Reading US Culture阅读美国文化.docVIP

Reading US Culture閱讀美國文化 英語菁英學程 Teacher: Kevin Chen 陳奏賢 Spring 2010 Course Description: When talking about the American culture, what images do we perceive in our mind? Famous sports teams such as Chien-ming Wang’s New York Yankees, Hong-Chin Kuo’s Dodgers, or Daisuke Matsuzaka’s Boston Red Sox? Pop stars Michael Jackson and Britney Spears, or the historical figure Dr. Martin Luther King? Tourist spots such as Las Vegas, Grand Canyon, New York and the Statue of Liberty? But how do we understand American cultures beyond these names, through films and news articles? In his 1860 preface to The Marble Faunt, the well-known novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne No author, without trial, can conceive of the difficulty of writing a romance about a country where there is no shadows . . ., no picturesque and gloomy wrong, nor anything but a commonplace prosperity in broad and simple daylight, as is happily the case with my dear native land. The famous essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson also commented on this new nation: So in this continent, the energy of Irish, Germans, Swedes, Poles and all the European tribes, of the Africans, and of the Polynesians—will construct a new race, a new religion, a new state. However, this nation is no longer new, and it has quite a big share of problems, shadows and contradictions. How do we, as both non-Americans and ESL (English as second language) learners, come to know the contradictions and dream of freedom and democracy in US culture? The purpose of this course is to introduce the social and cultural diversity of American culture today, and in some historical perspectives. To make the culture vividly present, the course will use films and news articles, matched with discussion questions and other learning activities. To achieve these goals I will in the first place focus on the general introduction to US culture. Then the second part will be using three different but related divisions to understand US culture: The American Society, US in th