First-Year Courses in American Culture (Division 315)
This page was created at 7:49 AM on Wed, Oct 4, 2000.
Open courses in American Culture
Wolverine Access Subject listing for AMCULT
Take me to the Fall Term '00 Time Schedule for American Culture.
To see what first-year courses have been added or changed in American Culture this week go to What's New This Week.
Unless otherwise stated, the permission required for the repetition for
credit of specifically designated courses is that of the student’s concentration or BGS advisor.
Courses in Ojibwa
A full sequence of Ojibwa cannot be guaranteed. Students must consult with the American Culture Program Office before undertaking Ojibwa to satisfy the College language requirement.
Amer. Cult. 103. First Year Seminar in American Studies.
Section 001 – From Ellis Island to "The Promised Land": Introduction to Immigrant Literatures
Instructor(s): Magdalena Zaborowska
Prerequisites & Distribution: Only first-year students, including those with sophomore standing, may pre-register for First-Year Seminars. All others need permission of instructor. (3). (HU).
First-Year Seminar,
Credits: (3).
Course Homepage: No Homepage Submitted.
Ellis Island, a gateway or "processing station" for immigrants coming to the United States in early twentieth century, is said to have admitted the ancestors of about 40% of people who comprise today's U.S. population. Referring to the ambivalent history of this patch of land located in Upper New York Bay, a documentary calls it "An Island of Hope, an Island of Tears." It will begin with an introduction to and retracing of several immigrant journeys that illustrate the interweaving of "hopeful" and "tearful" aspects of male and female newcomers' acculturation and Americanization. Ellis Island as a literal and symbolic location, and the historic and cultural period spanning 1890-1930 will serve as central foci for the first part of the course. We will read literary texts, such as Emma Lazarus' famous poem, "The Colossus" (1883, 1903) Abraham Cahan's Yekl: A Tale of the Ghetto (1896), Mary Antin's From Polotzk to Boston (1899), Israel Zangwill's play "The Melting Pot" (1909), and Anzia Yezierska's Breadgivers (1925), as well as excerpts from reviews, editorials, and past and recent historic and critical studies of the period, such as the nativist reports of the Dillingham Commission (1907-11) and the infamous Dictionary of Races or Peoples (1911). We will study early twentieth-century popular representations of ethnicity and xenophobic and anti-Semitic depictions of the immigrant as the "other," who must be "melted" into a model American. We will also watch Charlie Chaplin's burlesque depiction of the immigrant story in his 1917 film, "The Immigrant," a cinematic re-reading of the gender dynamics in "Yekl," a documentary on Ellis Island, and a slide-show tour of its contemporary museum of immigration. The second part of the course aims to examine various meanings of "(im)migrant" vs. "American" and the political and cultural consequences that this juxtaposition has had on newcomer stories and concepts of post-World War II American identity. We will read poems and view art
produced by immigrant artists, discuss fragments of Audre Lorde's Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982), Eva Hoffman's Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language (1989), and Gish Jen's Mona in the Promised Land (1996), as well as John Edgar Weideman's short story, "Valeida." We will also consider the development of scholarly discussion on immigration, from Oscar Handlin's The Uprooted: The Epic Story of the Great Migrations that Made the American People (1951), through Sam B. Girgus's The New Covenant: Jewish Writers and the American Idea (1984), Werner Sollor's Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture (1986) and The Invention of Ethnicity (1989), to Susan Stanford Friedman's Mappings: Feminism and the Cultural Geographies of Encounter (1998). In addition to regular attendance and participation, the students taking the class will be expected to give oral reports, work in teams, and write a short and a longer final essay.
Amer. Cult. 201. American Values.
Section 001.
Instructor(s): Margarita de la Vega-Hurtado (delavega@umich.edu)
Prerequisites & Distribution: (4). (HU).
Credits: (4; 3 in the half-term).
Course Homepage: No Homepage Submitted.
This course will explore the riot of ideals, aspirations, conflicts, visions, and material realities that have defined American culture. It will draw on a range of sources – including fiction, music, movies, architecture, and images in art – to reconstruct a history of ways in which Americans have imagined their nation. And, while this is not a history course, we will read a lot of history to follow the life of the American imagined community from the struggles to make sense of industrial growth, national expansion, and urbanization in the late 19th century to the current struggle to understand an increasingly multi-ethnic population, an increasingly service-oriented economy, and a growing distrust of government with the history of ideas about what "America" should mean. We will think about American culture as it is manifest in ideas about patriotism and war, race and national progress, and the idea of separate spheres as a solution to the moral problems of industrial capitalism.
Amer. Cult. 230/Hist. of Art 230. Art and Life in 19th-Century America.
Section 001.
Prerequisites & Distribution: (3). (HU).
Credits: (3).
Course Homepage: http://www.umich.edu/~hartspc/histart/F2000/230-001.html
See History of Art 230.001.
This page was created at 7:49 AM on Wed, Oct 4, 2000.
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