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The History and Paradigms of American Studies 1 (Šesnić, 2022)

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Course title: The History and Paradigms of American Studies 1 (A, 19th/20th)
Literary Seminar (MA Level): The History and Paradigms of American Studies 1 (A, 19th/20th)
Instructor: Dr. Jelena Šesnić
ECTS credits: 6
Status: elective (obligatory for American Studies majors in the 1st semester)
Enrollment requirements: enrollment in the 1st and/or 3rd semester

Fall 2023/24
Mon, 11-12:30, A-123
Wed, 1:15-2, A-105
Office: B-018

Phone: 01-4092060
E-mail: jsesnic@ffzg.hr

Office hours: Mon, 12:00-13:00 p.m.; Thur, 10-11 a.m.

Course description:

In the seminar we shall be discussing the emergence and various methodologies of American Studies from their beginnings in the 1930s and 1940s until the revisionist interventions in the 1960s and 1970s. In the introductory sessions the following questions shall be considered: why and in which contexts American Studies have appeared; in what way their approaches differ from the other disciplines concerned with U.S. American culture and society. The next sessions will be dedicated to the scholars who have founded American Studies. In the concluding part, a synthesis of readings of selected critical texts – accompanied by the relevant and illustrative primary (literary) texts – will be offered so as to point to their similarities and highlight the differences among the paradigms. Conclusively, it will be considered how these paradigms might be relevant for the understanding of the United States in the past and at present, and to what extent they might be applicable in other temporal and spatial contexts.

Course requirements: regular attendance (10%); in-class and home assignments (20%); seminar paper (40%); midterm and final test (30%)

Syllabus (subject to change):

  1. historical emergence of American Studies as a discipline
  2. methodologies of American Studies, an overview
  3. Main practitioners: F.O. Matthiessen
  4. Perry Miller
  5. Henry Nash Smith
  6. R.W.B. Lewis
  7. Midterm
  8. Leo Marx
  9. Richard Slotkin
  10. Alan Trachtenberg
  11. Sacvan Bercovitch
  12. Final test; course evaluation

Selected bibliography of texts will be provided in digital form on Omega.

Additional readings:

Castiglia, Christopher. Practices of Hope: Literary Criticism in Disenchanted Times, NYU P, 2017.

Fuller, Randal. Emerson’s Ghosts: Literature, Politics, and the Making of Americanists. Oxford UP, 2007.

Pfister, Joel. Critique for What? Cultural Studies, American Studies, Left Studies. Paradigm Publishers, 2006.

—. Surveyors of Customs: American Literature as Cultural Analysis. Oxford UP, 2016.

Van Engen, Abram C. City on a Hill: A History of American Exceptionalism. Yale UP, 2020.

Voelz, Johannes. Transcendental Resistance: The New Americanists and Emerson’s Challenge. Dartmouth, 2010.