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.