Cultures of the United States Ii

Consistent with first-year learning objectives, students will be led to refine the metacognitive analysis of discursive strategies of U.S. cultural production and representation in the relevant spatial-temporal context and through pre-existing skills related to the diversity of identity belonging. The course intends to provide students with further enhancement of knowledge, methodological tools of analysis and conceptual categories necessary for in-depth reading, contextualization, analysis and critical understanding of the texts addressed and related to the crucial narratives of U.S. in literary, historical, political, sociological, media and environmental contexts. It also aims, through seminar-like participation, to promote solidly argued critical discussion skills.

Consistent with first-year learning outcomes, students will be required to demonstrate in-depth knowledge of the historical, social and cultural contexts of the major U.S. narratives of the 20th and early 21st centuries, and to do so through a diachronic awareness of the long duration of cultural phenomena studied at the intersection of identity categories. Students must demonstrate the ability to apply preexisting knowledge by gaining further critical insight into the formal and thematic characteristics of the texts under study, the historical and cultural issues addressed, and the categories of theoretical and conceptual reflection analyzed in the course. Therefore, they should be able to critically analyze and interpret texts, situate them in relation to their historical and cultural context, and reflect on their forms and modes of representation, demonstrating the ability to construct a rigorous, original and methodologically informed critical argumentation, supported by textual evidence and theoretical reflections, and to do so in critically appropriate English - both written and oral.