Course Schedule:

American Studies 1002, sec. 6, Writing Intensive

American Cultures: 1945 to the Present

University of Minnesota, Spring 2000

Eric Drown, Instructor (drown001@maroon.tc.umn.edu); Dave Noon, Assistant

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Office: 329 Scott Hall; Office Hours: 5-6 Mondays and by appointment; American Studies Office: 104 Scott Hall

Introduction to the Course: 1945 was a landmark year for American society. First, and most obviously, the first use of an atomic bomb on civilian populations in Japan put an end to World War II, forever threatening the lives and futures of all of the earth’s living beings. The end of the war brought the hope for a return to “normalcy,” and a permanent change in the idea of the normal. Second, for the first time in American history, the ideas and institutions of capitalism and mass-production thoroughly permeated every aspect of American society, influencing politics, finance, race-relations, art, entertainment, gender roles, the family, and farming. Third, the United States entered into an ideological and military contest with the Soviet Union to determine the future shape of the world economic and political order.

These three factors—the stark contrast between the dream of normalcy and the nightmare of global extinction, the power of capitalism to define and evaluate the terms of human life, and the contest between the United States and the Soviet Union for world supremacy—make the post-war era a period of great importance for our understanding of modern American society. This was a time of rapid and permanent change that transformed the ways that Americans lived their lives. It was a time characterized by anxiety, avoidance, and, paradoxically, optimism. When middle-class Americans looked around following the war, they approved of what they saw: a growing economy, a new class of experts using science to run large-scale political, economic, intellectual, and social organizations, better more affordable single-family housing, more technologically advanced products for industry and the home, the increased availability of a college education to more classes of Americans. They believed that Americans had matured politically, to the point that they had attained a non-politicized consensus about the future of America. Capitalism, expert –managed bureaucratic-republicanism, and social conformity would bring about a United States of America with ever increasing freedom and opportunity for all.

But this utopian vision of America depended for its persuasiveness on white middle-class Americans’ refusal to see deeply into the contradictions of their society. African-American soldiers returning home from war found themselves still subject to racist laws and customs. Working and middle-class women who had earned financial autonomy working in war-time production were asked to give up their jobs to returning soldiers and to return to the home to take up the role of housewife once again. Gays and lesbians were forced by bigotry and violence to live double lives. People moved by conscience to dissent with the “consensus” vision of America were actively persecuted by the institutions of American government and industry, by social custom, and by the acts of individuals and small groups.

Even while many white middle-class Americans were celebrating the consensus vision of the nation, they were increasingly anxious about those “other” Americans who were demanding to be included in the economics, politics, and culture of American society. Throughout the post war era African-Americans, women, and working class-Americans fought for civil, political, and economic rights using a wide variety of strategies, non-violent and violent alike. This fight for the future of America came to a head in the 1960s. Differences that seemed to have been contained in the war and post-war period exploded in public demonstrations, riots and rebellions, assassinations, angry rhetoric, and political and economic instability. The consensus vision of America was revealed to be the narrow worldview serving the interests of a specific portion of the American people, not the expression of the hopes and dreams of all American people. This contest for the future of America made many Americans doubt the virtue of the fundamental institutions of American society.

Watergate, Vietnam, stagflation, and on-going cultural revolution meant that the 1970s was a decade of disillusion and dissolution for many Americans. The demands for inclusion by Americans historically excluded from the promise and prosperity of the United States and the economic, military, and political failures of middle-class expert seemed to have tattered the social fabric. But by the end of the 1970s, debates over the future of America had shifted domains. If in the 1950s, 1960s, and early 1970s, excluded Americans had called for fundamental changes in the economic and political structure of the United States in their fight for economic, political, and civil rights, by the end of the 1970s and the beginning of the 1980s, many people (even some of those in dissent) tended to accept the viability and necessity of the ideas and institutions of capitalism as the foundation of American society. The 1980s changed the terms by which Americans understood their society, and those terms were set in the main by conservatives. Terms like family, morality, responsibility, cultural diversity, the market, and economic growth replaced words like freedom, justice, revolution, activism, and social change. What were once debates about the fundamental economic and political structures of the nation became arguments about the values and morals of individuals, particularly those “other” American who had insisted on inclusion in the 1950s and 1960s. Calls for multicultural “diversity” in the workplace replaced calls for equal pay for equal work. Pleas for tolerance replaced demands for affirmative action. To me, this acceptance of the market as the determining factor in American society marks a successful counter-revolution by American conservatives, one that continues to shape many Americans’ outlook even today.

Assignments: Students will write 2 major papers (6-8 pages each), at least 4 “seed papers” (2-3 pages each), and two paper proposals (2-3 pages each). See attached course schedule for due dates.

Writing: To be accepted all student writing must be word-processed in a reasonably-sized font with one inch margins on four sides. Papers must be double-spaced with numbered pages. Pages must be stapled together. Grammar, spelling, and punctuation are the responsibility of the student. Quotes, paraphrases, summaries and other material borrowed must be referenced in footnotes or endnotes; page numbers should be referenced in the text. All papers are due in class on the assigned date.

Your writing will be assessed on the following criteria: content, clarity, and insight.

Content: How well have you considered/discussed the task at hand, the meaning of what you have read, thought, seen, or said? How well have you mustered pertinent information and evidence in support of meaningful claims? Have you handled facts accurately? How complete is your paper—have you considered all pertinent facts and lines of thought? Are there potential objections to your argument or interpretation? Have you answered them?

