Lecture 16: Epilogue: Rediscovering America

The final exam

Grade: 20% Total Grade (Graded out of 100 points)

Time: 100 minutes

I.e. roughly one point/per minute

DATE OF EXAM: Wednesday May 10, 7pm, 20 PC

LOCATION OF EXAM: C20 PC

Exam format
SECTION ONE (20 x 1 point)

Answer ALL 20

5 image IDs

1 a/v ID

4 reading IDs

10  quiz-style questions

SECTION TWO (5 x 2 points)

Answer FIVE of 7 questions

1 (or 2) sentence

SECTION THREE (2 x 10 points)

Answer 2 out of 6 questions (one from each list)

Concept question

full paragraph (150-200 words)

SECTION FOUR (1 x 50 points)

Answer just ONE of 3

Coverage

Sections 1-3 cover weeks 8 through 16

Section 4 emphasizes weeks 8 through 16 (but also draws on earlier weeks)

This weekÕs readings

Thomas Cole

b. 1801 in England

The Course of Empire (1835-6)

Bishop Berkeley, ÒWestward, the Course of EmpireÓ (quoted in Jasper, beginning of boomtown chapter)

Five acts:

I: Wilderness

II: Arcadian or Pastoral

III: Consummation

IV: Destruction

V: Desolation

Questions

Which of these 5 stages was America at by 1830s?  According to Cole?  According to other figures in that period? (Dickens, OÕSullivan, Douglass, et al?)

And which stage is America at now, in your view?

Do you think they would find the idea of rise and fall to be a comforting or a disturbing one?

 

A brief history of ruins in AmericaÉ

Ambrose Bierce, ÒThe Fall of the RepublicÓ (1888)

American novelist, short-story writer, and commentator

What will be the cause(s) of AmericaÕs future ruin, in BierceÕs view?

Why does Bierce imagine America in ruins?  What political purposes does it serve? Conservative or radical?

J. G. Ballard, Hello America (1981)

British science fiction writer

Expedition to rediscover America arrives on the East Coast and finds the continent in a state of environmental desolation.  They travel westward across the continentÉ

Why does Ballard set this scene in Las Vegas?

Why have people written about and depicted America in a state of future ruin?  Implications for ÒexceptionalismÓ?

Question A

 

Review course week by week

Unit 1: Placing American Identity
1: On the Move

 

 

2: Discovering America
 

 

3: Moving West
 

 

UNIT II: Going to Washington: Rights, Justice, Dissent

 

4: Declarations of Independence: Articulating Liberty
 

 

5: ÒPeacably to AssembleÓ: Marching on Washington
 

 

6: TakinÕ it to the streets: Alternative strategies
 

 

Unit III: Negotiating The Market: American Dreams, American Failures
7: Paths to Success
 

 

8: On the Road to Failure
 

 

10: MovinÕ North: Slavery and Labor
 

 

11: Laboring America
 

 

12: Encountering Consumer Culture
 

 

13: American Pilgrimages

 

 

Unit IV: Family Matters
14: Domesticating America, or Family Values
 

 

15: Innocents Abroad?

 

 

 

16: Epilogue