American Madness: Mental Illness in History and Culture
Experiences of and ideas about madness, insanity, and mental illness have varied and changed radically within American history and culture. This module will survey and analyse these changes from the mid-19thcentury to the present. We will consider how and why medical authority, gender, and class have all impacted the way in which mental illness is understood, and consider the significance of changing approaches to treatment. Sources used on this interdisciplinary module range from medical accounts and psychiatric theory to memoir, fiction and film. The aim is to place representations of mental illness in their historical context, and to ask what they reveal about related ideas about identity, conformity, social care and responsibility.
American Magazine Culture
The magazine has been one of the most accessible and influential cultural forms in America since the mid-18th century.
From the wide-ranging political and literary magazines of this founding period through the emergence of specialised and mass-market periodicals in the 19th century to the counter-cultural and consumerist magazines of the 20th century, this distinctive mode of publication has reflected the tensions and ideals of a rapidly developing society.
Using a broad range of representative magazines from different eras, this module will encourage students to get to grips with how American culture has shaped, and been shaped by, the periodical, and it will also introduce them to some of the unique literary and institutional qualities of the magazine.
Primary sources covered on this module are likely to include:
- The Dial (est. 1840)
- Harper's (est. 1850)
- The New Yorker (est. 1925)
- Life (est. 1936)
- Rolling Stone (est. 1967).
Looked at in the context of their times, such sources show us how Americans have long engaged with and debated their own identity through the prism of print, as well as the ways in which this self-definition has changed across time.
Moreover, alongside the magazine's regular testing of new political and cultural concepts we will be able to see how the periodical form itself embraced other emerging media, including illustration, photography, and popular music.
The main content-spine through each week will be a focus on changes in the nature of American journalism, the rise of modern advertising, and the development of the short story as a form, as well as the interactions between these three elements.
In addition to the standard lecture/seminar set-up, the module will also incorporate a series of workshops focusing on hands-on study of hard copies of particular publications.
This is an optional module worth 20 credits.
Building the Nation: The Discursive Space of American Architecture
This module introduces students to an often overlooked area of material and visual culture in the form of architecture and the built environment.
The course encourages students to analyse and understand these sites as discursive and ideological spaces that encompass and reveal particular historical moments and social, economic and cultural movements.
Beginning by examining the plantation house, the module takes a broadly chronological approach and asks students to consider how buildings and public spaces construct and control citizens’ behaviours and allows them to further their understanding of key cultural theories including modernism, postmodernism and post-structuralism.
This is an optional module worth 20 credits.
Engaging Asia: The United States, India and Pakistan, 1942-Present
This module examines American relations with India and Pakistan between the Second World War and the onset of market-based economic reforms in the early 1990s that transformed the socio-economic landscape of the Indian subcontinent.
Much of the focus will be on:
- American involvement in conflicts that shaped modern South Asia (Indo-Pakistani hostilities in 1947, 1965 and 1971
- 1962 Sino-Indian War
- 1979 Soviet intervention in Afghanistan
- the influence exercised by external actors on American regional policy (principally Britain, the Soviet Union and Communist China)
- the impact of international trends on America’s relations with India and Pakistan, such as decolonization, globalization and nuclear proliferation.
In addition, consideration will be given to the cultural dimension of America’s relationship with India and Pakistan. Cinematic and literary depictions of US-South Asian relations, encompassing issues of race, religion, gender and neo-colonialism, will be critically examined.
This is an optional module worth 20 credits.
Ethnic and New Immigrant Writing
This course will consider the development of ‘ethnic’ and new immigrant literature in the United States from the early twentieth century to the present day. It will do so by positioning literary works within their wider historical, political and cultural context.
The course will examine the dominant ideas and concerns of a range of texts from life-writing and poetry to drama, short fiction and the novel by writers from a range of ethno-cultural backgrounds, including Irish, Jewish, Italian, Caribbean and Asian American.
Issues for discussion will include:
- the claiming of the United States by new immigrant and ‘ethnic’ writers
- race and ethnicity
- gender, class and sexuality
- labour and economic status
- the uses and re-writing of American history and ‘master narratives’
- the impact of US regionalism
- the ways in which writers engage with the American canon
- multiculturalism and the ‘culture wars’
- the growth of ‘ethnic’ American writing and Ethnic Studies as academic fields.
The course will analyse works by such writers as:
- Jacob Riis
- Mario Puzo
- Philip Roth
- Jamaica Kincaid
- Bharati Mukherjee
- Sandra Cisneros.
