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(Some details may change before the semester begins)
History 510:552, American Intellectual and Cultural History
Cultures of US Capitalism
Fall 2014
Tuesdays 5:30-8:10, Conklin 445
Mark Krasovic
49 Bleeker Street
[email protected]
973-353-1051
Office Hours: Tuesday, 10am-12pm & by appointment
Course Description
The history of capitalism has become, lately, a hot field in American history. Yet for many years
– maybe since Karl Marx wrote about base and superstructure, and certainly since Raymond
Williams offered cultural materialism as a valuable revision to Marx’s model – cultural
historians and critics have grappled with the relationship among capitalist development and the
world of art and thought. Now seems a particularly fruitful moment to take stock of the new
boom in historical writing about U.S. capitalism and to consider what it contributes to a much
longer consideration of the relationship between economics and American thought and culture.
Required Texts
These books are available at the campus bookstore in Bradley Hall and for two-hour checkout at
the Dana Library reserve desk.
• James Fulcher, Capitalism: A Very Short Introduction
• T.H. Breen, The Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped American
Independence
• Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market
• Michael Denning, Mechanic Accents: Dime Novels and Working Class Culture in
America
• Alan Trachtenberg, The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age
• Susan Benson, Counter Cultures: Saleswomen, Managers, and Customers in American
Department Stores, 1890-1940
• David Nye, America’s Assembly Line
• Nicholas Wapshott, Keynes Hayek: The Clash that Defined Modern Economics
• Daniel Horowitz, The Anxieties of Affluence: Critiques of American Consumer Culture,
1939-1979
• Bethany Moreton, To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free
Enterprise
• Arlene Davila, Culture Works: Space, Value, and Mobility Across the Neoliberal
Americas
• Richard Sennett, The Culture of the New Capitalism
All other required readings on the syllabus are available as pdfs on our class Blackboard site.
Please print them, read them (obviously), effusively mark them up, and bring them to class.
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(Some details may change before the semester begins)
Requirements
Weekly pithy commentaries (20%): Each week you will write a brief (1-2 page) commentary on
the week’s reading to hand in during seminar. You should feel free to comment on whatever
aspect of the readings most strikes you. I only ask that your commentary be thoughtful, not be
summary, and that it come out of a desire to construct a critical understanding of the text at hand
(rather than, say, a desire to simply celebrate or trash it). You need not submit a pithy
commentary on the weeks that you open discussion (see below).
Presentation/Discussion Starting (10%): You will be responsible for getting discussion started on
a day of your choosing. How you do this is up to you, and there is a wide range of options,
including commenting on the week’s readings, introducing a relevant primary source, and/or
posing thoughtful discussion questions. You’ll sign up for this presentation on the first day of
class. Some you will have to pair up, but the bravest of you will be on your own.
Keyword tracking/journaling (20%): You will choose or be assigned a specific keyword relevant
to the topic at hand. Your job is to track various uses of this keyword throughout the semester
and to make that information available to the entire class via an online outlet of your choosing.
This is not simply a cataloging of citations, but a critical engagement with the ways these words
and the ideas they represent are used. Thus, your entries must be as much about your developing
understanding of those words and ideas as they are about any author’s use of them.
Short essay (10%): You will write one short (4-5 page) essay as a warm-up for your longer
seminar essay (see below). You will choose your own cultural text to focus on. It may be
something mentioned in one of the readings – and upon which you will expand or of which you
will provide an alternative reading – or something you’ve found on your own. In the essay, you
will make an argument about how that text grows out of and engages with its historical context,
both in terms of its content and form. The due date is floating, but you must submit one of these
essays in the first half of the semester and one in the second half. See the course schedule below.
Long essay (30%): Similar to the short essay, but longer (10-15 pages) and on a second text (or
set of texts) of your choosing. Though no formal proposal is required, you should consult with
me on your topic as early as possible in the semester, and certainly by the middle of it. The essay
is due on December 16.
Participation (10%): This includes basic attendance and punctuality; informed and active
participation in class discussions; and holding each other accountable for the scholarly claims we
make in a civil manner.
Note: To my mind, more than one unexcused absence from a graduate seminar is cause for
concern and constitutes grounds for serious diminution of final grades.
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(Some details may change before the semester begins)
Course Schedule
Where there are multiple readings, I strongly suggest reading them in the order listed.
September 2:
Reading Assignment: Cook and Glickman, “Twelve Propositions for a History of
U.S. Cultural History”; Fulcher, Capitalism: A Very Short Introduction
September 9:
Reading Assignment: Breen, Marketplace of Revolution
September 16:
Reading Assignment: Denning, Mechanic Accents
September 23:
Reading Assignment: Trachtenberg, The Incorporation of America
September 30:
Reading Assignment: Benson, Counter Cultures
October 7:
Reading Assignment: Nye, America’s Assembly Line
October 14:
Reading Assignment: Wapshott, Keynes Hayek
October 21:
Reading Assignment: Horowitz, Anxieties of Affluence
October 28:
Reading Assignment: Livingston, The World Turned Inside Out
November 4:
Reading Assignment: Moreton, For God and Wal-Mart
November 11:
Reading Assignment: Frederic Jameson, “Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic
of Late Capitalism”; David Harvey, selections from The Postmodern Condition
November 18:
Reading Assignment: Davila, Culture Works
November 25: NO CLASS; THURSDAY CLASSES MEET
December 2:
Reading Assignment: Sennett, The Culture of the New Capitalism
December 9:
Reading Assignment: Amanda Ciafone, “The Magical Neoliberalism of Network
Films”; and watch Amores Perros and at least one of the following: Crash,
Babel, 21 Grams, Contagion, or Syriana
December 16:
Long Essay Due by the End of the Day