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Constructing Individuals: Toward an American Cultural History of the individual
AMST342 FA

We will explore a few provocative theoretical and historical approaches to the cultural discourses, ideologies, and concepts of "the individual" in nineteenth- and twentieth-century America. The premise of the course is that the individual can be conceptualized fruitfully as a changing historical and cultural category rather than a "natural" experience of one's self. Thus we will begin to think critically about "the individual," not as a person who is inherently individual, but as one who is fashioned as such by historically specific economic, political, imperialist, class, racial, gendered, sexual, body, family, psychological, literary, and aesthetic discourses. We will start by reading some seminal interdisciplinary discussions (history , literary, anthropology, sociology, cultural studies) of "the individual." We will also study key historical and ideological movements that shaped subjectivities, like Romanticism and the sentimentalization of the family. Then we will focus on three are as. First, we will examine the Carlisle Industrial School for Indians (1879-1918)--set up to "Americanize" and "individualize" the "Indian"--and the writings this school produced. Second, we shall reassess the making of the middle-class "psychological individual" through selected 20th century texts in psychology, pop psychology, literature, drama, and advertising (this will culminate with Foucault's critique of psychoanalysis). Third, we will scrutinize Left critiques of the individual and of the aest hetic values legitimated by the ideologies of "the individual" from the 1910s to the Cold War era.

COURSE FORMAT: Lecture

REGISTRATION INFORMATION

Level: UGRD    Credit: 1    Gen Ed Area Dept: HA ENGL    Grading Mode: Student Option   

Prerequisites: NONE

Last Updated on MAR-24-2000

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