The Singer-Songwriter & American Popular Culture

Catalog description

This is a course about the emergence of a mythological figure in twentieth-century American popular culture: the singer-songwriter. From the storied travels of Woody Guthrie across the Great Plains, to the rebellious genius of Bob Dylan, whose poetic lyrics won him the Nobel Prize in Literature, to the genre-bending feminist icon of our modern age, Taylor Swift, singer-songwriters have been at the heart of American cultural expression for nearly a century. By taking seriously how both individual and national identity are shaped by discourses of race, ethnicity, class, gender, and sexuality, we will explore how political transformations in American social life might help us to understand the careers of Guthrie, Dylan, Swift and many others, as well as vice-versa: how singer-songwriters transformed American social life in the mid to late twentieth century. What remains so alluring about these poet-performers? What can their enduring significance tell us about the development of American popular culture in the twentieth century and today? Note: No musical training is required to take this course.