996005 Reform, Progress, and the Modern in the United States, Part 2: The Twentieth Century (S) (SoSe 2011)

This is the second half of a two-part seminar, although students do not need to have participated in the first half to be involved in this course. While the first part of the course traced the grand theme of the United States as a progressive nation and a modern society back to the American Revolution, this course begins with the superfically familiar theme of the United States as embodying the progressive aspects of industrial capitalism. The seminar will try to supply some order or context into a set of themes and images that continually multiplied and mutated over the twentieth century. It will consider free market, consumerist, and corporate thought, as well as reformist, liberal, and radical visions, delving especially into the early twentieth-century movements that labelled themselves progressive. The seminar will discuss ethnic and racial dimensions of the theme of modernity and progress, ranging from pluralist arguments and arguments rooted within ethnic experiences to assimilationist, exclusionist, and eugencist points of view. The seminar will consider modernism per se, in both its cultural-artistic manifestations and its technocratic-planning ones. And the course will introduce versions of the imagery of the United States as representing progress and modernization in world affairs. In later units, the group will consider, among other matters, the post-World War II debate over American exceptionalism, conservative and liberal thought concerning progress, the New Left, personal liberation movements, and their aftermath, the religious right and Reaganism, and futurism and the reemergence of technological enthusiasm. The seminar will emphasize primary texts in English, supplying as well secondary reading as needed for context.