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Course Offerings for Spring 2006
(As of 11/14/05)
REMEMBER: ATTENDANCE IS REQUIRED FOR THE FIRST WEEK IN ALL AMERICAN STUDIES COURSES. STUDENTS WILL BE DROPPED FROM CLASS FOR NON-ATTENDANCE.
10 - INTRO. TO AMERICAN STUDIES, Section 01: The Sacred (4 units) - CC# 02003
TTH 11:00-12:30 88 Dwinelle Instructor: K. Biestman
Sec. 101, CC# 02006 W 08:00-09:00, 47 Evans
Sec. 102, CC# 02009 Th 03:00-04:00, 51 Evans
This course provides an introduction to the study of American Culture and will analyze cultural values, knowledge, objects, texts, places, and meaning using the Sacred as its central theme. Select interdisciplinary readings and perspectives frame Americans' complex relationship with the Sacred in terms of text and textuality, material and popular culture, space and place, science and sanctity, and law and religious freedom. The course will explore the Sacred in the context of The American Dream (sacred lands, private property, frontier ethos), Literature and Sacred Knowledge (The DaVinci Code), and American Identity, Religious Freedom, and the Separation of Church and State (Creationism v. Evolution, American Flag, Pledge of Allegiance).
10 - INTRO. TO AMERICAN STUDIES, Section 02 (4 units) - CC# 02012
MW 04:00-05:30 166 Barrows Instructor: S. Saul
Sec. 201, CC# 02015 Tu 02:00-03:00, 51 Evans
Sec. 202, CC# 02018 W 08:00-09:00, 45 Evans
The Short American Century: America from WWII to the New Frontier
This course is designed to introduce students to the intellectual and cultural history of America in the years between WWII and the New Frontier ? the era that invented the nuclear bomb, the nuclear family, the car with tailfins, the blacklist, the sit-in, the mall,
Disneyland, film noir, TV, the CIA, rockabilly, the mass-merchandized paperback novel, and much, much else.
On the broadest level, the class will investigate the large-scale social and political transformations of the 40s and 50s: the fracturing of FDR's New Deal coalition, the rise of suburbia and the nuclear family ideal, the American military's assumption of a larger role in global geopolitics, the surge of the Civil Rights Movement and the beginnings of second-wave feminism, among others. But it will do so primarily through the lens of culture, by zooming in on the new forms of writing, film, visual art, music and theater that were produced in the period. Material to be covered in the class will include films like Double Indemnity, The Apartment, and The Ten Commandments; plays likeThornton Wilder's The Skin of Our Teeth and Adrienne Kennedy's Funnyhouse of a Negro; the music of Elvis Presley; and the short stories, poetry and novels of writers like Paul Bowles, Allen Ginsberg, Ralph Ellison, Alice Childress and Richard Wright.
"TIME" COURSES
101, Section 01 - AMERICAN APOCALYPSE: THE ATOMIC AGE & NUCLEAR CRITICISM (4 units) CC# 02033
TTH 08:00-09:30 160 Kroeber Instructor: C. Palmer
American Apocalypse will introduce students to the ways in which historical and contemporary traditions have imagined and interrogated apokalypsis, the moment of destruction and revelation. Specifically, we will explore literature and cinema that imagine individual and social life amidst the fallout of near-terminal and apocalyptic events. This course considers biblical, post-nuclear, post-holocaust, and culture-destroying experiences and responses to them. With the Cold War (1945-1990) as the historical fulcrum of the course, we will examine nationalism, the nature of self, nostalgia, trauma, the practice of history, social reform, voyeurism and surveillance, and the tensions between old world order/new world order and chaos/regimentation. Our task in this class is to figure out how people use and respond to the rhetoric of the end of the world in the United States, particularly in light of the invention of the atomic and hydrogen bombs - the moment at which humans realized the ability to destroy the planet.
