2023-24 Academic Catalog

"America" has often served as a canvas for projecting European anxieties about economic, social and political modernity. Admiration of technological progress and democratic stability went hand in hand with suspicions about its--actual and supposed--materialism, religiosity and mass culture. These often contradictory perceptions of the United States were crucial in the process of forming European national imaginaries and myths up to and including an European identity. Accordingly, this course will explore some of the most important examples of the European imagination of the United States--from Michel de Montaigne to Hannah Arendt.