American Literature in the Age of Empire

The contemporary political Right wants to turn America back to the Age of McKinley. In the course we’ll return to the scene of the crime. Using a mix of literature, history, and political/cultural criticism, we’ll concentrate on the formation of the American empire, its relation to the exporting of American products and the American Dream, the origins and dynamics of American advertising and consumer capitalism, America before the income tax and the safety net, the role of race in the America of Jim Crow and the White Man’s Burden, and the implications for American authoritarianism, proto-fascism, or fascism of all of the above.
The primary literature will include Twain’s Connecticut Yankee and his powerful anti-imperialist essays, Dixon’s The Clansman and DuBois’s Souls of Black Folk, Dreiser’s Sister Carrie, Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class, Melville’s Billy Budd, James’s “The Jolly Corner,” and Crane’s “The Monster” and selected city sketches (list will probably be scaled down under the pressure of reality). Context studies will include selections from Wiebe’s Search for Order, LaFeber’s The New Empire, Greg Grandin’s “The Right Quagmire: Searching History for an Imperial Alibi,” Gore Vidal’s Empire, William Appleman Williams’s Contours of American History, Zinn’s People’s History, Rosenberg’s Exporting the American Dream, Leach’s Land of Desire, and Horsman’s Race and Manifest Destiny.