WiSe 24/25: Redefining ‘America’: Cultural Struggles for Recognition between the Civil War and World War I
Winfried Fluck
Kommentar
“Are We a Plutocracy?,” W. D. Howells, the leading American realist of the so-called Gilded Age, but by no means a radical, asked in 1894 to give expression to a growing concern that America was losing control over a new business elite that had emerged in the wake of industrialization, and that it was, in consequence, also losing control over its democracy. The term Gilded Age, now used to describe the period between the end of the Civil War and 1900, was coined by Mark Twain, the most popular American writer of the time, to highlight a public perception that America, up to this point seen as an exceptional nation, was turning increasingly materialistic and betraying its ideals. The guiding assumption of this seminar is that such far-reaching social changes produce new struggles for recognition and that culture is a realm in which these struggles take place. New cultural themes and forms developed that make the period between 1865 and the beginning of World War I one of the most interesting in American cultural history. Topics will include the cultural meaning of the American self-made man and the robber baron, realism and naturalism as two literary movements that redefined literature’s approach to reality, a literature of social protest and social reform such as the muckrakers, the impact of Social Darwinism on changing views of immigration and imperialism, the attempts of women and African Americans to gain entry into the American cultural system, the frontier and the Western as redefinitions of masculinity, and the emergence of new media and popular forms that challenged the authority of the dominant cultural system. To obtain a credit, course requirements are regular attendance and a term paper on a topic of the seminar.
Schließen16 Termine
Regelmäßige Termine der Lehrveranstaltung