HUM 225 - Values in American Life
Welcome to the course. I have posted separately the Grading Policy, Marks, Requirements. That's required reading.
GE Credit
The course satisfies Segment II, ARTS AND SCIENCES CORE REQUIREMENTS, Humanities and Creative Arts Area, Category C: Historical/Social/Ethnic/Cultural Contexts. It further satisfies the AERM-- the requirement that you take one course in American Ethnic and Racial Minorities.
This is an intermediate-difficulty course.
We originally conceived this course as a more advanced companion to other courses I teach on this topic.I won't make it a formal prerequisite, but it would help if you have taken my California Culture course first. There's a reading list which is lengthy and expensive by Humanities standards (though the whole list costs list than a single one of your business or nursing textbooks, so don't ask me to feel sorry!)
Marks
There is a museum visit held on a Saturday or Sunday. Attendance is optional but a paper on the museum isn't. Be sure to see what is said about submission requirements and grading elsewhere on this website, as described above.
The Class as Think Tank
Since you live in San Francisco, in the thick of the action, you may know more than any professor back at Yale knows about this. The years when this class has really worked, the students began to realize they were more like a think tank than a class. You really have a lot of information which America wants to know about. I'll help you educate each other. Some of these groups have so recently begun to produce a nationally-known literature or art, no-one knows who their "classics" will be. I'm going to ask your help deciding that. I'll often ask you (as another typical assignment) to read a bunch of new writers and tell me who moved you, who you think deserves to be more widely known. This is a great time to be studying this: the professors haven't got it All Figured Out, there's plenty of room for original ideas and opinions.
So what's the course about?
The course is an ambitious attempt to talk about class, race, and religion-- every topic you're not supposed to talk about at a dinner party. In our controlled setting here, with myself as a strong moderator, you can get a chance to tell people what you think without being shouted down or cut off.
One of the crucial historical values which sets us apart from other nations is our extraordinary diversity. From the first, the dollar bill had the motto: "E pluribus, unum." "Out of many-- one." This part of the course could very well be called, "What you need to know to live and to work in the new cosmopolitan America." It's the most practical work you can do, quite apart from the intellectual appeal.
By "diversity" I mean diversity of race, ethnicity, class, sexual orientation, political opinion, religion-- all manner of diversity. We'll discuss ethnicity as we encounter a variety of films and creative works related to some of America's, and America's most rapidly growing ethnic cultures. When you think about what gives America its flavor, and its unique place in the modern world, perhaps the first thing is, the interplay of ethnicities.If we mean American "culture" in the sense of what gives a place its special flavor, we'd have to say "ethnicity." But what is it? How does it function in our lives? And we'll ask if "gay" can now be discussed as if it were an ethnicity. (I'm not telling you-- I'm asking you. These questions are new and unsolved.) David Sedaris's comic works should come in here.
A lot of what we do in this part of the course is the basic job of learning to decipher "multicultural" works. What's a shiksa, what's a shmuck? I'll give you a lot of insider Yiddish swear words and concepts that you'll realize you've been hearing all your life, since you watched the Genie pop out of the lamp in the Disney classic yelling "Oy!" and kvetching about his back. We'll see how Maus fits here.
What's a pendejo, a coyote or a pollo-- and who is La Migra? When a Japanese American writer refers to his issei father or his happa child, what does he mean? Until you know, you can't begin to enjoy his story.We'll pay attention to the specialized language the different cultures use, and their slang. Sometimes it reveals their interests. For instance, there are no theological curses in Chinese, but Latin American Spanish abounds in them. I'll often ask you, as a short assignment, simply to tell me what words you found hard to understand in some work, and then we'll try to get them explained. You'll discover that many words exist in languages which can't be translated, because they're based on values another culture doesn't share.
But we also talk about "class" not just ethnicity and race. Increasingly, that's where the discussion is going-- beyond, for instance, the early 1990s assumptions that certain races were always oppressed, others were always oppressors. Whatever happened to "the poor"-- to concern for Tom Joad? Are the Okies now just patriarchal white guys, as if they were running the world with the Rockefellers? We read a great new novel, "Old School," about class and prejudice within the white world.
We read two key works about the modern African American experience: the novel, Imani All Mine, and selections from the theoretical work, The Future of the Race, by Gates and West, America's two most famous African American scholars. We'll take a look at some of Tyler Perry's work for insights, and Spike Lee's movie about black college fraternities.
We'll hear George Orwell's ideas about liberal vs. totalitarian societies, and Friedrich Nietzsche's ideas about "the transvaluation of the values." Then we'll relate their ideas to The Fountainhead, by Ayn Rand. Rand's books routinely sell 300,000 copies a year. Rand made it onto a postage stamp, and she has disciples like Alan Greenspan in the highest places in government. Yet she is never taught, probably because university courses typically trend left. I had never read the book before this summer, though students mentioned it to me for years. If we believe in diversity, we must believe in diversity of opinion as well, and we'll read selections from this long work. I'm happy to report that all the attention paid to her philosophy obscured the fact that it's a good read-- and the heart of it is an amazing, powerful sexual relationship.
And we don't forget religion. One great difference between us and the Europeans which scholars increasingly notice is our interest in unique national forms of religion and spirituality. By contrast with us, Europe has been called "post Christian" and secular. (Maybe that's what their problem is?) Is there an underlying body of values to most of our religions here-- a bedrock "American religion," as Harold Bloom and countless others have argued? Many call it, popularly, "spirituality." We'll learn about it by doing Cage's 4'33" and using Alan Lakein's classic business text, "How to Get Control of Your Time and Your Life." Even there, in that 1970s commercial book, you'll find underlying it the American Zen idea that "Today is the first day of the rest of your life."
Starting with Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman and Muir, Americans in general have had a religious attitude to the countryside from the start, which led us to pioneer in the ecology movement, and in a related form of art. This religious, mystical current, "natural supernaturalism," will be the subject of our museum visit. As an artist, I'm usually grouped with the wing of the avant garde that comes down from them: Cage, Warhol, Antin, Kaprow, Zen Happenings, Pop Art, Arthur Danto, Woodstock, Fillmores. I can give us an insider's picture of this current, and class allows me to say things I don't put in my books. (One of the reasons I say no taperecorders of any kind, including cell phones, allowed. I want to be completely off the record in class.) We'll do a museum project on this spiritual topic vital to America's culture. Some of our authors are sure to tackle it as well. I'll lecture at the Museum of Modern Art. The lecture is optional; the museum paper on the art isn't.
So: is that enough for you? Everyone from black theorists like Gates and West to libertarians like Rand; plus Cage and Warhol and spirituality. That's "diversity"! We all should know quite a bit more about America, and ourselves as Americans, after watching all these thinkers collide.
Such, anyway, are the topics which have worked in the past. When I know more about you from reading your biographies and computer questionaires, I'll steer the actual course towards this class's interests.