Because this course contextualizes itself within, at the same time that it examines, popular culture, it is particularly suited to having a web site (jungle site?). Many of the books, characters, and authors we will be reading have entered our culture--Tarzan, Little Women, Gone With the Wind, Philip Marlowe (or the hardboiled detective), the Horatio Alger tale, Zane Grey's version of the Western hero--and have web sites associated with them that function as electronic fan clubs, as well as sources of useful background information. Do not overlook the advertising associated with these texts, which may also be of use to your critical thinking. Furthermore, you may also find useful databases, search engines, and etexts that help your academic research.

    We designed the web site with certain specific critical aims. Because we seek in this course to understand our literature in terms of its cultural contexts, and our culture in terms of its literary productions, we attempt to avoid the (to our minds artificial) subordination of one to the other. If, as Bruce Daniels suggests, "what a society reads may be the most instructive guide to its cultural landscape," we also want to stress the idea that tastes in literature--indeed, in what separates "literature" from "popular culture"--have changed over the course of America's history, in keeping with changes in its cultural landscape.

    To that end, we have tried to design a site sensitive to questions of fashion, of style, of taste, of image, and of icon. In other words, questions of changing fashions--in literature, but also more generally in consumption (what do people buy, and buy into? what do they sell each other, and why? what do they do in their leisure time? what do they want to look like? how do they envision themselves and each other?)--might in one sense be understood as the subject matter of this course.

    The web is obviously one of our newest fashions, one of our newest sites for literary and cultural production, and one of our currently most popular forms of self-presentation. It is a mode which complicates the very questions of history and of historiography (the writing and recording of history) with which this course partly concerns itself. This web site is therefore presented to you not only as a supplementary tool to the reading of literature, but as a primary means of engaging with questions of cultural production and of cultural history.

    Each book on the syllabus has a web page associated with it. On those pages you will find images, links, questions, and ideas about both the specific book we are reading, and about the author and her/his oeuvre more generally. You can access these pages through the Books and Authors page. The Books and Authors page has additional information about the idea behind these pages, as well as questions to get you started. Each week you will find posted on the book page suggested questions for that text. These questions are by no means exhaustive, nor meant to be. They are only provided to help focus your initial approach to these texts. We certainly hope for, and encourage, the development of your own interrogation of these texts.

    In addition, below you will find other general links that we thought you might find helpful or interesting as you read these books. In this way, you can also get a sense of other approaches to these texts, and other questions you might be asking.

    You will also find office hours (with links to preceptors' email addresses), the syllabus, assignments when available, and the course description on the web site.

Course Links
 

USA Today Best Seller Lists Publisher's Weekly Bestsellers Lists Best Seller Lists (20th C)

Godey's Lady's Book, 1855-1858 Godey's Lady's Book, 1850 Nineteenth Century Advertising Nineteenth Century Fashion American Lady: The History of American Women's Magazines very cool

Links to Popular Culture and Pulp Fiction Classic Movie Reviews Romancing the Web The Romance Authors Page Write Page Modern Genre Writers Site Cinema Sites : databases, reviews, previews, studios, screenings, fan pages galore  Hollywood.Com: just like it sounds  Lyrics Server : full lyrics of over 65,000 popular and folk songs

UVA Best Seller Course Home Page Web Resources A Celebration of Women Writers American Studies Web : primary site for exploring American topics on WWW  ASW Literature & Criticism : long list of sites that should be useful  ASW Region & Environment : especially good for locations, places, cities  USA Citylink : city home pages, provide links to local collections & images  Library of Congress : home page for exhibitions, library, research tools  American Memory : historical digital collections at Library of Congress  American Memory Topics : searchable index to the collections, good for browsing  American Folklife Center : great archive of documentary images, recordings, films  Smithsonian Institution : resources, collections, events in many topical areas  American Social & Cultural History : featured collection at the Smithsonian  Author Bibliographies : over 2500 author bibliographies, organized alphabetically  Authors & Topics : 100s of authors, 22 categories, book reviews, etc.  Online Books Page : massive archive of all online books, at CMU  Online Literary Criticism : 1180 critical and biographical websites, searchable  AJR NewsLink : over 600 English-language papers & magazines, all online  Museum of Broadcast Communications  : radio and television history, films, etc.

 FRS 132w Fall 1996 (PU)
 
 

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