Antonio Gramsci defines historical crisis as a “crisis of the ruling class’s hegemony.” By this he means historical moments in which social categories as they are defined by those in power in order to represent their world-view become threatened. Some might argue this is true at all times but most would agree that certain moments in American history can be understood primarily through their definition as crisis. This class will focus on a few of these historical moments – roughly, the end of the 18th and 19th centuries and the middle to late 20th century – to try to think critically about what social structures, conditions of possibility, negotiations, and circuits of power are at work during what we’ll call crises in the definition of “the (American) People.” Our main intellectual questions will be: What does “America” mean? And who are Americans? Or, more precisely, who gets to be American? And how? And why? Since, literature has always played some role in producing answers to these questions, we will then ask: What is a national literature and why has literature even been associated with the nation at all? What role might the literary play in producing “the People” of a nation? What intellectual space might literature provide for reinforcing, negotiating, or challenging that definition and those that define it?

Because America is produced through multiple discourses, disciplines, and institutions, including but not limited to “its” literature, our literary readings will be juxtaposed with other kinds of readings, including: primary historical documents (such as the “Declaration of Independence” and Exclusion Acts); theoretical readings about the nation form; and literary criticism about the texts we read. This will all be in an effort to ascertain what they might mean by the term “the (American) People” in order to produce our own working definition of the term. As race is the salient modality through which “the People” are defined and through which “America” is lived, our focus will be on reading literary texts as part of U.S. racial formation. Readings will include multiple genres (novel, play, short stories, and poetry) and may include Thomas Jefferson Notes on the State of Virginia, Benjamin Franklin, Ralph Waldo Emerson “American Scholar,” Phillis Wheatley, Walt Whitman, Francis Harper Iola Leroy, Harriet Jacobs, William Faulkner, Richard Wright Native Son, Langston Hughes Simple Stories, James Baldwin Blues for Mister Charlie, and Gloria Anzaldúa.

A decent grade will depend heavily on class participation and engaged interrogation of each day’s reading as well as several short papers and a final paper project.