American Studies in Dialogue

Seit seiner Entstehung in den 1930er- Jahren hat sich das Fach "American Studies" in den USA radikal verändert. Als Motor dieses Prozesses galt bislang die wissenschaftliche Forschung. Matthias Oppermann beleuchtet nun erstmals die Rolle der Lehre und zeigt, dass das Fach von Beginn an durch Kurse und Lehrpläne nicht nur didaktisch, sondern auch theoretisch kontinuierlich neu konstituiert wurde. Mit dieser Neubewertung liefert er ein revidiertes Verständnis der "American Studies" als interdisziplinäre Kulturwissenschaft im Spannungsfeld unterschiedlicher Theorien, Methoden und Forschungsgegenstände.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ix
Introduction 12

Histories of Curricular Innovation

1. American Studies as Curricular Innovation: Interventions into Narratives of Field Formation 35
1. 1 "A Subject So Familiar and So Simple": American Literature and American Civilization in the College Curriculum 38
1. 2 Money, Jingoism, and Folklore? American Studies after World War II 55
1. 3 Bridging the Schisms of Culture and Method: "Peaux Rouges" and "Mandarins" in Minnesota 75

2. Maturity and Midlife Crises: Radical Teachers, Cultural Turns 86
2. 1 Quantitative Growth and Organizational Structures in the 1960s and 1970s 88
2. 2 Cultural Experts and Literary Amateurs in the Early 1960s 94
2. 3 Radical Teaching Contra Cultural Consensus? 100
2. 4 Collaborators, Computers, Problem-Solvers: Minnesota, Pennsylvania, and Davis (Re-)Considered 107

Trajectories of Transformation

3. Multiculturalism as Radical Critique: American Studies Beyond the Nation 131
3. 1 Social Movements, European Theory, and the Search for Resistance 134
3. 2 Contextualizing Cultural Studies: The Political Work of Cultural Critique 140
3. 3 Dialogics Beyond Borders: American Culture Studies 146
3. 4 From Coverage to Contact Zones: Curricula of Comparative U. S. Cultures 152

4. American Studies in the Age of Digital Cultures 165
4. 1 American Studies and New Media 166
4. 2 Culture and Database: George Allen's Curse, Chris Crocker's Cupcake 171
4. 3 New Media-New American Studies? 179

Expansions of the Field-Imaginary

5. American Studies and the Learning Paradigm 187
5. 1 Understanding Student Learning 193
5. 2 Novice, Expert, and Beyond 203
5. 3 Does American Studies Have "Signature Pedagogies"? 214

6. From Best Practices to Next Practices 226
6. 1 Going Meta: Towards a Scholarship of Teaching in American Studies 227
6. 2 Pedagogies and Epistemologies: Notes from the Visible Knowledge Project 234
6. 3 Digital Storytelling: Adaptive, Embodied, and Socially Situated 245

Epilogue 266

List of Tables 273
Bibliography 274
Index 292