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Never before has the United States had a First Lady like Michelle Obama. During her eight years in the White House, Michelle Obama transformed traditional meanings of womanhood, marriage, motherhood, and style and created new possibilities for what it means to be strong and what it means to be beautiful. No First Lady has ever been so scrutinized but also so beloved: from her J. Crew dresses to her Let's Move campaign, from her vegetable gardens to her chiseled arms, and from her powerful speeches to her casual and always authentic personality. This class examines the impact on American culture of the most popular First Lady in American history.

In 2015 Stanford's Cantor Arts Center acquired New York Corner (1913), an early painting by the celebrated American artist Edward Hopper (1882-1967). In honor of the acquisition, this seminar will explore Hopper's paintings in detail but with a twist. In each class meeting we will pair Hopper's paintings with the work of another artist or, in some cases, a filmmaker or novelist. The work of these other figures, all notable in their own right, will be given equal if not greater emphasis in each seminar meeting. In classroom discussion, our goal will be to build a rich description of Hopper's art and to understand something of the times when he painted (especially the late 1920s through the late 1950s). If you have wanted to learn how to look closely at a work of art, and how to interpret film and literature with equal depth doing so in intensive conversation with the professor and your peers this is the class for you. Some of the questions we will address: What is an artist?; What is an artist's career?; What does it mean for an artist (or anyone) to develop a lifelong vision of American culture, of American places, of American life?; What is a place (as opposed to a space)?; Is making a painting (or speaking or writing about a painting) a meaningful act in the world?; What does it mean (for Hopper, for any of us) to emerge out of a coherent tradition?; What is high art?; What is popular art?; What are the strengths and limitations of each?

(Formerly English 43/143). In his bold study, What Was African American Literature?, Kenneth Warren defines African American literature as a late nineteenth- to mid-twentieth-century response to the nation's Jim Crow segregated order. But in the aftermath of the Jim Crow era and the Civil Rights movement, can critics still speak, coherently, of "African American literature"? And how does this political conception of African American literary production compare with accounts grounded in black language and culture? Taking up Warren's intervention, this course will explore African American literature from its earliest manifestations in the spirituals and slave narratives to texts composed at the height of desegregation and decolonization struggles at mid-century and beyond.

We may "know" "who" we "are," but we are, after all, social creatures. How does our sense of self interact with those around us? How does literature provide a particular medium for not only self expression, but also for meditations on what goes into the construction of "the Self"? After all, don't we tell stories in response to the question, "who are you"? Besides a list of nouns and names and attributes, we give our lives flesh and blood in telling how we process the world. Our course focuses in particular on this question--Does this universal issue ("who am I") become skewed differently when we add a qualifier before it, like "ethnic"?

Preference to freshmen. We will examine the struggles of African American women to define their own lives and improve the social, economic, political and cultural conditions of black communities. Topics will include women¿s enslavement and freedom, kinship and family relations, institution and community building, violence, labor and leisure, changing gender roles, consumer and beauty culture, social activism, and the politics of sexuality.

This discussion class will explore a series of social movements in modern America through the songs produced to support efforts to achieve labor unions, civil rights and racial justice, peace, and women's rights. For each class we will read short historical texts to provide contexts for the movements and then concentrate on the role of music within them. We will listening to and discuss several core songs for each topic. Biographical and autobiographical readings on a key set of musicians (including Joe Hill, Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Malvina Reynolds, and Bernice Johnson Reagon) will provide personal accounts of the relationship of songs to social movement . The music we include in class will range from ballads to anthems, from oral traditions to the work of singer-songwriters.

Preference to sophomores. ¿The humor, the sadness, the EVERYTHING-ness and American-ness of these pictures!¿ wrote Jack Kerouac of photographer Robert Frank¿s iconic collection, The Americans. This seminar takes Kerouac¿s enthusiasm and applies it to ten American photographs, a new one each week. Examples span the medium¿s history and were taken as art, science, commerce, journalism, or personal mementos. Close study of the photo of the week will address how it looks and why; its history, from initial responses to later reception; and its relationship to the larger American visual and cultural context. Also under discussion: What story does this set of pictures tell about Americanness? What might another set of photos convey?

Preference to freshmen. Mark Twain defined the rhythms of our prose and the contours of our moral map. He recognized our extravagant promise and stunning failures, our comic foibles and  tragic flaws. He is viewed as the most American of American authors--and as one of the most universal. How does his work illuminate his society's (and our society's) responses to such issues as race, gender, technology, heredity vs. environment, religion, education, art, imperialism, animal welfare, and what it means to be "American"?

This class examines the history of Mexican migration to the United States. In the United States we constantly hear about Obama¿s immigration plan, the anti-immigrant laws in Arizona, and the courage of DREAM Activists; in Mexico news sources speak about the role of remittances, the effect of deportations, and the loss of life at the border. Unfortunately, few people truly understand the historical trends in these migratory processes, or the multifaceted role played by the United States in encouraging individuals to head there. Moreover, few people have actually heard the opinions and voices of migrants themselves. This course seeks to provide students with the opportunity to place migrants¿ experiences in dialogue with migratory laws as well as the knowledge to embed current understandings of Latin American migration in their meaningful historical context.