printer friendly pageAMSTUD 142: The Literature of the Americas (COMPLIT 142, CSRE 142, ENGLISH 172E)
A wide-ranging overview of the literatures of the Americas inncomparative perspective, emphasizing continuities and crises that are common to North American, Central American, and South American literatures as well as the distinctive national and cultural elements of a diverse array of primary works. Topics include the definitions of such concepts as empire and colonialism, the encounters between worldviews of European and indigenous peoples, the emergence of creole and racially mixed populations, slavery, the New World voice, myths of America as paradise or utopia, the coming of modernism, twentieth-century avant-gardes, and distinctive modern episodes--the Harlem Renaissance, the Beats, magic realism, Noigandres--in unaccustomed conversation with each other.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:EC-AmerCul, GER:DB-Hum, WAY-A-II
AMSTUD 143A: American Architecture (ARTHIST 143A, ARTHIST 343A, CEE 32R)
A historically based understanding of what defines American architecture. What makes American architecture American, beginning with indigenous structures of pre-Columbian America. Materials, structure, and form in the changing American context. How these ideas are being transformed in today's globalized world.
Last offered: Autumn 2019
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, WAY-A-II
AMSTUD 143X: Starstuff: Space and the American Imagination (ARTHIST 264B, FILMSTUD 264B)
Course on the history of twentieth and twenty-first century American images of space and how they shape conceptions of the universe. Covers representations made by scientists and artists, as well as scientific fiction films, TV, and other forms of popular visual culture. Topics will include the importance of aesthetics to understandings of the cosmos; the influence of media and technology on representations; the social, political, and historical context of the images; and the ways representations of space influence notions of American national identity and of cosmic citizenship.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II
Instructors:
Kessler, E. (PI)
AMSTUD 144D: American Arts & The Great Depression (ENGLISH 144D)
American culture in the 1930s and 40s is easy to dismiss. It can seem too parochial, too patriotic, too escapist. But looking closer we find 'bold and persistent experimentation' in the face of inequality and unrest. How does a photograph respond to want? A novel produce community? A musical call for revolution? In this course we'll consider a diverse cast of objects and artists: phototexts by James Agee and Walker Evans, Richard Wright, and Dorothea Lange and Paul Taylor; the films of Busby Berkeley, Charlie Chaplin, Frank Capra, Fred Astaire, and Pere Lorenz; paintings by Grant Wood, Grandma Moses, and Diego Rivera; and the fiction of Tillie Olsen and Nathanael West. We'll explore the Federal Arts Projects - which put thousands to work - describing America to Americans in the form of government-funded plays, symphonies, and guidebooks, and were fiercely contested by conservative critics of the New Deal - and examine their continuing legacy. Students will reflect on primary and secondary readings and digital archives in a series of short papers.
Terms: Sum
| Units: 3-5
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II
Instructors:
Bolten, R. (PI)
AMSTUD 145: Silicon Valley
Silicon Valley. The site and source of vibrant economic growth and technological innovation. A disruptive force in social, economic, and political systems. An interface between technology and academia, with the the quirky influence of the counterculture in the background. A surprisingly agile cultural behemoth that has reshaped human relationships and hierarchies of all sorts. A brotopia built on the preferences and predilections of rich, geeky white guys. A location with perpetually sunny skies and easy access to beaches and mountains. nnThis seminar will unpack the myths surrounding Silicon Valley by exploring the people, places, industries, and ideas that have shaped it from post-WWII to the present. It takes an interdisciplinary approach to the subject and considers region's history and development; the products of Silicon Valley, from computers and circuit boards to search algorithms and social networks; and Silicon Valley's depictions in photography, film, television, and literature.
