atlantic comparison, from the master diarist Samuel Pepys, through lives bogus (Robinson Crusoe), stoically female (a Maine midwife), and boyishly on the make (Boswell, Franklin). We will encounter self-consciously marginal Irishmen (Yeats, Joyce) and Southerners (Agee, Welty), the nervous splendor of Bloomsbury (Woolf), the distant battlefields of Vietnam (Herr) and the nearer trenches of family dysfunction (Gosse, Franzen.) Themes include attitudes towards place, faith, work, privacy, intimacy, gender, fame, confession, and self-fashioning.