Clarity: How well have you expressed your ideas, arguments, or interpretations? Is your prose clean and clear, intelligible and jargon-free? Do you have a clear pattern of development, leading the reader from point to point to a complex conclusion?

Insight: Have you thought through the social, political, or logical implications of your argument? How persuasive are your arguments and interpretations. Have you gone beyond the conventional wisdom to consider alternative explanations or interpretations of your data? Does your paper pass the “So What?” test?

Grading: My grading conforms to CLA guidelines. Be advised that CLA guidelines define the C grade as the fulfillment of basic requirements. Scholastic dishonesty—including, but not limited to, cheating, plagiarizing, interfering with the ability of other students to complete course assignments, representing another person’s work as one’s own—will result in disciplinary action in accordance with CLA guidelines. Please refer to the CLA Student Handbook as necessary.

4 Seed Papers will be worth 40% of the final grade. Each major paper will be worth 30% of the final grade. Drafts and proposals not completed will result in a lowered grade on the final papers. Refer to the following chart to figure out your grade:

A+ =	A =	A- =	B+ =	B =	B- =	C+ =	C =	C- =	D+ =	D =	D- =	F =
12	11	10	9	8	7	6	5	4	3	2	1	0

Final grade calculation:

Grade = (Seed Paper 1 x .10) + (Seed Paper 2 x .10) + (Seed Paper 3 x .10) + (Seed Paper 4 x .10) +
(Paper 1 x .30) + (Paper 2 x .30).

Incomplete assignments will receive an F grade. No “Incompletes” will be given for a course grade.

Required Reading: (* available as mass-market paper-backs; ˚ often available at used bookstores)

January 24, 2000

Mildred Pierce (film, d. Michael Curtiz, 1945)

January 31, 2000

Seed Paper 1

Zinn, The Twentieth Century, Preface and Ch. 5

Ray Bradbury, The Martian Chronicles

Invasion of the Body Snatchers (film, d. Don Siegel, 1956)

February 7, 2000

Seed Paper 2

Zinn, Ch. 6

Chester Himes, If He Hollers Let Him Go

February 14, 2000

Proposal for Paper 1

Seed Paper 3

Stephanie Coontz, The Way We Never Were (1^st half)

Catch-22 (film, d. Mike Nichols, 1970)

February 21, 2000

Seed Paper 4

The Way We Never Were (2^nd half)

February 28, 2000

Draft, Paper 1

Zinn, Ch. 7

Vine Deloria, Jr., Custer Died for Your Sins

March 6, 2000

Seed Paper 5

Zinn, Ch. 8

Marge Piercy, Woman on the Edge of Time (1972)

March 13, 2000

Final Draft of Paper 1 Due

Zinn, Ch. 9

Easy Rider (film, d. Dennis Hopper, 1969)

March 20, 2000

Seed Paper 6

Zinn, Ch. 10

Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49 (1965)

March 27, 2000

Spring Break

April 3, 2000

Proposal for Paper 2

Seed Paper 7

Zinn, Ch. 11

Tom Clancy, The Hunt for Red October

April 10, 2000

Seed Paper 8

Zinn, Ch. 12

John Irving, A Prayer for Owen Meany (1^st half)

April 17, 2000

Draft, Paper 2

Zinn, Ch. 13

John Irving, A Prayer for Owen Meany (2^nd half)

April 24, 2000

Amy Tan, The Joy Luck Club

May 1, 2000

Final Draft of Paper 2 Due

Edward Scissorhands (film, d. Tim Burton, 1990)

Seed Papers

If you are scheduled to present a seed paper in class, you must transfer it to overhead transparencies.

Seed papers are 2-3 page short essays that transform the insights you generated from your reading into interpretive statements about what these narratives (whether fictional, historical, or filmic) have to say about the historical moment(s) in which they were produced. Like everything else you write this quarter, they should have interpretive titles, clear focuses, and a strategic pattern of development.

These seed papers are opportunities to develop your thinking about the ideas that you are encountering in the course readings, to commit your ideas to paper, and to test them for their soundness in a public forum. Your job in these seed papers is not to evaluate the author’s findings, nor to “agree” or “disagree” with them. You are not writing a “critique” of the readings. Instead you should comb these readings to discover a sense of what it might have been like to have lived in the United States in the permanent flux of social changes from just after World War II until the end of the 1980s. Use your imagination, tempered by historical discipline, to think about how an individual might have been affected by the changes that these writers engage.

As you develop this more personal link to the history you’re studying, think about how the different periods from World War II to the 1980s function as “usable pasts” in contemporary society. What kinds of stories do we “remember” about these times? How do we tell the story of these pasts when we narrate them to ourselves? In other words, try to generate a theory about the meaning the second half of the twentieth century for the present.

Because many of these readings are long and these seed papers are short, you cannot hope to summarize the contents of any particular text completely. Instead, you must think about what particular aspect of the topic is most relevant for the view of the past that you’re constructing. Then you need to decide how best to convey a sense of that past to the reader. What does s/he need to know in order to get a glimpse of your past? What kind of guidance does s/he need in order to see it in the way that you do? How does the sense of the past you’re digging up in these narratives differ from the past that’s commonly remembered?

There are eight opportunities to write seed papers this quarter. You must write four.

Information on Paper Proposals and Papers will follow later.