Topics in the Literature of American Cultures

Fiction is full of characters who exert a pull on their readers: those in whom we see versions of ourselves, those we hate to love or love to hate, and those who remain forever inscrutable no matter how hard we try to get inside their thoughts and feelings.  While one of our first instincts as readers may be to respond to such characters in terms of attraction and aversion, as friend or as foe, we’re also told repeatedly that one of the cardinal sins of serious literary engagement is to “identify” with the figures who populate the worlds we read about, who are, after all, mere words on the page.

This course proposes to take seriously our reactions to literary characters: rather than simply dismiss our impulse to respond to these fictional figures as real people, we’ll interrogate exactly how and why fictional texts make us respond as we do to the people who populate their pages. More specifically, we’ll focus our attention on characters in works of twentieth century American fiction to ask what strategies these texts use to represent the particularities of individual experience and how our access to these characters might also provide a portrait of the broader historical and cultural scope of the America in which he or she lives. We’ll consider how first person, stream of consciousness narration might offer us a useful vantage point from which to trace the rise of American slavery in A Mercy and the decline of Southern society in The Sound and the Fury. We’ll ask how questions of voice not only structure the development of the female protagonists in Zora Neale Hurston and Jamaica Kincaid’s novels, but also how these texts position voice in relation to larger questions of African-American identity and American feminism. We’ll travel to two different New Jerseys, to the world of the Italian-American mafia in The Sopranos and the Dominican immigrant community in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, encountering charismatic characters whose surface charm and winning manner draw us into their often horrifying worlds and others who are worthier of our sympathy but have to work much harder to earn it. Throughout the course, we’ll also ask what makes these characters distinctly American and how they help to welcome us into, and perhaps implicate us in, distinct portraits of America at various moments in its history.

Requirements for this course include careful reading/viewing of assigned course texts, active class participation, an in-class presentation, an analytical paper, and a creative project in which students produce and analyze their own fictional American character.

Course texts:
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Díaz
The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner
Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston
Lucy, Jamaica Kincaid
A Mercy, Toni Morrison

Screenings:
The Sopranos (selected episodes), David Chase
Do the Right Thing, Spike Lee

Shorter readings will be available on the course bSpace page.