American Studies - Spring 1998

1. The development of a critical understanding of how American film represents history and political ideology;
2. The analysis of gender, ethnic, and racial constructions in American film;
3. The examination of film as it shapes and is shaped by cultural mythologies;
4. An increased confidence in film analysis, making use of concepts from critical theory and cultural studies.

Various Readings in Class Reader

Midterm Exam 25%

Term Paper (5-7 pages) 30%

Final Exam 35%

Attendance & Class Participation 10%

The midterm and final exam will be based on class lectures, assigned readings, and films screened in class. The paper topic will be assigned later in the course and will entail the close textual analysis of film(s) screened outside class.

Meeting One Introduction to the Course: Filming American National Identity

Screen: A DATE WITH YOUR FAMILY (1950), THE COOKIE CARNIVAL (1936), clip from INDEPENDENCE DAY (1996)

Meeting Two The Hollywood Studio System: Production Methods and Narrative Conventions

Screen: MEET ME IN ST. LOUIS (1944, dir. Vincente Minnelli, 113 min.)

Meeting Three Genre and Culture (Part One): The Western

Screen: STAGECOACH (1939, dir. John Ford, 97 min.)

Meeting Four Genre and Culture (Part Two): Historical Change

Screen: BROKEN ARROW (1950, dir. Delbert Daves, 93 min.)

Meeting Five The Big City: Representing Urban America

Screen: PUBLIC ENEMY (1931, dir. William Wellman, 84 min.)

Meeting Six America and the Melting Pot: The Politics of Assimilation

Screen: THE JAZZ SINGER (1927, dir. Alan Crosland, 89 min.)

Meeting Seven National Identity and Historiography (Part One)

Screen: Segment from BIRTH OF A NATION (1914, dir. D.W. Griffith, approx. 90 min.)

Meeting Eight Representing "Other" National Identity

Screen: SALUDOS AMIGOS (1942, dir. Norm Ferguson, 40 min.)

Meeting Nine National Identity and Historiography (Part Two)

Screen: MI FAMILIA (1995, dir. Gregory Nava, 128 min.)

Meeting Ten MIDTERM EXAM (2 hours)

Meeting 11 The "Breakdown": America and Hollywood in the 1960s

Screening: SUPERFLY (1972, dir. Gordon Parks, Jr., 96 min.)

Meeting 12 African-American Filmmaking .

Screening: DO THE RIGHT THING (1989, dir. Spike Lee, 132 min.)

Meeting 13 A Survey of Asian-Americans in American Film

Screening: EAT A BOWL OF TEA (1989, dir. Wayne Wang, 104 min.)

Meeting 14 Complicating the Issues: The Interaction of Race and Gender

Screening: MAHOGANY (1975, dir. Berry Gordy, 109 min.)

Meeting 15 Patriachal Capitalism and Filming Women

Screen: GILDA (1946, dir. Charles Vidor, 110 min.)

Meeting 16 The Woman's Film

Screen: ALL THAT HEAVEN ALLOWS (1955, dir. Douglas Sirk, 89 min.)

Meeting 17 The Rise of Female Filmmakers

Screen: THE BALLAD OF LITTLE JO (1993, dir. Maggie Greenwald, 120 min.)

Meeting 18 Class Barriers: The Unspoken in American Culture

Screening: NORMA RAE (1979, dir. Martin Ritt, 113 min.)

Meeting 19 The Latest Battlefront: Homosexuality in America

Screen: Segment from THE CELLULOID CLOSET (1996, dirs. Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Freidman)

Meeting 20 Target Marketing and Commodification of Identity

**Papers Due**

Screen: ALL OVER ME (1997, dir. Alex Reche, 90 min.)

FINAL EXAM (2 hours)

There is a large and steadily growing body of scholarly literature that examines the emergence of a nationalist discourse in the period between the American Revolution and the Civil War, and that examines various challenges to this emerging discourse coming from both sub-national and trans-national perspectives. This seminar will examine some of the major issues involved in late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century debates both over the legitimacy of the United States as a nation and over the question of the existence and nature of an "national" culture, and will consider some of the major expressive and rhetorical forms in which the debates manifested themselves.

Among the themes to be explored will be the extent to which the concept of national culture was inflected with racial, gendered, and class markings, ways in which the concept negotiated its meanings against such concepts as state, region, Europe, "humanity," and the "New World," and ways in which the concept was affected by changing technologies and conventions of representation.

The course will focus primarily on a series of major verbal, visual, and material texts from the period--texts with which all professional Americanists should be familiar--, placed in the context of some major recent scholarly literature on the course themes. The primary texts will include some of the following:

• J. Hector St. Jean de Crevecoeur, Letters from an American Farmer
• Thomas Paine, Common Sense
• Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia (selections)
• The U.S. Constitution
• The Federalist Papers, selected papers
• George Washington, selected addresses
• U.S. maps; city plans for Washington D.C. and New York City
• Selected paintings and prints, 1770-1850
• Hannah Foster, The Coquette
• Catharine Sedgwick, Hope Leslie
• James Fenimore Cooper, Notions of the Americans
• Alex de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, selections
• Selected essays by Emerson, Fuller, Childs, Douglass, and others
• Selected tales by Hawthorne, Poe, and othersVarious periodical essays and speeches from the 1820s, 1830s, and 1840s, including debates over U.S. expansion, cultural nationalism, slavery, treatment of Indians, women's rights, immigration, and labor rights

Once I determine what students wish to take the seminar, I will contact them individually (in late February) and, as much as possible, custom-tailor the reading to meet their specific interests.

The first half of the course will focus on the Revolutionary and Early National periods (roughly 1775 to the 1820s); the second half on the two decades ending in the 1840s. During the Spring of 1999 I plan to teach an American literature graduate course that will, in effect, be a "sequel" to this course--one focusing primarily on literature of the 1850s.

At each meeting of the seminar, several students will be responsible for ten-minute formal presentations focused on key interpretative and theoretical issues raised by the primary and secondary reading for that week. Each student will make three or four such presentations during the quarter. Each student may elect to write either four short papers (perhaps based on her/his oral presentations) or a final longer paper on a relevant topic of particular interest.

If you are potentially interested in taking this course and would like to use it to examine some particular text or texts of the period that I've not mentioned above (e.g., some specific novel by Cooper, George Lippard's The Monks of Monk Hall, the work of a particular abolitionist, Olmstead's plans for Central Park, speeches by specific tribal leaders, etc.), please contact me at:

michael_cowan@macmail.ucsc.edu

I'll be happy to try to include those texts in the course's reading list, even if it means dropping something else. I'm aware of the need to keep the reading to a reasonable amount.

Revised 7/13/04.