Topics in the Literature of American Cultures

Young adult fiction, cable television drama, sportswriting, the Western— all are genres that we’re likely to associate more with leisure entertainment than historical inquiry.  And yet, the parameters and conventions of each provide authors with a particular mode of storytelling through which they can imagine the lived experience of past moments and explore its tensions in ways the historical record might not.

In this course, we’ll turn to contemporary works of American fiction, both literary and visual, that cast a look back on various moments of the country’s history from the vantage point of the past thirty years.  We’ll follow Toni Morrison back to the early days of American slavery to look at race and gender in the pre-revolutionary colonies.  We’ll accompany M.T. Anderson’s young Octavian Nothing as he navigates the political unrest of Boston during the Revolutionary War and rebels against his status as “property” and as racial Other.  We’ll turn to the American Southwest, to Cormac McCarthy’s intensely violent imagining of the mid-19th century U.S./Mexico border, and travel to Deadwood, at the outskirts of the Dakota Territory, to chart the camp’s attempt to transform itself from a wilderness outpost into an established American town.  Finally, we’ll end up in the 20th century, where we’ll explore Don DeLillo’s portrait of 1950s Cold War politics through the lens of a baseball game, America’s pastime.

Through a close reading of these literary texts, which we’ll supplement with additional historical and critical readings, we’ll address questions of race, ethnicity, gender, and culture during the defining historical moments that the texts take as their focus, and we’ll consider how the mode of historical fiction allows us to view the fractures, tensions, and anxieties of that past moment.  In addition to asking what these texts can tell us about America’s past, we’ll also interrogate what these works suggest about the contemporary America in which they were written and how they might understand their own— and our— place in its history.

Required Texts:

A Mercy, Toni Morrison
The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, Volume 1: The Pox Party, M.T. Anderson
Blood Meridian or the Evening Redness in the West, Cormac McCarthy

Visual Texts:

Django Unchained, Quentin Tarantino
Deadwood (Season 2), David Milch

A course reader will include “The Triumph of Death” from Don Delillo’s Underworld, as well as selected historical and critical readings.