The theme of the American abroad has permeated film and fiction for more than a century. In a new course this semester, Cornell students are exploring for the first time how visual and literary media portray Americans traveling in other countries.

"It's a new course for me, so it's kind of an experiment," said Sabine Haenni, assistant professor of film and American studies who teaches the course. "It came out of my research -- I have been thinking about transnational cinema and also thinking of American cinema in that kind of context, and it struck me that people haven't thought about film and international encounters within my discipline that much," she said.

Questions surrounding international encounters, modalities of traveling and living abroad, globalization and identity are among the issues Haenni is hoping to address. After starting with the rise of mass tourism in the late 19th century, the course explores European-American cultural encounters, and in the second half of the semester, will focus on more recent cinema and global issues.

Haenni is particularly interested in exploring ways that war has shaped how we think about Americans abroad. "Part of my original impetus for putting the course together was thinking about post-1968 and how Vietnam changed the way in which American cinema portrays foreign encounters. A question I have for myself is how a kind of Vietnam paradigm has made it difficult to think about international engagements in a constructive way, and how that seems to stay in the film culture much longer than anywhere else," she said.

Students will read and discuss Mark Twain's "The Innocents Abroad" and Henry James' "The American," among other works. With such a large body of literature to draw from, Haenni couldn't squeeze several major writers into the syllabus -- Gertrude Stein and Ernest Hemingway, for example, are prominently missing.

"The goal is really not to produce coverage in any kind of way -- there's just too much. I was thinking of the course much more in terms of concepts and historical moments ... what I want is to introduce new ways of thinking," Haenni said.

The course, Americans Abroad (listed as American Studies 305, Film 305, English 352 and Visual Studies 306), includes weekly film screenings in addition to lectures. The films covered range from "Siren of the Tropics" (1927) to "Apocalypse Now" (1979) to "Lost in Translation" (2003).

Old hats at film analysis and novices alike have enrolled in the course. For some, this will be their first chance to critically view classic American cinema. "This course will give me a chance to see films from the '50s and earlier that I wouldn't see otherwise. It's an opportunity to view past films and explore the complexity involved," said Ryan Stanisz, a sophomore in the College of Human Ecology.

Haenni is not yet sure whether Americans Abroad will become a regular course offering, but she plans to continue exploring the issues raised through her own research.

Graduate student Melissa Rice is a writer intern at the Cornell Chronicle.