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To study American consumerism is essentially to study America and its people. Consumerism is very much linked with "The American Way" and tells us much about American values and how Americans live their lives. As such, "The American Way" has greatly influenced the world - especially our part of the world - and one might argue that American values have become western values.
This course examines America and the Americans through the lens of consumerism. Focusing primarily on developments in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the course will enable students to identify, understand, analyze, and reflect critically upon the role of consumerism in American history, society, and culture. While the emphasis is on the last 100 years or so - the century often referred to as ‘the American century' - the course will also assess the earliest theories and writings on the role of consumption and advertising in American society, in order to understand the foundation upon which the consumer state of the 1900s was built. As the course progresses, we will also explore developments in advertising and look into examples of how consumerism has been depicted in American literature, film, TV-series, and art.
Some of the topics/areas covered in the course will be: The Gilded Age; The Roaring 20s and the Jazz Age; the rise of the post-war consumers' republic; the suburban sprawl; the landscape of consumerism (shopping malls, billboards, etc.); children, tweens, and teens as consumers; the post-modern consumer society; fast-food culture and the McDonaldization of America.
Ingen.
Michael Madsen
I hold an MA in English from the University of Southern Denmark. Since 2007 I have been an assistant/external lecturer at Aarhus School of Business and Aarhus University, mainly teaching courses on American and British history, society, and culture. In addition to giving papers at literature conferences in England and the US, I have published newspaper articles and essays on representations of the city and suburbia in American literature and popular culture, and on the fiction of John Dos Passos, Jeffrey Eugenides, and Cormac McCarthy. I have a chapter entitled "A Namelessness Wheeling in the Night: Shapes of Evil in Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian and John Carpenter's Halloween" in the coming collection Borders and Crossings: Intertextual and Interdisciplinary Approaches to Cormac McCarthy (editor, Nicholas Monk) published by Routledge in August 2012.
Undervisningen i disciplinen foregår på hold, og der lægges vægt på arbejdsformer, der kan omfatte læsning af primær- og sekundærtekster, skriftlige opgaver og/eller mundtlige bidrag fra de studerende, holddiskussioner samt gruppearbejde.
Engelsk
The course reading will consist of a course book (title to be announced) and additional texts, some of which will be in a course compendium, while others will be distributed in class or online. There may be screenings of films and relevant episodes of TV-series outside of class.
Mundtlig prøver eller undervisningsdeltagelse eller fri skriftlig hjemmeopgave.
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