Cloud mentioned last night that many may still be confused...
Well, personally I think that would go way beyond me explaining what BAAS stands for as an acronym! Especially given some of the titles. Glad that mine at least made sense to some readers.
And the disco?
Shudder: I repeat - BAD DANCING...*
* some of it by me...
2 comments:
American Studies? Why the heck do you guys want to study America?
I should probably make it clear that there are a few schools of thought on American Studies. One is that it provides a convenient umbrella for the studies of things that are American (people, places, activities, events) or affected by America as a cultural, political, social entity. It's particularly helpful if what you wish to research has an interdisciplinary aspect to it - that it, that your topic doesn't easily fit into Literature Studies, or History, or Politics etc etc. The other is that there is something discplinarily specific about American Studies as a way of thinking [I'll say here I'm not convinced of that].
My PhD on Peggy Guggenheim didn't fit most other subjects or disciplines. She was an American, so I ended up in American Studies. It was really a means to an end since there was nothing about her specificly as American that I was focusing on: she spent as much (MORE) time in Europe than she ever did in Europe, but she was riddled with influences of her American upbringing (albeit one heavily affected by the Jewish European origins of her family). Others in my department just happened to be writing about American writers: writers who didn't fit into being studied in Philosophy departments because they were American and didn't name themselves as philosophers, and didn't fit Literature because they wrote non-fiction (sometimes with fiction; or dealt with philosophical ideas in fictional formats). Moreover, people who were influenced by European thinking and ideas... where else could their study be accommodated than under the interdisciplinary umbrella of American Studies, albeit in its loosest sense?
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