UGC 211 LYN
American Pluralism: "At Home in America?"
#311153
Professor Deidre Lynch (English)
MWF 12:00 - 12:50
Clemens 4
Our readings for this section of American Pluralism will focus on the roles that immigration and migration, in tandem with feelings of community and feelings of belonging, have played in Americans' lives. The books and essays I'm considering assigning--books like Chang-Rae Lee's Native Speaker, Nella Larson's Passing, Art Spiegelman's Maus, Octavia Butler's Kindred; essays by Adrian Piper; Curtis Chang; Adrienne Rich; Richard Rodriguez; and many others--will, I hope, provoke us into examining questions like these: How have Americans reconciled their commitment to social mobility (moving out and up, going West or going North) with their sense of importance of home (the place that we run away from and return to)? Is it still the same family on the other side? Do mobility and home means the same things to women that they mean to men?
We'll spend a lot of our time in this course thinking about what it means to make a home and feel at home. As the cultural historian Angelika Bammer and anthropologist Renato Rosaldo have each noted, "home" is a slippery term. It can refer to a deeply familiar place, the location where you grew up, and refer to a place you've never been, your parents' or grandparents' homeland in another country. It can even refer to the hotel room or campground where you are spending the night in transit. (At what point does a dorm room become "home"?) In view of this slipperiness, what precisely does it mean to feel at home in the USA--for an individual to think of a country that has a quarter of a billion residents and that covers about 3 and a half million square miles as the place where s/he belongs"?
Stories about American who have crossed the color-line in quest of economic security, stories about Americans who, having found such security, have left their working-class roots behind, and stories about Americans who have lost their mother-tongues will make us wonder about what it means to lose the home we have with those who share our racial and/or class and/or linguistic identities. And in the last weeks of the course we'll engage with readings that investigate what it would take for all of us to feel at home (sheltered and secure) in the American university and its classrooms.
Requirements: regular attendance; involvement with class discussions; seven or eight short response papers (1 page); two or three longer papers (5 pages each).
SOC 211 LEW American Pluralism Cognate
"Sociology of Diversity"
#415352 (cross-listed with SSC 212 Reg. # 268728)
Professor Lionel S. Lewis (Sociology)
MWF 11:00 - 11:50
Cooke 121
The purpose of the course is to introduce students in a systematic way to the continuity and changes in patterned behavior in America. Throughout the semester, concepts and theories of sociology will be used to gain a better understanding of the experiences of a society that is diverse ethnically, racially, religiously, and economically, and the changing structure and processes fostered by this diversity. We will consider how its demographics, class structure, the relationship between various social groups, and the major institutions provide the broad outlines of the society as a whole. The course will focus on the diversity of heritage and values (as well as examining the question of a common culture) that sets off Americans of various identities and loyalties -- men and women, rich and poor, individuals of various ethnic identities, and on tolerance of differences. Particular attention will be given to what social researchers have learned about how the occupational structure and the distribution of income, wealth, prestige and power differentially affect individuals with various ethnic, racial, class, religious and gender experiences. The readings are selected to help the student answer the question: Who are the American people? Although the readings and lectures will sometimes consider historical and literary materials, the dominant perspective is sociological.
Required texts are: Dale McLemore, Racial and Ethnic Relations in America; Lionel S. Lewis, Cold War on Campus; Elliot Liebow, Tell Them Who I Am: The Lives of Homeless Women.
UGC 211 SMT
American Pluralism
#182270
Professor Barry Smith (Philosophy)
TR 9:30 - 10:50
Cooke 121
By means of debates and special guest lectures a variety of strands in the tapestry of American pluralism will be subjected to rigorous examination. Topics will include: Should women be allowed to serve in front-line combat units? Did Europeans steal America from its original inhabitants? Does affirmative action benefit minorities? Are women in the labor force treated unfairly? Does America have a different system of justice for rich and poor? Does pornography empower women? Should same-sex marriage be allowed? Is interracial adoption wrong? Should the consumption of drugs be legalized? Should gangster rap be banned? Does the fetus have rights? Do 'Hispanics' exist?
