THE MYTH OF NATIONAL COMMUNITY IN THE 19TH CENTURY U.S.: FIGURES OF ‘AMERICA’ AGAINST A TROUBLED BACKDROP

An exploration of the powers--and limits--of various cultural mechanisms seeking to impart integrity and focus to a sprawling US society during the nineteenth century. A study of US art and culture in general–of maps, Currier and Ives prints, and other cultural artifacts through the lens of which national wholeness and identity are imagined–as well of major theorists and critics of the nation-building process such as Homi K. Bhabha and Sacvan Bercovitch. To what degree does a US national imaginary become persuasive and credible against a backdrop that includes increasingly globalized, trans-national space, racial and class division, Indian removal, immigration, and civil war? What sort of cultural work do national myths, symbols of unity, and rhetorics fusing American society with utopian aspiration and divine providential will perform–or fail to perform–throughout this period? Readings that throw the question of national identity into relief against a troubled backdrop will include “Chief Seattle’s Speech,” Whittier’s Snowbound, Margaret Fuller on her encounter with native tribal peoples of the upper American Midwest, Whitman’s poetry and prose, Moby-Dick, selected fiction and sketches by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, selected writings by Frederick Douglass, Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk, fiction by Rebecca Harding Davis, Kate Chopin, and Stephen Crane, and, finally, a close reading of Henry James’s The American Scene, which from its turn-of-the-century vantage point will help both to sum up and to sharpen our discussion of the problematics of the US national imaginary.