American Studies Commons^™

Covid-19 Student Journal, Sierra Sprouse

Kutztown University Archives

Sierra Sprouse, a Professional Writing major at Kutztown University, kept a journal of her life and observations during the COVID 19 pandemic as part of her internship in the Rohrbach Library-Archives Office.

Loughery Covid -19 Digital Archive, Kelly Loughery

Kutztown University Archives

Kelly Loughery, a Professional Writing major in the English Department at Kutztown University kept a journal in summer 2020 as part of an internship at the Rohrbach Library-Archives Office.

The American Dream As A Cultural Movement, Thomas W. Raskay

English Department: Traveling American Modernism (ENG 366, Fall 2018)

This piece investigates the relationship between the American Dream and automobility through a generational lens, assessing cultural change in each renewal of the American Dream. Comparing generations of Americans exploring and reforming cultural space reveals evidence of the American Dream as a tendency for generations to expand to new frontiers balanced by a duty to reform current social space. Automobility multiplies Americans’ options for exploration and explodes the rate at which modern generations engage with different spaces. Now that automobility is routine, Millenials have expanded to the new social space frontier in cyberspace, but a limitless frontier may disrupt the …

A Genealogy Of Self-Development In Modern America, Kelsey M. Binder

English Department: Traveling American Modernism (ENG 366, Fall 2018)

This article offers a hypothetical conversation between various authors and creators who have embarked on progressive self-development journeys under the influence of a shared society that intermittently embraces and rejects the structures of the American Dream. While examining the instinctive human motives that cause the radical decision to actualize one’s life, this paper attempts to bridge the psychology of the desire for personal growth to our influential cultural landscape. It explores and analyzes the self-development journeys of individuals such as William Least Heat-Moon and Chris McCandless, as well as the recent message of self-development found in a cinematic pop culture …

Automobility And The Future Of Transport, Lukas Koch

English Department: Traveling American Modernism (ENG 366, Fall 2018)

This article explores the history of automobility as ideology, its effect on individuals and its possible future. In the USA in the early 20th century the automobile served to solve the crisis of individualism, created by Taylorism and the rise of the scientific method. To the people of the time the car was associated with freedom and individuality. Freedom through the automobile however was and would never be universally accessible. Furthermore examining the real life consequences of increasing mobility reveals unforeseen effects, mainly pollution, traffic and fragmentation of society. This paper proposes adoption of programs favoring sustainable modes of transportation …

The New Hearth: The Creation Of A Mobile Space, James C. Mangum

English Department: Traveling American Modernism (ENG 366, Fall 2018)

The New Hearth: The creation of a Mobile Space

Mangum, James. Kutztown University, (4 December 2018).

This analysis offers an insightful look into an aspect of travel and modernity that has gone seemingly unnoticed in the culture of American Mobility. As a social product space is created to serve the function of something integral in society. Working individuals need offices for example, students need schools, and citizens need residences. These are created spaces of society that intersect the realities of life, and an automobile is how we get to and from these spaces. Modernity has allowed us to stretch the …

The Influence Of Individualistic Ideas On American Mobility, Markus Magiera

English Department: Traveling American Modernism (ENG 366, Fall 2018)

In this paper I showcase the influence of individualistic thinking ranging back as far as Age of Enlightenment on the development of mobility in America since the eighteenth century. My goal is to identify the factors that shaped the evolution of travel. In order to do so I start by analyzing texts from the early nineteenth century, where travel by foot was the common thing. Next I focus on new means of mobility; first the bicycle, and later on the automobile. I aim to convince that modernity's main instigator was the change in thinking brought forth in the Age of …

Fading Landscapes: The Culture Of Exile And The Open Road, Marc T. Rentschler

English Department: Traveling American Modernism (ENG 366, Fall 2018)

This article seeks to analyze the complex relationship between material culture and hegemonic constructions of ideology along with their tendency to make their way into larger institutional apparatuses of society. For this study this interaction is explored through the symbolic construction of the american roadways and a selective. Drawing on Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, Baudrillard’s America, and William Least Heat Moon’s Blue Highways, this work attempts to combine critical perspectives on the formation of public space with the events of these works in order to formulate how the ideological values which are subsumed by the representational space of ‘The …