53-532 Key Concepts: Frontiers in U.S. History and Culture (ENG-6a, ENG-7, ENG-7a, ENG-13, AA11, LAA10, LAA11, LAA12, LAA13, IAA22, IAA24, SLM-WB, Master-WB, SG)

Instructors: Prof. Dr. Astrid Böger

Event type: Lecture

Displayed in timetable as:

Hours per week: 2

Credits: 2,0

Language of instruction: English

Min. | Max. participants: - | -

More information:
The notion of a frontier or a boundary between nature and culture, wilderness and civilization or along other bifurcations delineating ‘us’ from ‘them’ has been a constitutive myth in American culture from its inception. In roughly chronological fashion, this lecture course will highlight moments in American cultural history when the notion of a frontier was invoked in order to chart the geographical as well as the intellectual terrain of today’s United States of America, sometimes at the expense of those either not considered to be part of it or else pushed into positions of marginality. Using a broad scope will allow us to consider texts and other artefacts across media including maps, literature, painting, photography, and film. In the latter part of the course, we will focus our attention on activist movements roughly of the past two decades whose aim has been to expand inclusion into the ‘American project’ to groups formerly excluded from it, including the Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter movements.

Course Requirements:

Regular attendance as well as readiness to participate in discussions/analyses of individual texts and visual artefacts. Additionally, students in the Master of Education (M.Ed) will be required to submit a short research paper at the end of the semester.

Recommended Reading:

In order to appreciate literature in its cultural contexts, reading any literary history would make for useful preparation. We especially recommend Hubert Zapf (ed.), Amerikanische Literaturgeschichte (Metzler 1996) or Richard Grey, A History of American Literature (Wiley & Sons, 2011).