|
課程內容大綱 |
How do we understand American culture beyond the names like New York Yankees, Michael Jackson, Lady Gaga, or Dr. Martin Luther King? In the 1860 preface to The Marble Faunt, the well-known novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne has written about 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. Ralph Waldo Emerson has 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 dream of freedom and democracy, and the contradictions within this dream in This course aims 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 we 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 American culture: The American History and In this course the assigned readings will mostly be from the handouts, including newspaper, magazine articles, and other texts. We will also be viewing the materials from the Internet, like photos, short media clips from Youtube, and Hollywood films about the main issues of American culture. |
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
      |
 |
|
 |
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||
 |
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
