American Culture is a cultural studies course for SUSTech students who aim to acquire a deeper international perspective on Western Culture, particularly Anglo-American. This course will expose students to the most prominent US scholars and writers from the 19th century to the present, and it will discuss concepts and ideas that represent the foundations of American culture, such as independence, individualism, frontier, freedom, optimism, capitalism and many others. The course will examine a variety of texts, from political essays to novellas, from Presidential speeches to short stories, from documentaries to visual artifacts and economic reports, with the purpose of clarifying what these concepts mean historically, why they are so important, and how they have evolved. At the end of the course, students will be able to understand better their own relationship to another civilization. Prerequisites: English for Academic Purposes III or EAP or English for Academic Purposes.