101, Section 02 - Architecture in Depression & War (4 Units) CC# 02036
TTH 12:30-02:00 155 Kroeber Instructor: A. Shanken
The Great Depression and World War II are arguably the two most influential events for the development of the built environment in the 20th century. Not only did they alter the socio-economic and political landscape on which architecture and urban planning depend, but they also led to technological innovations and vital debates about the built environment. This course examines the 1930's and 1940's topically, studying the work of the New Deal, corporate responses to the Depression and war, the important connections between architecture and advertising, the role of the Museum of Modern Art in the promotion of Modernism, the concept of the ideal house, and key texts, theories, and projects from the period. Students can expect to have rich contact with primary materials from the period, to do original research, and to write several short papers, plus a final exam.
This course will satisfy "Time" as well as Area Courses for students with Areas of Concentration in Urban Studies, The Modern Period, or World War II Culture.
"PLACE" COURSES
C112B - AMERICAN CULTURAL LANDSCAPES, 1900 - Present (4 units) CC# 02042
Also listed as ED c169B, Section 01; Geog c160B, Section 01
TTH 11:00-12:30 112 Wurster Instructor: P: Groth
Sec. 101, CC# 02045 Tu 01:00-02:00, 172 Wurster
Sec. 102, CC# 02048 W 12:00-01:00, 104 Wurster
Sec. 103, CC# 02051 Th 10:00-11:00. 104 Wurster
Sec. 104, CC# 02054 Th 04:00-05:00, 172 Wurster
Sec. 105, CC# 02057 Tu 12:30-02:00, 108 Wurster
This course introduces ways of seeing and interpreting American histories and cultures, as revealed in everyday built surroundings: homes, highways, farms, factories, stores, recreation areas, small towns, city districts, and regions. The course encourages students to read landscapes as records of past and present social relations, and to speculate for themselves about cultural meaning. Note that although this course deals with culture, and America, it does not deal equally with three different cultures. Thus, it does NOT satisfy the University's American Cultures requirement.
C171: The American Designed Landscape Since 1850 (3 units) - CC# 02060
TTH 12:30-02:00 101 Wurster Instructor: L. Mozingo
Also cross-listed with Landscape Architecture c171, Section 01
Sec. 101, CC# 02063 TBA
Sec 102, CC# 02066 TBA
This course surveys the history of American landscape architecture since 1850 including the rise of the public parks movement, the development of park systems, the establishment of the national parks, the landscape of the Progressive Era, suburbs, and the modernist landscape. The survey encompasses urban open spaces, conservation landscapes, urban design, environmental planning, and gardens. It reviews the cultural and social contexts which have shaped and informed landscape architecture in the United States since the advent of the public parks movement, as well as the aesthetic precepts, environmental concerns, horticultural practices, and technological innovations of American landscapes.
History 126B: The American West Since 1845 (4 units) - CC# 39421
MWF 10:00-11:00 102 Moffitt Instructor: M. Brilliant
This course surveys the history of the American West since 1845. We will pay particular heed to the history and historiography surrounding those aspects of the West that are typically associated with the region's distinctiveness as both a shifting region on the national map and a potent metaphor in the national imagination. These include: a cultural history propagated in films and literature in which the region occupies center stage in the drama of America's development as a democratic society; an ethnoracial history that consists of a complex, multiracial (as opposed to biracial) pattern of race relations; an environmental history shaped by a scarcity of water amidst an abundance of extractive resources; an urban history characterized by the nation's highest concentration of urbanization by 1970 and an approach to metropolitan development that shaped that of the rest of the nation; and a political history as a national bellwether for both liberal action and conservative reaction. Throughout the course, we will reflect on whether claims about the West's distinctiveness are in fact regionally and analytically distinctive, or whether its time, as some historians have recently declared, to abandon the history of the American West as an historical sub-field.
HONORS TRACK
(See American Studies Faculty Advisors, if interested)
H110, Section 1 - HONORS SEMINAR: Special Topics in American Studies (3 units) - See American Studies Advisor for CC#.
W 03:00-06:00 203 Wheeler Instructor: M. Brilliant
The Meanings of America and the Development of American Studies, 1930 to the Present
This seminar traces the development of the field of American Studies from its origins in the 1930s to the present. Seminal scholarly books in Americans Studies will serve as the principle means to this end. Each of these books has at its core a claim about the "meaning" of America whose substantive contours, methodological approach, and scholarly response we will examine. Over the course of the semester, we will compare, contrast, and evaluate the various "meanings" of America advanced in the books under scrutiny. In the process, we will map the historical trajectory of the only academic field of inquiry that takes America as a whole as its unit of analysis - its pivotal junctures, critical conversations and controversies, and broader sociopolitical contexts within which they emerged.
