Course Description

This course offers a broad sweep of American literature, history, and politics, with a focus on issues of identity and difference, mission and migration, and regionalism and nationalism. It examines the influences and legacies of 17th-century Puritan theology, 18th-century enlightenment rationalism, 19th-century romantic ideologies, and 20th-century modernist aesthetics on the present-day United States. Throughout, emphasis will be placed on the meanings, significance, and stakes of changing borders of American identities; on close, contextual, and comparative reading; on critical thinking, writing, and speaking; and on connections to and contrasts with Japanese history, culture, and politics.

Link to Kyushu University syllabus.

Link to Seinan Gakuin University syllabus.

Course Instructor

The salutatorian of Clinton High School�fs Class of 1987 and co-valedictorian of Hamilton College's Class of 1991, Bruce Simon went on to earn his M.A. and Ph.D. from the Department of English at Princeton University, where he was a teaching assistant in English and Afro-American Studies and an instructor in the Princeton Writing Program. A former co-general editor of Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labor, he has published essays in The Politics of Information (2004), The Social Construction of Race and Ethnicity in the United States (2nd ed., 2001), Postcolonial Theory and the United States: Race, Ethnicity, and Literature (2000), and Race Consciousness: African-American Studies for the New Century (1997). As an assistant and now associate professor of English at SUNY Fredonia, he has taught courses in American, African-American, and world literature as well as in Multiethnic Studies and American Studies. With a sabbatical leave from SUNY Fredonia from fall 2006 to spring 2007 to enable him to serve as a Fulbright Visiting Lecturer at Kyushu University and Seinan Gakuin University, he stepped down as Vice President for Academics of the Fredonia chapter of the SUNY faculty/professionals union, Chair of the university�fs Planning and Budget Advisory Committee, Associate Chair of the English Department, and University Senator. In addition to teaching courses in American Literature and American Studies in Fukuoka, Japan, he is currently working on a book manuscript, American Studies and the Race for Hawthorne, co-editing two collections of critical essays, tentatively entitled Echoes of Nuremberg and Trauma, Melancholia, and the Politics of Race, and preparing a conference paper on Paule Marshall and Mahasweta Devi. For further information about the instructor, please see his web site at http://www.fredonia.edu/department/english/simon/.

Introduction to American Studies: The Making of America and Americans, Fall 2006
Created: 9/27/06 2:42 pm
Last modified: 10/3/06 3:53 pm
Webmaster: Bruce Simon, Fulbright Visiting Lecturer in American Studies, Kyushu University and Seinan Gakuin University and Associate Professor of English, SUNY Fredonia