My classmates and I have been asked to write a post about our perceptions and expectations of this field of American Studies; however, i think mine is gonna be somehow different from others since I’ve been experiencing all these classes of the past year while other guys are just in the doorway of getting into the subject. So, while these newcomers, like me a year ago, are going to have a kind of idealistic attitude towards our job here, I’ve come to realize what’s going on here, in fact.
To start with, as i searched “American Studies” in Wikipedia, i found out that as an interdisciplinary field, it could cover a wide range of different studies from history to art and literature, from politics to culture and from sociology to anthropology. But, of course, it is impossible for a student to deal with all these grand majors in two or three years and that’s why, as other ones, our college covers a few among them. But what are these few ones? I may turn to wiki again when it says about us that this “new program, offered at the Faculty of World Studies, is a multidisciplinary MA program focusing on American culture, politics, history and ethnicity” while it misses the courses on economics and isn’t that much correct on cultural side: we have a course on American cinema and that’s all about its culture; no talk on American people, A LOT on its government.
Then, to have a general look at it, i think the main focus of our studies is on political issues, from some introductory course of politics to the structure of the US government to its foreign policy and even when it turns to history, its all about how United States came to be the superpower of the world, which is again a political approach to history. And I like it in this way! I like it to be so much political, ’cause I didn’t know anything of politics when i came here and now it is my second favorite in human sciences, after art and literature.
Lets stop here. I will discuss theses mainly political issues of our studies in details, each at a time.
Adios!
