The Orient in American Popular Culture
Madame Butterfly, Doctor Fu Manchu, Arab Shieks, Islamic terrorists--over the last 150 years, American culture has energetically imagined the far and middle East. This course examines the uses to which these imagined "Orients" have been put in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. We will pay attention to the ways that the "Orient" has entered into American consumer culture, helped to form coherent ideas about "Americanness," and offered dreams of escape from supposedly Western inhibitions. Course materials will be drawn from literature, painting, fiction, advertising, movies and other sources. They will likely include various writings by Mark Twain, paintings by Frederic Church, cigarette ads, movie-palace architecture, Vietnam-war fiction, and, at the end of the course, news coverage of terrorism and recent wars in Iraq.(Students who have taken AMCV 0220 Topics in Am. Civ.: The Orient in Am. Popular Culture are not eligible to register for this course.) 3 hrs. lect./disc.