This is an optional module worth 20 credits.
Feminist Thought in the US: 1970-Present
This module will familiarise students with the major “strands” of feminist thought which have emerged in the United States since the 1970s: from liberal feminism through radical and materialist to post-structural and neo-liberal feminism.
Although the module will focus on key texts and thinkers for each “strand,” we will simultaneously challenge any neat categorisation by exploring the central issues and debates, such as the sex-gender distinction, female sexuality, and pornography, which have preoccupied as well as divided feminist thinkers over the past few decades.
Finally, we will contextualise these issues and debates by looking at contemporaneous representations of women in fiction, the mass media, and other cultural sites.
This is an optional module worth 20 credits.
From Revolution to Rapprochement: Britain and the US 1776-1877
This module encourages students to reassess the Anglo-American relationship during an era of major upheaval in both nations (1776-1877).
Taking students from the American Revolution through to the end of the Reconstruction era the module will challenge learners to examine how events and ideas forced Britons and Americans to re-conceptualise their relationship.
Through the module, students will engage with concepts crucial in the formation of the modern world including:
- race
- ethnicity
- liberty
- republicanism
- class
- gender
- manners
- reform
This is an optional module worth 20 credits.
History of the Civil Rights Movement
This module examines a range of documents and scholarly controversies pertaining to the Civil Rights Movement between 1940 and 1970.
Documents will include:
- public and organisational records
- photo- journalism
- speeches
- memoir
- personal papers
Controversies will include those relating to the chronological limits, spatial dynamics, and gender politics of the movement, as well as those relating to the movement’s goals and achievements.
This is an optional module worth 20 credits.
In the Midst of War: The United States and the Vietnam Wars, 1940-1975
This module looks at American attitudes, perceptions and policies toward Vietnam from the Second World War until the collapse of the South Vietnamese government in 1975.
We will examine the forces that led the U.S. to get entangled in Southeast Asia looking at the Cold War, domestic politics, economics, and broader international issues, as well as the Vietnamese role in this process and the part they played in decisively shaping the events that unfolded.
As we will see, it was the U.S. involving itself in the long Vietnamese struggle for self-determination that provoked two major wars in the area between 1945 and 1975.
We will also consider important themes such as race, gender, religion, self-determination, empire, decolonisation, domestic politics and national security that can help us to develop a broader understanding of these events.
Finally, the module also introduces students to some of the key sources, materials and archival collections that can be employed when embarking upon independent research in the area.
This is an optional module worth 20 credits.
Latino Cultures
This module offers a survey of Latino cultural expression from the colonial period through to the present.
It explores genres, forms, and sites involved in the production and consumption of Latino culture including:
- art
- vernacular architecture
- music
- testimony
- fiction
- performance
- religious expression
- tourism/heritage/museum
- media industries
- elite/popular/everyday cultural expression
It also looks at the positioning of Latino culture at the margins and within the mainstream of US society.
It acknowledges the diversity and demographic significance of the Latino population by covering a range of groups such as:
- Mexican
- Puerto Rican
- Cuban
- Dominican
We also look at several major US cities and metropolitan regions including:
- Los Angeles
- New York
- Chicago
- Miami.
The module adopts a largely chronological approach and considers a range of critical debates about the production and consumption of Latino culture and its social and political significance.
This is an optional module worth 20 credits.
North American Film Adaptations
This module examines North American short stories and novels and their film adaptations.
We'll look at the contexts in which both the literary and the cinematic texts are produced as well as to the analysis of the texts themselves.
In particular, the module takes an interest in literary texts whose film adaptations have been produced in different national contexts to the source material.
This is an optional module worth 20 credits.
Popular Music Cultures and Counter-cultures
This interdisciplinary module examines the role played by American popular music in counter-cultural movements. A central concern is to evaluate the effectiveness and potential of popular music as a socially-critical or oppositional force.
We focus on:
- the ways in which marginalised, subordinate or dissenting social groups have used popular music as a vehicle for self-definition and for re-negotiating their relationship to the social, economic and cultural mainstream
- how the mainstream has responded to music countercultures in ways that range from repression to co-optation
- how the music and the movements have been represented and reflected on in fiction, film, poetry, journalism and theory.
The module is built around case studies of key issues and moments in American popular music history.
One of the key issues is the debate over the ownership and use of African-American musical resources, from nineteenth-century minstrelsy to twenty-first century hip-hop. Another is the function of commercial entertainment institutions in mediating between music subcultures, political countercultures, and the mainstream culture.
