The U.S. through Different Lenses:

Marc Dolan and American Studies

"There is at no point in time a stable idea of what constitutes an American," says Professor Marc Dolan, coordinator of the Certificate Program in American Studies and professor in the Ph.D. Program in English. "It is constantly shifting. Even when people claim it's stable, it's being reconstituted."

According to Dolan, the best way to answer the question, "What is an American?" is to look at it from many different angles. He applies a distinctly multidisciplinary approach in his own writing--on topics as diverse as Herman Melville's The Confidence Man and David Lynch's "Twin Peaks." He also teaches the graduate seminar, Introduction to American Studies: Histories and Methodologies, in which students learn to examine life in the U.S. over the last 400 years through the lenses of philosophy, literary criticism, performance studies, iconography, anthropology, historical scholarship, economics, political science, and other modes of thought.

"In practical terms, American studies is for people who want to study the U.S. from an interdisciplinary perspective, and to study those qualities that are uniquely American," says Dolan. It is also a well-established discipline of its own, having started about seventy-five years ago in literature departments by scholars who wanted a more contextual way of reading American literature, he explains. "Americanists" began to include more intellectual history in their work, and, after World War II, opened up the field to perspectives from psychology, sociology, anthropology, the arts, and so on.

"In some ways, American studies was ahead of a lot of other fields, in that it was one of the first mass movements of multi-disciplinary studies," says Dolan.

In moving from discipline to discipline, however, it is amazing how certain themes come up again and again, resurfacing in different historical periods, says Dolan. For example, the themes of ethnic heterogeneity, the frontier, and the history of Western capitalism are among the most common.

"I think the themes you find most relevant have to do with the period that you most often study," he says, adding that he's not sure if it's "the chicken or the egg."

In Dolan's case, the period tends to be the 1920s (or, roughly, post-World War I era). He is currently working on a book, "Systems and Solos: A History of U.S. Mass Art, 1919-1946," about creativity in the emerging arts of motion pictures, sound recording, and broadcasting around this time. His previous book, Modern Lives: A Cultural Re-Reading of the Lost Generation, also focused on this era and conceptions of the self in the work of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Malcolm Cowley. Oddly enough, it was while Dolan was studying the 1970s punk scene, and the rock group the Ramones, that he found his current topic.

"I gave a couple of talks, and then I realized at some point, while talking about the Ramones, that I had to go back to 1927, and to the earliest remote recordings of blues musicians," says Dolan. "I was thinking about what constitutes 'raw sound,' what constitutes 'authenticity,' and it took me back to these old recordings...I found myself back in the 20s again. I thought I was going to escape."

In the space of about two years, says Dolan, "The entire sound of the U.S. changes." Sound recording goes from acoustic to electric, and therefore can be done remotely in places like Tennessee or Wisconsin, as well as in big cities. Radio goes from local to network, and movies go from silent to sound. Dolan is documenting the interplay between works of art and audiences in society in the midst of these sweeping changes.

As coordinator of American Studies, as in his own work, Dolan pushes for more dialogue across disciplines. He has organized a series of talks on "Life During Wartime" for the fall, featuring lectures by a noted Colonial historian, a sociologist, and an art historian, among others. Next spring, the program will begin an annual "period course," allowing students to look at a decade, say the 1940s, from "at least a half a dozen disciplines," by bringing in faculty from various departments as guest lecturers.

The Certificate Program in American Studies is open to anyone enrolled in a Ph.D. program, and it involves doctoral faculty from the Ph.D. Programs in Art History, English, History, Music, Philosophy, Political Science, and Theatre.

Dolan speaks excitedly about a new fall course that will be co-taught by Professors John Graziano (music) and Michelle Wallace (English) on the history of minstrelsy from the Civil War to the present. "If I were a student here, that's the course I would take, because you can work with two disciplines in the same room on a common phenomenon," he says, adding that The Graduate Center is a great place to do interdisciplinary work because of the strength of the faculty in the various programs.

"A discipline is like a pair of glasses," he says. "It helps you see, but it helps you see in a very particular way. I think a good scholar should have at least disciplinary bifocals, if not trifocals, or quadrifocals."