| | 01 | M-W---- | 10:00A-11:20A | Busch / 14 | Maciak | Paper/Project/TakeHome | 16 | 14 | 0 | | Desc: | American Culture: Methods and Visions: The American Aughts (1803, 1903, 2003): This seminar is an experiment in American Culture Studies. We will be studying three years in U.S. history over the span of several hundred. 1803, 1903, 2003 -?three years in American culture, starting with the year many students in this class were born and tumbling backward to the Early Republic. Paying attention to works of literature and visual culture, advancements in technology and media, huge national events the resonated throughout the world and small twists of fate that would only reveal themselves in retrospect. We will move comparatively across texts, events, and discourses from all three of those years. The Louisiana Purchase and the Iraq War, The Souls of Black Folk and The Known World, the emergence of Sacagawea into the national imagination, the debut of Thomas Edison's most important narrative films, MySpace, The Call of the Wild, the Space Shuttle Columbia, the city of St. Louis across two-hundred years. We will mix and match, utilizing a variety of American Culture Studies methodologies to provocatively juxtapose objects and eras. We will test the common narrative of American Cultural History against our observations of these years, and we will trawl them for familiar myths and symbols -?all the while, working through this generative constraint, we will keep our eye on the question of how the stories of American culture come to form amidst random events, uncanny echoes, and the ordinary lives of Americans, then and now. Preference given to junior AMCS majors. |
| | | Actions: | | Books | | Syllabus | | Syllabi are provided to students to support their course planning; refer to the syllabus for constraints on use. |
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| 02 | -T-R--- | 11:30A-12:50P | Eads / 216 | Walsh | Paper/Project/TakeHome | 16 | 19 | 0 | | Desc: | American Culture: Methods and Visions: Fake News: Pandemics, Power, and Propaganda. In this American Culture Studies methods seminar, we will examine the way in which the numerous crises of our contemporary era echo previous moments when armed conflict, pandemics, domestic political factionalism, abuses of power, and serial economic upheaval occupied the attention (and anxiety) of cultural actors. We now, as those before, navigate a politicized and bewildering informational setting that taxes collective abilities to know truth and reality from lies and misdirection. These periods of radical uncertainty, then or now, are potent seedbeds for those leveraging information as mechanisms to control memory, history, political enemies, and national populations. In this seminar we will investigate some preceding crises in U.S. history to discover the circumstances and techniques when informational control-our starting definition of propaganda-emerged as a dominant feature of national politics. We'll discover the roots of American propaganda during the WWI era and trace both its evolution and saturation into multiple social sectors over the 20th century as preparation for illuminating its complex deployment today. We will engage with multiple disciplinary practices to broaden our collective imagination on what propaganda is, how it's used, and how to measure and catalog consequences. Using online archives, we will read widely from primary materials as we seek to know how people wrestled with and resisted mediations of power to define enemies, allies, criminals, and those worthy of justice. Preference given to Junior AMCS majors. |
| | | Actions: | | Books | | Syllabus | | Syllabi are provided to students to support their course planning; refer to the syllabus for constraints on use. |
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