Among the key moments examined are:
- the folk revival and the 1930s Popular Front
- rock 'n' roll and desegregation in the 1950s
- rock music and the 1960s counterculture
- postmodernism and identity politics in the music of the MTV age, and the relationship between hip hop culture and neo-liberalism in the early twenty-first century.
This is an optional module worth 20 credits.
Recent Queer Writing
This module explores representations of sexuality and gender expression in contemporary Canadian and American texts by LGBTQ writers (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transsexual & transgender, two-spirit, queer & questioning).
The module is multi-generic, engaging with forms including:
- novels
- short fiction
- life writing
- poetry
- drama
- graphic narrative.
Topics for discussion will include:
- LBGTQ sexuality
- constructions of masculinity and femininity
- the politics of representation: the extent to which writing can enable agency as subjects or citizens
- intersections between race, ethnicity, class, nationality and religion in the construction of gender and sexual identities
- writing for LGBTQ youth
Literature studied will be contextualised in relation to relevant debates in feminist, queer, postcolonial and transnational theories.
Representative authors for study may include:
- James Baldwin
- Jane Rule
- Dionne Brand
- Dorothy Allison
- Tomson Highway
- Alison Bechdel
- Leslie Feinberg
- Ivan Coyote
This is an optional module worth 20 credits.
Sexuality in American History
From the Puritans to Playboy, sexuality has been a focal point in the culture, politics, and society of the United States. This module will examine Americans' differing attitudes over time toward sexuality. Representative topics covered may include:
- marriage and adultery
- homosexuality and heterosexuality
- nudity
- abortion
- birth control
- prostitution
- free love
- rape.
This is an optional module worth 20 credits.
The Great American Short Story
This module examines the development of the American short story over the last 200 years, from Washington Irving’s Sketchbook (1819) through to contemporary short story writers such as George Saunders and Junot Diaz.
It focuses on:
- the emergence of the American short story in comparative context and in the shadow of the critical birth of the Great American Novel
- how short story genres emerge and disappear
- how critics have theorised the short story form
- the relationship between the short story and the magazine
- the relationship between the short story and the creative writing program in the twentieth century
This is an optional module worth 20 credits.
US Foreign Policy
This module examines the making of US foreign policy in the post-Cold War period, from the end of the Cold War to the present.
It examines the grand historical narratives of American international relations and considers in depth the drivers behind the foreign policies pursued by Presidents:
- George H. W. Bush
- Bill Clinton
- George W. Bush
- Barack Obama
- Donald Trump
It considers whether the post-1989 period has constituted a break from previous traditions in US foreign policy or whether there has been an essential continuity through the war on terror and beyond. It does this through an examination of the impact of economics, geopolitics, ideology and security issues on post-1989 strategy in different regions of the world, as well as the impact of a new international environment marked by the demise of bipolarity and the rise of globalisation.
This is an optional module worth 20 credits.
Varieties of Classic American Film, Television and Literature Since 1950
- What is a film, television or literary classic?
- How has this term come under pressure and fractured over the past half century or so?
This module will examine these questions by building on knowledge and study skills acquired by students in level 1 and level 2 classes that touch upon North American film, television and literature.
It will do so by considering the concept of the mid and late twentieth century American “classic” in a variety of contrasting and overlapping contexts. These contexts will be elaborated on the basis of their formal, generic, period and/or cultural designations that will cover university and exam curricula reading lists, popular opinion and widespread critical consensus (such as the currently prevalent view, for instance, that the early twenty-first century constitutes a ‘golden age’ of US television).
The overall aim will be to encourage students to scrutinise more assiduously both the aesthetic and social processes by which ‘classic’ categories and sub-categories have and continue to be constructed.
The following represent a few examples of texts/ designations that might be explored:
- Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man and Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo as ‘canonized’ classics
- Harper Lee's To Kill A Mockingbird and Steve McQueen’s Twelve Years A Slave as ‘pedagogical’ classics
- John Williams’ Butcher’s Crossing and Jonathan Nolan & Lisa Joy’s TV series Westworld as classic modern westerns
- Evan Connell’s novel Mrs Bridge and Kenneth Lonergan’s movie You Can Count On Me as ‘minor’ classics
- Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar and the recent TV adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale as feminist classics
- Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections and Vince Gilligan’s Breaking Bad as critically lauded ‘contemporary classics’
This is an optional module worth 20 credits.