SENIOR THESIS SEMINARS
SENIOR THESIS SEMINARS: Students will meet in a seminar, which will help them research and write their senior theses.
191, Section 01 - SENIOR SEMINAR (4 Units) - CC# 02075
Th 10:00-12:00 78 Barrows Instructor: C. Palmer
191, Section 02 - SENIOR SEMINAR (4 Units) - CC# 02078
Tu 02:00-04:00 C335 Cheit Instructor: K. Biestman
191, Section 03 - SENIOR SEMINAR (4 Units) - CC# 02081
M 02:00-04:00 B51 Hildebrand Instructor: M. Foletta
191, Section 04 - SENIOR SEMINAR (4 Units) - CC# 02084
W 04:00-06:00 5 Evans Instructor: M. Foletta
H195 - SENIOR HONORS SEMINAR (4 Units) - CC# (see below)
Tu 10:00-12:00 136 Barrows Instructor: C. Palmer
***NOTE: In order to receive honors in American Studies, a student must have an overall GPA of 3.51, and a GPA of 3.65 for all courses taken in completion of the major (upper and lower division). Students should discuss with their major faculty adviser the preparation of a bibliography and a brief description of their proposed honors thesis and their eligibility to enroll in honors, based on GPA, the semester before they plan to enroll in H195. They also must secure a faculty adviser from an appropriate field who will agree to direct the honors thesis (the "honors thesis adviser"). THE FACULTY ADVISER'S AGREEMENT MUST BE SUBMITTED TO COURSE INSTRUCTOR NO LATER THAN THE 2ND WEEK OF CLASSES.
GRADUATE COURSES
250 - Research Seminar: Prophecy and The American Voice (4 Units) - CC#
Th 03:00-06:00 203 Wheeler Instructor: G. Marcus
This seminar begins with John Winthrop's 1630 Puritan sermon "A Model of Christian Charity" and moves forward to the movie Invasion of the Body Snatchers--in three versions, from the 1956 original, set in the Central Valley, to the 1978 remake, set in San Francisco, to the 1998 inversion Pleasantville, set in an American version of Shangri-la. Drawing on classical religious and political texts and public addresses, contemporary poetry, archaic ballads and gospel music, novels, films, and biographies, the course takes up the question of the U.S.A. as God's country--as a place, idea, and moment in history that is specially blessed, and thus potentially cursed--and the way in which the prophetic voice and the expectation of judgment produced by such a vision of blessedness has shaped American rhetoric, art, and identity. Course materials: books; CDs provided to students; films screened and discussed in class.
COURSES OFFERED BY AMER. STUDIES AFFILIATED FACULTY
Upper Division courses can be used for Areas of Concentration, when appropriate.
American Studies 39B- Freshman/Sophomore Seminar: California Foodways: Business, Media & Culture (3 units) - CC# 02021
M 03:00-06:00 203 Wheeler Instructor: K. Moran
This course will discuss the politics and culture of American foodways, focusing on California and the Pacific West Region. We will begin with a history of California agribusiness and the role of food advertising and food tourism in the west. We will also discuss food in Hollywood films, various food movements, the rise of Berkeley's "gourmet ghetto," and popular representations of food, gender and race.
L & S 40B - The History of American Popular Culture (3 Units) - CC# 51827
TTH 03:30-05:00 310 Hearst Mining Instructor: K. Moran
One way to understand the social history of the United States is to think about the ways Americans told their stories, represented and imagined the past, and expressed their identities in the popular culture they created and consumed. In this course we will focus on some of the main forms of American popular culture from the1890's to 1940 including historical romances, dime novels, magazines, early cinema, Tin Pan Alley comic books and amusement parks. We will end the course looking at classic Hollywood movies. Throughout the course, we will be analyzing the way that social and political changes resulting from the rise of consumerism and modern industrial practices were reflected, expressed, and contested in the kinds of entertainments that shaped the everyday world of Americans.