Prerequisites: None
Required text: Annette T. Rottenberg. Elements of Argument: A Text and Reader. Boston: St. Martin's Press, 4th ed., 1994.
GEO 231 American Pluralism Cognate
"Contemporary Problems of the U.S."
#493867
Professor James E. McConnell (Geography)
TR 11:00 - 12:20
Fillmore 357
Americans face a number of important and complex public policy issues in the 1990s that are directly and indirectly related to differences in social class, gender, race, ethnicity, religion, and age. Such issues include concerns about the country's current immigration policy, the deindustrialization of the economy, economically growing versus lagging regions, involvement in the global community, abandoned neighborhoods, the white underclass, gendered spaces, institutional and environmental racism, conflict and power in the city, residential segregation, the increasing income gap between rich and poor, and religious and ethnic conflicts. This course will focus upon these (and other) contemporary policy issues, the relationships that exist between them and the increasing diversity of the American society, and the impacts these interconnections have upon human spatial behavior and the geographical organization of the U.S. over time. The readings and small-group discussions are designed to help students examine a variety of myths and realities, discover and analyze the sometimes "invisible" spatial patterns that surround them, and come to grips with their own views and opinions about "What is going on with the U.S. 'motorcycle' as the 21st century approaches?"
UGC 211 SCM
American Pluralism
#006608
Professor David Schmid (English)
TR 8:00 - 8:50
Clemens 6
The American Dream Revisited: This course addresses the issue of American pluralism by examining one of the most oft-used yet little understood concepts in American culture: the American Dream. What constitutes the American Dream? When did this concept originate? Has it changed over time? How is one's definition of and access to the Dream determined by your gender, class, race, ethnicity, sexuality and/or religion? What is the future of the Dream in the 1990's? These questions and others will be the focus of our discussion this semester.
In order to facilitate this discussion, we will use a mixture of fictional and non-fictional, primary and secondary texts. Primary texts will include: Horatio Alger, Ragged Dick; Studs Terkel's Oral Histories in American Dreams; Anzia Yezierska, Bread Givers, and Gloria Naylor's Women of Brewster Place. Secondary texts will include articles on the relation of class, economics, work, education, family, sexuality, advertising and religion to the American Dream, as well as a history of the concept and speculations about whether the Dream is still alive today, all available in a course reader.
Attendance and keeping up with the reading are mandatory, participation is extremely desirable. There will be two five-to-seven-page papers, and reading notes throughout the semester.
UGC 211 FRI
American Pluralism
#070695
Professor Michael Frisch (American Studies)
TR 2:00 - 3:20
Clemens 6
We will focus on the convergence of pluralism issues in modern urban and suburban America (from 1945 to the present), with a particular concern for the explosive conflicts this process has generated. It draws on the instructor's base in American social and urban history, in oral history (historical interviews and life narratives as a way to understand history from the perspective of those who live and make it), and in films as a way of documenting history and its relevance to the present.
The underlying assumption propelling the course is that the complex life of cities in modern American history can help us understand our conflicting social worlds, as well as the often conflicting dimensions of our own identities, since we all "have" gender, racial, class, ethnic, and religious dimension to our lives. The underlying hope is that examining all these dimensions in complex, colliding, overlapping historical motion, changing dramatically over time in the modern American city, can help us appreciate the possibilities for change and growth today, individually and socially.
All students will first explore introductory exercises, articles, and historical materials selected to develop critical reading, analytic, and discussion skills. This will be followed by in-depth writing, reading, and critical viewing of several major core books and films. At the same time, the class will break into teams that, in the last section of the course, explore and present course issues to the whole class through particular types of sources, such as urban studies, autobiographies, oral histories, photographs, documentary and fiction films, and so on. In addition, all students will be involved in some off-campus real-world fieldwork explorations, using the city around us as a kind of "text" in which the complexities of American pluralism can be studied.
