American Studies

This seminar first develops a brief overview of the form and theory of the essay as a literary genre. Primarily, however, the course reads and analyzes essays North American women writers who, in particular from the 1960s onwards, appropriated and henceforth shaped the form and tradition of the essay. To understand the profound aesthetic and social influence and the cultural work of women authors after World War II, the course devotes some time to canonical authors such as Susan Sontag and Joan Didion. Not least because of the very cultural authority of these writers and their early and pivotal periods of production in the era of counterculture and the women's movement in the United States, the Cold War and accelerating globalization, the course explores how these - and other - women essayists wrote about the Other, about the world. Frequently, in the essay itself and in research on it, the "I," the introspection of the writer, takes center stage. While this is highly relevant to an understanding of the genre, the course wants to venture a shift of perspective and ask: What forms of observation and description, what ethics of regarding the Other (or lack thereof) can be found in these texts? What imagery, cultural valences, and political implications can be distilled from the essays? In addition, the course pays special attention to works by African American women writers such as Audre Lorde, Alice Walker, and June Jordan. African American writers in particular used the essay as a medium of political self-authorization, social critique, and literary renegotiation of cultural knowledge and female and minority subjectivity. Which distinct aesthetics of factual writing did they develop, how did they inscribe themselves in canonical essay traditions, yet how did they also perform productive fractures and critiques of these and develop alternative forms of essayistic thinking and writing?

This course examines the African American experience in the United States from the colonial period to the contemporary era. It is interdisciplinary in design, using different approaches to considering the history and culture of Africans who gradually became African Americans as the British American colonies became the United States.

 

This course explores major themes, patterns, developments, and conflicts in American history, politics, and society, from the pre-colonial era to the present day. Drawing on a range of primary, secondary, and tertiary sources, both historical and contemporary, it outlines phases, continuities, and changes in the nation’s history, identifies key ideologies and institutions, introduces theories and analytical methods that shed light on the nation’s development, and highlights how understandings of the present-day United States call for an informed, critical knowledge of its past. The course includes topics such as liberty and equality, individualism and community, nationalism and regionalism, self-reliance and welfare, business and labor, slavery and race, immigration and identity, ethnicity and gender, domestic reform and overseas expansion, and hot and cold wars. It also addresses the growth of the United States from its origins as a British colonial outpost to its contemporary status as global superpower. In addition, the course enables students to produce written work on topics within its subject areas.

This course introduces students to the institutions and politics of the United States. It offers a thorough grounding in the empirical and theoretical literature on American politics, and requires students to evaluate that literature critically through seminar discussion and oral presentations, two pieces of assessed coursework, and an unseen examination. Starting by building up students’ basic historical knowledge of the development of American politics, the course covers the Constitution, Congress, the Presidency and federal bureaucracy, separation of powers, federalism and state governments, the Supreme Court, elections, political parties and interest groups.