LFU:online

This seminar will deepen your understanding of some key concepts relating to U.S. history, familiarize you with major historiographical debates – and, most importantly, introduce you to an array of voices and reflections across the centuries as well across racial and class lines. Helping you refine your skills as an American Studies student in handling primary and secondary material is one of the main goals of this seminar. Careful in-depth reading of our common texts together with your thoughtful engagement and contribution in class discussions are essential prerequisites for this seminar.

A city upon a hill, an empire for freedom, the land of boundless opportunity, a country of extremes, the bully of the free world, the world’s last best hope. The intensely ideological nature of American national identity as well as the strong and diverse responses the country has elicited over centuries around the globe offer a rich research opportunity for cultural historians with an interdisciplinary appetite and international interest. In this seminar we explore America as a model, a projection, an idea – both from within and from abroad. Our time frame extends from the Puritan errand into the wilderness to the current global hegemon in decline. Rather than following a history of events, however, we will identify major themes in American self-representations and foreign perceptions and trace their changing meaning over time. Our primary source base will be a set of – mainly American - seminal documents (including novels, films and travel accounts) on the concepts of providence, freedom, and human nature and on the realities of slavery, religion, power and dissent. These will be complemented by European and Asian conceptualizations, critiques and appropriations of the “first modern nation.” We will study American visions of religious and political freedom, promises of economic opportunity and technological advances and outcries against inequality, hypocrisy, abuse of power. At the same time we will examine how other societies and cultures used “America” to work out their own ambivalence over modernity

Lecture inputs, student presentations, group discussions.

Active class participation, student presentations, reading and writing assignments, term paper.

Course materials and selected primary and secondary sources will be posted on OLAT.

for the Bachelor Program (612): positive completion of compulsory module 14
for Bachelor Program Lehramt (457): positive completion of compulsory module 16
for the Teacher Training Program (Lehramtsstudium: 344): VO2: Introduction to American Literary Studies

For students of the BA Teacher Training Program (457), it is strongly recommended to have passed the VU Introduction to American Cultures.

For the Teacher Training Program (Lehramtsstudium: 344): PS2: American Culture.

Due to substantial differences in the allocation of ECTS-Credits in various curricula (teacher training program - BA/MA English and American Studies), the requirements for this course vary. Information will be provided by the instructor at the beginning of the course.