CUNY Academic Commons

American Culture and Values (MALS 73100) Introduction to American Studies: History & Methods

Posted Course Description:
Drawing on the interdisciplinary methodologies of American Studies, this course will look at diverse groupings of texts that enact, represent, and interrogate American cultures and values and how they are formulated, understood, and contested. Among the authors that enact or address these issues directly, we will consider Crèvecoeur, Jefferson, de Tocqueville, Emerson, Douglass, Adams, and other more recent commentators, such as Janice Radway; among authors that represent American culture and values, we will look at works by Hawthorne, Cather, Hurston, Mailer, and Alice Walker; among texts that reflect on how culture and values are assessed, we will look at seminal works, such as those by Charles Beard, Leo Marx, and F.O Matthiessen, as well as more recent studies, such as Susan Hegeman’s Patterns for America: Modernism and the Concept of Culture and The Cultural Return and Siobhan B. Somerville’s Queering the Color Line: Race and the Invention of Homosexuality in American Culture. In defining culture and how the term is “valued” in American studies today, we also consider its appeal and limits. One way to do this – and to incorporate more popular culture and multimedia texts – is to focus on the idea of “an American Icon,” an individual who is said to encapsulate a certain era or set of values, and we will have short units on such figures as Billy the Kid, Annie Oakley, Lucille Ball, and Jimi Hendrix.