America: The View from Europe

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

In this London Seminar you will investigate how Europeans have seen, understood, and portrayed America from the fifteenth-century voyages of discovery until the present day. Engaging with a diverse array of perspectives and authors—Columbus and Vespucci; Montaigne and Marx; Calvino and Pavese; de Tocqueville and de Beauvoir; Trollope and Woolf—you will reflect on the enduring myths of America that continue to shape our understanding of the New World. Conducting an investigation across a wide variety of texts and genres—letters and travelogues; essays and novels; films and popular songs—you will explore the formation of American identities from without but also from within. Confronting the big questions and the major controversies—about democracy, diversity, equality, liberty, and prosperity—you will evaluate how others understand America, and how Americans understand themselves.