Methods and Texts I

AMER 115 is your training ground for reading culture as text — learning to take a poem, a film, a novel, or a piece of nonfiction prose and actually say something rigorous about how it works and what historical conditions made it possible. The semester moves through genre-specific toolkits (scansion, narrative voice, staging, musical form) while running a parallel track on the intellectual history of modernity: how the "open future," individualism, and capitalist time-discipline came to shape North American self-understanding. Expect steady quizzes, two short essays, and a midterm built on close reading rather than memorization. As the first half of the AMER methods sequence, it sets up the critical vocabulary you'll lean on in every literature, film, and cultural-studies course that follows.