Assignments for the course will include short, informal responses to particular readings and films, the small-group presentations, an ongoing student "journal" in which the various readings, discussions, and field explorations can be integrated and assessed in an individually meaningful way, and a final, individual or group term paper/project. In the absence of formal exams, evaluation will be based on attendance and participation, brief writing assignments and exercises, the informal fieldwork/response journal, the collaborative small-group projects, including class presentations, and the final paper/project.
UGC 211 HEN
American Pluralism
# 085807
Professor Keith Henry (African American Studies)
TR 2:00 - 3:20
Clemens 4
This American Pluralism seminar addresses the major modes of social experience and the major social fissures in America, ones encapsulated in the headings class, gender, religion, race, and ethnicity. Its later sessions attend most consistently, however, to varieties of specific racial or ethnic group experience in America - among which, viewed in some ways, are those of women. James S. Olson's The Ethnic Dimension in American History is one of the readings for the course. The relevant passages in Olson are the essential work for class discussions of specific racial or ethnic or quasi-ethnic groups, women excepted. Martin H. Marger's Race and Ethnic Relations and Richard R. Schaefer's Racial and Ethnic Groups are excellent supporting texts. Schaefer includes a chapter on women as well as other chapters on conventional racial-ethnic groups and on American religion. Schaefer and Marger also include annotated bibliographies appended to each chapter and discussions of concepts (such as "stereotype") useful in analyzing societies driven by enduring social divisions. For the industrious, the most useful reference for work on racial/ethnic groups and related issues is the comprehensive but readable Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups edited by Stephan Thernstrom. Other pertinent readings include: Richard C. Monk (ed.), Taking Sides and Paul Berman (ed.), Debating P.C.
UGC 211 NEW
American Pluralism
#034544
Professor Robert Newman (English)
TR 11:00 - 12:20
Clemens 4
As with many countries around the world (Bosnia, Rwanda, to name notorious examples), the United States faces the question of how different groups can live with both their own integrity intact and yet also with one another, as part of a larger culture. This course will raise the issues of what a common culture means, how such a culture has been created (or not) and how such matters as race, class, gender, religion, ethnicity play into it. We will read autobiographical essays to get the feel of lives as they are lived on both the margin and at the center, and also read secondary materials on race, class, gender, etc., in order to re-see those lives in other dimensions. The focus will be on issues--those matters on which reasonable people can disagree. Possible readings will include: Stephen Carter ("Affirmative Action Baby") vs. Shelby Steele ("The Recoloring of Campus Life"); Susan Faludi ("Backlash") vs. Camille Paglia ("Madonna--Finally a Real Feminist"); Jonathon Kozol ("Savage Inequalities") vs. Fortune Magazine ("Can Your Kid Become President?"); Richard Rodriguez ("Memory of Desire") vs. Rasario Morales ("I Am What I Am"); Conor Cruise O'Brien ("Off His Pedestal", An argument that Thomas Jefferson should be condemned as a racist and expelled from the American pantheon) vs. Gordon Wood ("Radicalism of the American Revolution"); Henry Louis Gates, Jr. ("The Uses of Anti-Semitism") vs. Winthrop Jordan ("Slavery and the Jews"); Benjamin Schwartz ("The Diversity Myth") vs. Nathan Glazer ("Emergence of an American Ethnic Pattern"). Other possible texts include East to American: Korean-American Life Stories, Marianna De Marco Torgovnick, On Being White, Female, and Born in Bensonhurst, Benjamin DeMott, The Imperial Middle: Why Americans Can't Think Straight About Class, and so on.
Class attendance and participation in class discussion is of course required. A final research essay will be necessary, one in which you examine in depth an issue discussed in class. Short response essays will also be required throughout the semester.
Rick Hill (American Studies)
TR 3:30 - 4:50
Clemens 6