= final examination topics: MA, American: American Studies Theories, Cultural Studies, Visual Culture

# Keywords of early American culture: covenant ideas of Puritanism, Antinomianism, religious dissent, evangelical democracy.
# Keywords of modern American culture: American exceptionalism, the myth of individualism, the feminine mystique.
# Reinterpreting the “sacred texts” of America (The Declaration of Independence, The Declaration of Sentiments; the speeches of Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, John Wannuaucon Quinney, Chief Red Jacket, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Martin Luther King, Woodrow Wilson, John F. Kennedy, etc.).
# Manifest destiny and manifest domesticity.
# The American dream.
# Class in American society.
# The intellectual history of women: Puritan subversion, separate spheres, women's history, female relations in the 19th century, the gender of individualism.
# Paradigms and paradigm changes in American Studies.
# The “pictorial turn”
# Visual culture versus art history
# The social construction of the visual and the visual construction of the social in American culture 
# Race, gender and visual representation (empowerment and disempowerment of vision)
# Elite/popular culture vs. mass culture theories
# Representation of race and gender in popular culture and mass media
# Major tropes, genres, and media in American popular culture (Frontier and the Western; romance and the romantic comedy; sitcoms: suburbs, family and domesticity; the fantastic and utopia/dystopia; social media, culture and identity construction; choose one for detailed analysis)


== recommended readings

* Althen, Gary (with Doran Amanda and Szmania Susan), American Ways, 2nd Edition, Intercultural Press, 2003.
* Ehrenreich, Barbara, Bait and Switch: The Futile Pursuit of the American Dream. Holt, 2005.
* Ehrenreich, Barbara, Nickel and Dimed. Holt, 2001.
* Rothstein, Bo, Social Traps and the Problem of Trust (Theories of Institutional Design). Cambridge University Press, 2005.
* McFarlane, C. K., ed., Readings in Intellectual History: The American Tradition. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970.
* Hollinger, David A., and Charles Capper, ed., The American Intellectual Tradition, I−II. New York: Oxford UP, 1997.
* Pease, Donald E., ed., National Identities and Post-Americanist Narratives. Durham: Duke University Press, 1994.
* Schlosser, Eric, Fast Food Nation. Penguin Books, 2002.
* Harley, Gail M., Emma Curtis Hopkins: Forgotten Founder of New Thought. Syracuse UP, 2002.
* Macionis, John, Social Problems (4th edition). Prentice Hall, 2009.
* Kerber, Linda K., No Constitutional Right to Be Ladies. Women and the Obligations of Citizenship. New York: Hill and Wang, 1998.
* Kerber, Linda K., Towards an Intellectual History of Women. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1997.
* Kerber, Linda K., Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1980.
* Kerber, Linda K., Alice Kessler-Harris and Kathryn Kish Sklar, U. S. History as Women’s History. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1995.
* Kerber, Linda K., and Jane Sherron de Hart, Women’s America. Refocusing the Past. New York: Oxford UP, 1995.
* Mooney, Linda, D. Knox, and C. Schacht, Understanding Social Problems (7th edition). Wadsworth, 2010.
* Maddox, Lucy, ed., Locating American Studies. The Evolution of a Discipline. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1999.
* Baker Eddy, Mary, Manual of the Mother Church (The First Church of Christ Scientist in Boston, Massachusetts). IndyPublish, 2007.
* Machin, David, and Theo van Leeuwen, Global Media Discourse. Routledge, 2007
* Horwitz, Richard P., ed., The American Studies Anthology. Wilmington: Scholarly Resources, 2001.
* Phillip, Rayner, Peter Wall, Stephan Kruger, Media Studies: The Essential Resource. Routledge, 2004
* Kephart, William, and W. Zellner, Extraordinary Groups: An Examination of Unconventional Lifestyles, 5th ed. St. Martin’s Press, 1993.
* Kornblum, William, and J. Julian, Social Problems (13th edition). Prentice Hall, 2008.