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| Unit name |
Europe and the Americas |
| Unit code |
MODLM0003 |
| Credit points |
20 |
| Level of study |
M/7
|
| Teaching block(s) |
Teaching Block 2 (weeks 13 - 24)
|
| Unit director |
Professor. Ginger |
| Open unit status |
Not open |
| Pre-requisites |
None |
| Co-requisites |
None |
| School/department |
School of Modern Languages |
| Faculty |
Faculty of Arts |
Description including Unit Aims
This unit addresses a fundamental cultural concern at the heart of the ‘West’ since the late fifteenth century – the cultural relationship between the ‘New’ and the ‘Old’ World. Students will develop a sense of this relationship in its depth and breadth by working on representative case studies.
The subjects for study will be drawn from a range of linguistic cultures, reflecting the specialisms of the unit tutors. They will illustrate the following themes:
- Travel, Migration, and Exile: The substantial movements of peoples, and of intellectuals, voluntary and otherwise between Europe and the Americas has been a defining feature of the intellectual and cultural life of the West. Topics covered here might include: early experiences of the Americas, the major exiles of Europeans to the Americas, immigration into the Americas, the ‘reverse conquest’ of American intellectuals (from North and South) arriving in Europe
- Cultural Export: The dissemination and transmission of cultural goods between the Americas and Europe has had a similarly defining but complex effect. A key example would be Hollywood Cinema whose infrastructure, distribution, and echoes extend out from the North of the Americas across the rest of the Americas and Europe. Similarly, European styles have been adapted, adopted, and criticised throughout the history of the cultures of the Americas, not least in ‘mestizaje’
- Mutual Views: In addition to the actual movement of people and cultural goods, the cultural attitudes of peoples of Europe and the Americas – in mutual, but problematic awareness of one another – have become one of the touchstones of Western culture. Evolving European depictions of Americans (of all kinds) over centuries, and vice-versa, through media as diverse as literature, art, and screen have come to be one of the key ways in which those cultures understand, express, and define themselves, as much as how they comprehend others.
Intended Learning Outcomes
Students will be able:
(1) to develop a broad, informed awareness of the senses and ways in which Europe and the Americas have interacted culturally
(2) to appraise individual aspects of that relationship and to critically evaluate their part in it
(3) to use established theories and methodologies in analysing cultural phenomena, and to make independent judgements as to such theories' usefulness and relevance
(4) to reflect on the larger questions surrounding the cultural relationship between Europe and the Americas over time
(5) to write lucidly at extended length and at a high intellectual level
(6) to engage in discussion and to formulate and present ideas orally
Teaching Information
Seminars, to include student presentations
Assessment Information
1 x 5,000-word essay (Intended Learning Outcomes 1-5)
Reading and References
- Caroline Williams (ed.), Bridging the Early Modern Atlantic World (Ashgate, 2009)
- David Ellwood, The Shock of America: Europe and the Challenge of the Century (OUP, 2012)
- Mary Nolan, The Transatlantic Century: Europe and America 1880-2010 (CUP, 2011)
- Susan Manning (ed.), Transatlantic Literary Studies: A Reader (Johns Hopkins Press, 2007)
- Axel Korner, et al (ed), American Imagined: Explaining the United States in Nineteenth-Century Latin America and Europe (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012)
- J.H. Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America 1492-1830 (YUP, 2009)
