American Culture Studies: The Discipline and the Curriculum

Abstract

THERE IS A VAST SLOUGH OF GENIAL IGNORANCE ABOUT AMERICAN STUDIES. Consider the stock questions anyone moving to establish it on any given campus will be asked: has it been around long? what other universities have American Studies? are graduate degrees given? where can a faculty be found? who can know everything about America? is it intellectually sound? shouldn't we really conduct a feasibility study first? As this essay is being written and read faculty committees at a number of colleges and universities are at work inventing a curriculum and replaying past gropings as if the fund of experience accumulated over more than three decades were invisible. Not only in the natural world does ontogeny recapitulate phylogeny. In fact, by 1972 at least 200 programs were in operation. Of these, 153 offered bachelor's degrees, 24 master's degrees and 29 doctoral degrees. American Quarterly, American Studies, the British Journal of American Studies, the Canadian Journal of American Studies, American Studies News, Connections and other professional journals, as well as professional societies in a number of countries besides the United States, testify that in one form or another American Studies exists. Professor Sigmund Skard in 1958 reported in two volumes on American Studies in Europe, as did Professor Robert Walker the same year on American Studies in the United States. Among the anthologies that bring together the work of American Studies scholars, the decade of the 1960s produced Kwiat and Turpie's Studies in American Culture: Dominant Ideas and Images (1960), Marshall