Like many other surveys of American Literature, this class will ask how literature has contributed to the construction of national identity and what Benedict Anderson has called “the imagined community” of nationalism. In this particular class, we will focus our attention more specifically upon representations of place and location in order to see how American “character” has been defined and re-defined according to where it has been historically “located.” Guided by contemporary criticism and theory in American Literary Studies, we will travel through and across a variety of locales – from the domestic spaces of the traditional family, to the Western frontier, and to the streets of the great American metropolises. We will also examine a number of texts that put pressure on the boundaries and limits of these spaces – the different forms of imagining national belonging that are excluded or effaced in the process of representing American community.
The reading load for this class will be heavy and will include Hannah Foster’s The Coquette, Maria Luis Burton’s The Squatter and the Don, Charles Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition, Nella Larsen’s Passing, and John Dos Passos’s Manhattan Transfer. Shorter class readings (available online) may include texts from Thomas Jefferson, Walt Whitman, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Stephen Crane, Gwendolyn Brooks, Alfred Kazin, James Baldwin, and Leslie Marmon Silko. Work for the course includes participation in class discussion and activities, weekly short, informal entries in a collective online journal, a 5-7 page essay, and a final exam.