AMS 211 AMERICAN GANGSTERS
Few cultural figures, if any, succeed in unveiling the interplay of modernity and America in the 20th century as well as the gangster does. The two match up so well and so often that the gangster has become coterminous of our culture. The gangster is everywhere: movies, literature, newspapers’ stories, TV shows, memoirs and popular music. The gangster is everywhere because he (the gender is not an option) evolves and changes with the times. In other words, the gangster's presence is essential to understanding some fundamental aspects of our modern life such as material culture (clothes, fashion); technology (fire weapons, automobiles); and the so-called culture industry. Indeed, the century long continuing success of the gangster indicates how pervasive this identification is in the American psyche. Why is that and how did it all happen?
One way to start figuring out some answers is to look back to classic historical and mythic figures such as Robin Hood, European “brigands,” as well as 19th century American outlaws (Jesse James and Billy the Kid come to mind). All of these figures are, in different but interlocked fashions, antecedents of the gangster. Therefore, they will be the starting point of our investigation, especially because they tell us two fundamental things about the gangster trope. Firstly, the gangster represents certain aspects of the historical evolution of our civilization. More to the point, the gangster represents one of the cultural ciphers of the historical switch from an agrarian economy to an industrial and financial one during the 20th and the 21stcenturies. As such, the gangster embodies pretty much all the questions that such an epochal transition entails. To name a few: changes in modes of productions; new social relations, including sexual, gender, and racial relations; modification in the structure of the society’s class division. Secondly, the gangster epitomizes the end of the 19th century’s rupture that changed once and for all our modern life. The gangster represents the historical switch to urbanization and everything that came with it, including aspects of modern life such as immigration, the new ethnic composition of the American working-class, and the changes in the psychological dimension of the modern life.
We will confront most, if not all of the above by posing the cultural artifacts under investigation in their historical context in the interdisciplinary perspective that characterizes American Studies.
Prerequisite
none
- • Acquire a significant knowledge and understanding of the gangster trope in our culture
• Practice the academic discipline called American Studies
• Recognize how diversity, cultural tropes and stereotypes are formed and intersect
• Think critically about narrative modes and representation
• Understand the role of popular culture in a modern society and the relationship between high and popular culture
• Learn and practice the "close reading of a text" methodology