printer friendly pageAMSTUD 1B: Media, Culture, and Society (COMM 1B)
The institutions and practices of mass media, including television, film, radio, and digital media, and their role in shaping culture and social life. The media's shifting relationships to politics, commerce, and identity.
Terms: Win
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-SocSci, WAY-A-II, WAY-SI
Instructors:
Turner, F. (PI)
AMSTUD 51Q: Comparative Fictions of Ethnicity (COMPLIT 51Q, CSRE 51Q)
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"?
Terms: Win
| Units: 4
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, WAY-A-II, WAY-EDP, Writing 2
Instructors:
Palumbo-Liu, D. (PI)
AMSTUD 68N: Mark Twain and American Culture (ENGLISH 68N)
Preference to freshmen. Mark Twain has been called our Rabelais, our Cervantes, our Homer, our Tolstoy, our Shakespeare. Ernest Hemingway maintained that all modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. President Franklin D.nRoosevelt got the phrase New Deal from
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. Class discussions will focus on how Twain's work illuminates and complicates his society's responses to such issues as race, technology, heredity versus environment, religion, education, and what it means to be American.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 4
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II, GER:EC-AmerCul, GER:DB-Hum, WAY-EDP
Instructors:
Fishkin, S. (PI)
AMSTUD 101: American Fiction into Film: How Hollywood Scripts and Projects Black and White Relations
Movies and the fiction that inspires them; power dynamics behind production including historical events, artistic vision, politics, and racial stereotypes. What images of black and white does Hollywood produce to forge a national identity? How do films promote equality between the races? What is lost or gained in film adaptations of books?
Terms: Spr
| Units: 3-5
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II, GER:DB-Hum, GER:EC-AmerCul, WAY-EDP
AMSTUD 121: Masterpieces of American Literature
(English majors and others taking 5 units, register for 121.) A survey of some of the definitive texts of American writing, such as
Leaves of Grass, Benito Cereno, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Waste Land, The Sun Also Rises, The Golden Apples, and
The Crying of Lot 49.
Last offered: Spring 2011
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, WAY-A-II, WAY-EDP
AMSTUD 124A: The American West (ARTHIST 152, ENGLISH 124, HISTORY 151, POLISCI 124A)
The American West is characterized by frontier mythology, vast distances, marked aridity, and unique political and economic characteristics. This course integrates several disciplinary perspectives into a comprehensive examination of Western North America: its history, physical geography, climate, literature, art, film, institutions, politics, demography, economy, and continuing policy challenges. Students examine themes fundamental to understanding the region: time, space, water, peoples, and boom and bust cycles.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 4
| UG Reqs: GER:EC-AmerCul, WAY-SI, WAY-A-II, GER:DB-Hum
Instructors:
Cain, B. (PI)
;
Freyberg, D. (PI)
;
Jones, G. (PI)
...
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Instructors:
Cain, B. (PI)
;
Freyberg, D. (PI)
;
Jones, G. (PI)
;
Kennedy, D. (PI)
;
Nemerov, A. (PI)
AMSTUD 132: American Art and Culture, 1528-1910 (ARTHIST 132, ARTHIST 332)
The visual arts and literature of the U.S. from the beginnings of European exploration to the Civil War. Focus is on questions of power and its relation to culture from early Spanish exploration to the rise of the middle classes. Cabeza de Vaca, Benjamin Franklin, John Singleton Copley, Phillis Wheatley, Charles Willson Peale, Emerson, Hudson River School, American Genre painters, Melville, Hawthorne and others.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 4
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, GER:EC-AmerCul, WAY-A-II
Instructors:
Wolf, B. (PI)
AMSTUD 139B: American Women Writers, 1850-1920 (ENGLISH 139B)
The ways in which female writers negotiated a series of literary, social, and intellectual movements, from abolitionism and sentimentalism in the nineteenth century to Progressivism and avant-garde modernism in the twentieth. Authors include Harriet Beecher Stowe, Harriet Jacobs, Rebecca Harding Davis, Emily Dickinson, Kate Chopin, Edith Wharton, Gertrude Stein, Willa Cather, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, WAY-A-II, GER:EC-Gender
Instructors:
Richardson, J. (PI)
AMSTUD 140: Stand Up Comedy and the "Great American Joke" Since 1945
Development of American Stand Up Comedy in the context of social and cultural eruptions after 1945, including the Borscht Belt, the Chitlin¿ Circuit, the Cold War, censorship battles, Civil Rights and other social movements of the 60s and beyond. The artistry of stories, monologues, jokes, impersonations, persona, social satire, scatology, obscenity, riffs, rants, shtick, and more by such artists as Lenny Bruce, Dick Gregory, Richard Pryor, George Carlin, Margaret Cho, Sarah Silverman, Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, as well as precursors such as Mark Twain, minstrelsy and vaudeville and related films, TV shows, poems and other manifestations of similar sensibilities and techniques.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 3-5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, WAY-A-II
Instructors:
Obenzinger, H. (PI)
AMSTUD 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.
Last offered: Winter 2013
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, GER:EC-AmerCul, WAY-A-II
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