The 2012 Council for American Studies Education (CASE) Conference, will be convening on February 24, 2012, at the Newberry Library in downtown Chicago. The theme is "America Imagined."
Register now (early registration ends December 23). Even better, submit a proposal for a breakout session (by January 6).
From deCrevecouer to Obama, America has evoked powerful motivation to generations of Americans and immigrants as a physical place and as an imagined space. We have long been a place of myth and promise, tied to place and yet always moving. Imagine the dotted lines tracing the movement from South to North (and back again), East to West, and West to further west. These lines represent those who are looking for the better America, the promise fulfilled.
American history, literature, art, and especially American theater exists in the dramatic tension between the imagined vision of America and the tragic failures of the American reality: individuals, families, and communities struggling to make ends meet in a country that can not or will not live up to its founding creed that all men are created equal.
Consider America as it exists on stage, screen, page, and canvas. Our imaginations are often as large as the physical landscape of this place. From Algren, Wright and Motley to Jane Addams and the White City, from Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun to Tracy Letts’ Superior Donuts, Chicago has provided particularly fertile landscape for this America Imagined.American Studies provides a rich framework for students to encounter the drama and ambiguity that plays itself out throughout American history and literature. This CASE Conference will challenge us to think about how America has been defined by place, both imagined and real, and how we might engage our students in that dramatic tension in the classroom.
The CASE 2012 Planning Committee is the Maine South American Studies Team.
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