American Studies "Areas, Approaches, Methods"

What is American Studies? How can we define the discipline that you have chosen as your field of studies? What are the most important questions animating our field? This course will help you to frame tentative answers for these questions. It provides an overview of some of the most important and influential

  • areas of American Studies (e.g. early America, Enlightenment, industrialization, globalization)
  • approaches to the field of U.S. American literature, culture and media (e.g. New Criticism, Myth and Symbol School, ideology critique, new historicism, transnationalism)
  • methods and theories employed in the study of North American literary and cultural production (e.g. theorizing on race, class and gender; the writing back paradigm; methods for the study of heteroglossia)

A reader with the relevant material is available at the copy-shop in the Reckhammerweg. Prospective participants are expected to purchase the reader prior to our first meeting. Please prepare the reading material for the first session in advance. Requirements for successful completion of the course: active participation in classroom debate, submission of short assignments, oral exam at the end of the term (in conjunction with the theory courses of Dr. Caeners).