Architecture 179, Section 01 - Yesterday's Tomorrows: Past Visions of Future Architecture (1-4 units) - CC 03865
Th 04:00-07:00 104 Wurster Instructor: A. Shanken
The future ain't what it used to be. This course explores architectural visions of the future as historical windows, examining them from a number of angles. Using a variety of case studies drawn from different media (architectural theory, film, advertisements, architectural projects, and so on) and periods (Modern Movement, World War II, etc.) it provides a sampling of possibilities and models for the final student project, an in-depth, original research paper. Several themes thread their way through the course, including the role of the "unbuilt" in architectural history and architectural practice; the uses of the future in the construction of national and personal identities, cultural narratives, and modern mythologies; the importance of the future as clich?, and the role of play in cultural production.
English 100, Section 01: American Writers in Paris (4 units) - CC# 28270
MW 10:30-12:00 305 Wheeler Instructor: C. Porter
We will primarily address American writers who found themselves in Paris and environs during the 1920's, with a brief look backward to their main precursor in the late 19th century, Henry James. The expatriots, as these writers and artists were called, wrote both fiction and non-fiction, and sometimes something in between, or even -- as the case of Gertrude Stein demonstrates -- something else entirely. We will be exploring their lives and their fictions in relation both to Paris and to the modernist movements to which it contributed.
Beach, Sylvia, Shakespeare and Company
Bricktop, Bricktop
Cowley, Malcolm, Exile's Return
Fitzgerald, F. Scott, Tender is the Night
Flanner, Janet, Paris Was Yesterday
Hemingway, Ernest, The Sun Also Rises
Hughes, Langston, The Big Sea
James, Henry, The American
McAlmon, Robert & Kay Boyle, Being Geniuses Together
Stein, Gertrude, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas
English 130D - American Literature: 1900-1945 (4 units) - CC# 28345
MW 03:00-04:00 277 Cory Instructor: C. Porter
Sec. 101, CC# 28348 F 03:00-04:00, 229 Dwinelle
Sec. 102, CC# 28351 F 03:00-04:00, 215 Dwinelle
Sec. 103, CC# 28354 F 03:00-04:00, 209 Dwinelle
Sec. 104, CC# 28357 F 03:00-04:00, 223 Dwinelle
A survey of American literature between WWI and WWII, focusing on poetry and fiction, and with an emphasis on modernist innovations.
Norton Anthology of American Literature, Vol D. Norton pb
Cather, Willa, The Professor's House, Vintage pb, 1990,
Fitzgerald, F. Scott, The Great Gatsby, Scribner pb, 1991
Hammett, Dashiel, Red Harvest,
Hemingway, Ernest, The Sun Also Rises, Scribner pb,
Hurston, Zora Neale, Their Eyes Were Watching God
Stein, Gertrude, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Vintage pb, 1990
English 131 - American Poetry (4 units) - CC# 28360
TTH 12:30-02:00 2040 VLSB Instructor: R. Hass
This course surveys American poetry from the mid-nineteenth century to the present, with special attention to Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, the early twentieth century modernists like T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, Gertrude Stein, and Ezra Pound, postwar poets like Frank O'Hara and Sylvia Plath, and a glance at contemporary trends.
History of Art 185A - Art, Architecture, & Design in the United States (4 units) - CC# 05559
TT 11:00-12:30 102 Wurster Instructor: M. Lovell
Sec. 101, CC# 05562 W 08:00-09:00, 425 Doe Library
Sec. 102, CC# 05565 W 11:00-12:00, 425 Doe Library
Sec. 103, CC# 05568 W 12:00-01:00, 425 Doe Library
Looking at major developments in painting and architecture from Romanticism to Post-modernism (with some attention to sculpture, city planning, design, and photography), this course addresses art and its social context over the last two centuries in what is now the United States. Issues include patronage, audience, technology, and the education of the artist as well as style, cultural expression, and the relationship of "high" art to vernacular and popular art. We will focus on the ways in which visual culture incorporates and responds to narratives of personal, community, and national identity. field trip.
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