Terms: Win
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II, WAY-SI
Instructors:
Kessler, E. (PI)
AMSTUD 145D: Jewish American Literature and Film (ENGLISH 145D, JEWISHST 155D, REES 145D)
From its inception, Jewish-American literature has taken as its subject as well as its context the idea of Jewishness itself. Jewish culture is a diasporic one, and for this reason the concept of Jewishness differs from country to country and across time. What stays remarkably similar, though, is Jewish self-perception and relatedly Jewish literary style. This is as true for the first-generation immigrant writers like Isaac Bashevis Singer and Anzia Yezierska who came to the United States from abroad as it is for their second-generation children born in the United States, and the children of those children. In this course, we will consider the difficulties of displacement for the emigrant generation and their efforts to sustain their cultural integrity in the multicultural American environment. We'll also examine the often comic revolt of their American-born children and grandchildren against their (grand-)parents nostalgia and failure to assimilate. Only by considering these transnational roots can one understand the particularity of the Jewish-American novel in relation to mainstream and minority American literatures. In investigating the link between American Jewish writers and their literary progenitors, we will draw largely but not exclusively from Russia and the countries of Eastern Europe.
Terms: Win
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, GER:EC-AmerCul, WAY-A-II, WAY-EDP
Instructors:
Ruttenburg, N. (PI)
AMSTUD 146C: Hemingway, Hurston, Faulkner, and Fitzgerald (ENGLISH 146C)
While Hemingway and Fitzgerald were flirting with the expatriate avant-garde in Europe, Hurston and Faulkner were performing anthropological field-work in the local cultures of the American South. Focus on the tremendous diversity of concerns and styles of four writers who marked America's coming-of-age as a literary nation with their multifarious experiments in representing the regional and the global, the racial and the cosmopolitan, the macho and the feminist, the decadent and the impoverished.
Terms: Sum
| Units: 3-5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, GER:EC-AmerCul, WAY-A-II, WAY-EDP
Instructors:
Jones, G. (PI)
;
Beaty, G. (TA)
AMSTUD 147J: Studies in Music, Media, and Popular Culture: The Soul Tradition in African American Music (AFRICAAM 19, CSRE 147J, MUSIC 147J, MUSIC 247J)
1960s and 70s Black music, including rhythm and blues, Motown, Southern soul, funk, Philadelphia soul, and disco. Its origins in blues, gospel, and jazz to its influence on today's r&b, hip hop, and dance music. Soul's cultural influence and global reach; its interaction with politics, racism, gender, place, technology, and the economy. Synchronous and asynchronous remote learning, with class discussions, small-group activities, guest presenters, and opportunities for activism. Pre-/co-requisite (for music majors):
MUSIC 22. (WIM at 4 units only.)
Terms: Aut
| Units: 3-4
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, GER:EC-AmerCul, WAY-A-II, WAY-EDP
Instructors:
Kronengold, C. (PI)
;
Proctor, E. (TA)
AMSTUD 150: Introduction to English II: American Literature and Culture to 1855 (ENGLISH 11B)
A survey of early American writings, including sermons, poetry, captivity and slave narratives, essays, autobiography, and fiction, from the colonial era to the eve of the Civil War.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, WAY-A-II, GER:EC-AmerCul
AMSTUD 150A: Colonial and Revolutionary America (HISTORY 150A)
(
HISTORY 50A is 3 units.
HISTORY 150A is 5 units) This course surveys early American history from the onset of English colonization of North America in the late sixteenth century through the American Revolution and the creation of the United States in the late eighteenth. It situates the origins and the development of colonial American society as its peoples themselves experienced it, within the wider histories of the North American continent and the Atlantic basin. It considers the diversity of peoples and empires that made up these worlds as well as the complex movement of goods, peoples, and ideas that defined them. The British North American colonies were just one interrelated part of this wider complex. Yet out of that interconnected Atlantic world, those particular colonies produced a revolution for national independence that had a far-reaching impact on the world. The course, accordingly, explores the origins of this revolutionary movement and the nation state that it wrought, one that would rapidly ascend to hemispheric and then global prominence.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-SocSci, GER:EC-AmerCul, WAY-A-II, WAY-SI
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