Wiedza o USA 340-AH1-2AMS

American Studies is a field of knowledge and a university course on more than 400 universities around the globe. The fundamental goal and rationale behind drawing up a course such as ours is, above all, to offer a dissection and an interdisciplinary investigation into the American experiment, to generate a genuine interest in various aspects of the ‘American way of life’ as well as laying the foundations for a better understanding of such a complex country. It is hoped that having gone through the course, students will pursue their individual interests in the field, thus shedding some more light on their favourite aspects of the USA, be it social, cultural, political or other. Viewed from this perspective, the course may be treated as an intellectual springboard for a fuller, more accurate grasp of what America has come to be and denote.

For each segment of the course, students will need to be familiarized with a number of reading assignments provided to them by the instructor. These are taken from a wide variety of sources, including the Internet. Special care has been given to the inclusion of both primary and secondary sources to provide students – practitioners of American Studies – with adequate intellectual stimulus and food for thought allowing them to draw conclusions on their own. Indeed, students will also be assessed on their ability to handle a wide variety of primary sources and only upon their close scrutiny will they be encouraged to consult secondary sources to compare and contrast their views with those of other experts in the field. Occasionally, selected issues will be tackled outside of the American context the aim being to consciously compare and contrast cultures such as American and Polish.

Lastly, it is of paramount importance to bear in mind that the course will inevitably deal with a raft of different dimensions of America. Tocqueville saw the USA as manageable chaos: "One could compare America to a great forest, with a myriad of straight roads built through it, all of them leading to the same point. One need only find the crossroads and everything will become visible at a single glance”. The fundamental rationale behind our investigation of the USA is, therefore, to arrive at the intellectual vantage point from which all the different threads of the American mosaic will suddenly make perfect sense. The purpose of the course is not to glamorize, glorify and romanticize the USA. Nor is it to demean, ridicule or unfairly criticize Uncle Sam.

Each individual student of the USA will doubtless find characteristics of both Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in the present-day America. We shall not shy away from controversial issues for if we eschew those, the final picture of America we arrive at may be blurred, fuzzy or simply erroneous. Also, no matter if you happen to be an Americaphobe or an Americaphile you will undoubtedly find a host of reasons to persist in your approach.

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