Spring 2025 First-Year Seminar BC1766 section 001

American Exceptionalism

AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM

Call Number 00266
Day & Time
Location
MW 2:40pm-3:55pm
To be announced
Points 3
Grading Mode Pass/Fail
Approvals Required None
Instructor Kristi-Lynn Cassaro
Type SEMINAR
Course Description

In this course we probe the ideology of American "exceptionalism." We treat the literary history of this idea as a transtemporal conversation involving its founding architects, ardent critics, and experimental reformers, concerned with the question of what should be valued on the American continents and within American experience. We become cartographers of this conversation and interlocutors within it, as we explore how habits of conceiving truth, power, and the relationship of human beings to the natural world have controlled what counts as exceptional and what ordinary. Where should we direct our awe? Readings will include James Baldwin, Ralph Waldo Emerson, bell hooks, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Audre Lorde, Henry David Thoreau and William Carlos Williams.

Web Site Vergil
Department First-Year Seminar Program @Barnard
Enrollment 16 students (16 max) as of 10:05AM Thursday, December 5, 2024
Status Full
Subject First-Year Seminar
Number BC1766
Section 001
Division Barnard College
Open To Barnard College
Note Barnard 1st Year Students Only
Section key 20251FYSB1766X001