American Popular Entertainments

Catalog description

This is a course about entertainment. Live, popular entertainments are simultaneously art and commerce, engaging audiences in performance events that reflect culture’s current tastes and values, its hopes and anxieties. Typically, they also are a lot of fun. This course considers American popular entertainments as culturally significant forms of performance that can reveal much about what a particular generation of Americans knows, believes, feels, and desires. Through our semester together, students will learn about and question the ways that American popular entertainments are produced, consumed, and circulated in and beyond the context of the United States. Employing either a survey approach or an intensive case study, this course introduces students to thinking deeply and critically about popular culture, especially those aspects of it that occur in front of a live audience.