American culture and cultural change, with attention to the multicultural basis of American society and emphasis on the need for multiple methods of analysis. The course will consistently draw on the arts, material culture, and various fields affecting cultural production and meaning. Those areas include literature, film, history, architecture, history of art, religion, music, engineering, environmental studies, anthropology, politics, economics, law, and medicine. This course may include discussion sections depending on available funding. Some versions of this course need four in-class contact hours because of the extensive use of media.

Is Los Angeles America, or is America Los Angeles? In this course, we will examine Los Angeles as both a material place and as a mediated landscape, a place with physical dimensions as well as imagined ones. We will explore the "City of Angels" through a variety of materials, ranging from novels to music, from scholarly research to journalism and essays, from architecture to gaming, and, of course, through Hollywood films. Of particular interest will be the intersection of technologies of mobility with technologies of representation, and how such forces mutually construct or, sometimes, deconstruct the city around them. Our task is to make an interdisciplinary examination of Los Angeles as both a tangible, material place, and as a bundle of culturally-grounded ideas and ideals, to try and understand the deeper social and cultural meanings of this, the largest city in California, and puzzle out how this is a place that everyone knows, even if they have never been there. More broadly, by making this effort, this course will provide an introduction to, and a “toolkit” for, the interdisciplinary study of American culture.

Credit Restrictions

Students will receive no credit for American Studies 10 after completing American Studies 10AC. A deficient grade in American Studies 10 may be removed by taking American Studies 10AC.

Repeat Rules

Course is not repeatable for credit.

Requirements class fulfills