Between them, Melville and Twain take us deep into the conflicts, cross-currents, contradictions, and achievements of the emerging America we now inhabit. Our focus will be on the imaginative power, the use of language, and the unsettling insights of Melville’s Typee, Moby-Dick, and Piazza Tales and Twain’s The Gilded Age, Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, Pudd’nhead Wilson, and “To the Person Sitting in Darkness” and Twain’s other exposures of American imperialism. Selected secondary material on Melville, Twain, and American history and political culture will provide a context. In the course I hope to avoid that “astonishing sense of weightlessness with respect to history and individual responsibility” that Edward Said criticizes as the result of contemporary theory.