Time: Tuesdays, 4.00-6.40 pm Place: Room 2137 Taliaferro Hall
Course Description
AMST 629M is the second half of a two-course sequence (with AMST 601) required of Ph.D. students in the department (starting with the Fall 98 class). AMST 601 "traces the history of American Studies as an academic enterprise and the contexts--intellectual, cultural, and political--that have shaped it." AMST 629M aims to make students conversant with issues resonating in American Studies scholarship currently and to familiarize them with a set of theories and methods scholars are finding promising for investigating those issues.
The course will be organized as a proseseminar and will include a wired component to make students acquainted with the potential resources the World Wide Web makes available for research and teaching in American Studies. We will begin by reviewing a few fundamental concepts and ideas: post-structuralism and post-modernism, theories of racial formation, post-colonial studies, and border studies. We will then sample a range of scholarship that builds on, invokes, supplements, or complicates these ideas, including investigations of identity and difference, transnational studies, constructions of Whiteness, queer theory, globalization and internationalization issues, and studies that examine the interaction of class, race, ethnicity, and sexuality.
Our main task in AMST 629M will be to work through and reflect upon an intriguing if challenging set of readings. Class meetings will be structured to be as participatory as possible. Students will keep a reading journal, develop an autobiographical statement, and prepare a graduate level syllabus that integrates the recent scholarship into a course in their primary area of interest. The assignment will include an essay discussing the form and logic of the course and an online syllabus. All students in the class are required to have WAM and GLUE accounts and will build their own Websites over the course of the semester.
Course Requirements
Students will complete weekly reading assignments, contribute weekly to seminar discussions, occasionally lead seminar discussions, present an autobiographical statement, keep a weekly reading journal, develop a simple Webpage for classwork, and prepare a syllabus (with commentary) which will be presented on the Webpage.
Weekly Participation in Discussions: Proseminars are collective enterprises; they require everyone's engagement and participation to succeed. You should come to class prepared to contribute to each week's discussion of the readings. Good discussions can only be built when a critical mass of class members have not only read but reflected on the week's texts. Please give yourself enough time for reflection.
Often, we will begin each session by eliciting everyone's sense of the books' or articles' major arguments, research approaches, and contributions, before we turn things over to the discussion leaders. During each class we will attempt to analyze the readings until we comprehend how the authors have framed their questions, what promise they offer for thinking about issues currently resonating in American Studies, and how well the arguments or research programs have been executed. Part of our task will involve demystifying the ways scholars talk about their issues, translating their arguments when necessary, and assessing the suggestiveness of their ideas. Please come to class with a couple of comments and a couple of questions to contribute.
On Leading the Seminar: Students will sign up to lead the seminar at least twice during the semester. When scheduled to lead a discussion, your job will include presenting a brief assessment of the readings and developing a set of discussion questions to help the class grasp and work through the key issues or concepts in the texts. Different texts inspire different kinds of discussions. For some readings, you may wish to focus on difficult or obscure passages or concepts and enlist everyone's help in working through them. For others, your presentation might consist of a critical evaluation of the work's purpose, scope, theoretical framework, methods, and major arguments. In other cases, you may wish to poll the class to elicit their opinions on the strengths and weaknesses of readings or on controversial points raised. In all cases, you should AVOID MERELY RECAPITULATING THE CONTENT OF THE TEXTS AT LENGTH. If you are stumped by a set of readings (this happens--it's OK!), feel free to take advantage of my Monday office hours.
Autobiographical Statement: Each student will prepare an autobiographical statement of approximately 7-10 minutes to be presented to the class. The purpose of this exercise is to ask everyone to reflect upon her relationship with her scholarship and to situate herself intellectually, politically, and personally. The logic of this exercise will become apparent as we explore the extent to which current approaches to American studies start from a position of identity politics. The exercise is designed to ask each scholar to think about his relationship to his work and to reflect upon the role of identity politics in his and others' scholarship.
Weekly Reading Journal: Each student will be assigned to keep a weekly reading journal. Journals should be fairly formal documents (typed and proofread) in which you reflect upon and respond to major points raised in each week's reading assignments. Use your journal to engage with the texts, to help you digest the ideas presented therein, to make these concepts your own, reject them (with cause), relate them to other ideas or scholarly sources you know, or otherwise make sense of them in some way. Journals will be collected about every two weeks.
Class Webpage: Toward the end of February we will begin building a class Website. This will consist of an online syllabus and a series of linked pages belonging to every student in the class. Information Technology (IT) already plays a strong role in our field and everyone intending to pursue scholarship in American Studies, whether in academe or public history or cultural resource settings needs to be familiar with IT-related resources and skills. By the end of the semester, you will know how to create your own basic Web site.
We will build our Websites incrementally through four assignments: a basic Webpage providing a brief identification of your interests and areas of expertise, an annotated bibliography of five Websites that you have identified that offer resources in your areas of interest, an annotated bibliography of five key texts that you plan to use for your syllabus project, and the final syllabus project itself. Workshops providing instruction in basic and intermediate html will be arranged for those needing it. Please consult the course calendar for due dates for each component of the Website.
Syllabus Project: The largest written project of the semester will be the syllabus project. Your task is to develop a syllabus for a graduate level course in whatever you consider to be your main area(s) of emphasis in American Studies. It goes without saying that your course should be interdisciplinary. And it should be up to date--that is, it should incorporate at least some of the current approaches in American Studies that we've been studying all semester. The project will have two components: the syllabus itself (which will be mounted on your website) and an essay providing a tour of your syllabus, a rationale for why you have shaped it in this particular way, a discussion of what role(s) the "current approaches" play in your course, and an assessment of the course's strengths, weaknesses, challenges, and irritations.
Course Readings
Books are available for purchase at the Maryland Book Exchange, University Book Center, or . (All books have been ordered for the reserve service at McKeldin Library). Two copies of articles or book chapters will be available "on reserve" in the graduate lounge. Please sign out articles for copying and return them within two hours.
