What makes American history, and why would we want to—need to—remake it? This course explores literary and visual materials produced in the post-Civil Rights U.S. by artists and writers who ponder this question and approach history like a raw material that demands to be refashioned and constantly problematized. What versions of American history have they remade, and what new versions and visions of history do they produce in the process? How has re-making history been used to gain a critical understanding of silences and omissions in the United States’ story?

What is a hero? What are the origins of the hero as a cultural and literary construct? Originating in myth, folktale and religious cult-worship, the hero archetype has had an astonishing history stretching from ancient times to the Marvel and DC superheroes of today. Endowed with superhuman or exceptional traits, the hero originated as a bridge between the divine and the human. His life’s journey combines a quest for self-discovery with the fulfillment of a higher cause, from the cosmic workings of destiny to the realization of social justice.

The Statue of Liberty with welcome torch always raised. The Hollywood sign against golden California hills. Subways and freeways running like arteries above and below ground, offering to transport us around and across the city. Many iconic images of New York City and Los Angeles construct U.S. urban centers as a space of endless movement and possibility.

From Columbus’s ‘discovery’ of America to the Pilgrims’ settlement, from the Sons of Liberty to the Founding Fathers, the dominant stories of America’s cultural founding draw heavily from contradictory themes of finding, abandoning, and founding one’s roots. While American origin stories often thematize the loss, abandonment, or reestablishment of family and heritage, these foundational myths also tend to obscure the history of imperialism, racial oppression, violence, and exploitation that forms American political bedrock.

The Hunger Games, World War Z, Divergent, The Walking Dead, Zone One, San Andreas, The Road, The Leftovers: the prevalence of dystopias and catastrophic disaster narratives in current American popular culture—in everything from Hollywood blockbusters to Young Adult fiction to prestige TV and highbrow novels—would seem to suggest that we are living through a golden age for the apocalyptic imagination.

What does it mean to be born into the legacy of a cultural disaster that one did not experience oneself, but came to know only through the lives of others? How do major historical upheavals impact the generations that follow? What is a “second generation” survivor?  This course will focus on theories of violence, ethics, and memorial practices, with particular emphasis on World War II in Europe and Asia but with reflections on events from other regions and from more recent times. Which voices dominate, and which are the hardest to hear?

This class will examine the concept of responsibility through selected Modern Greek fiction by writers of the 19th and 20th centuries. We will look at responsibility and its confrontation, evasion and abdication. We will also examine the focus of responsibility toward the self, toward the law, and toward the other.

Also listed as Slavic 131:1

This seminar serves as an introduction to upper-division coursework in Comparative Literature, and it takes up an important question as a way to begin exploring what comparative literary study is.  How do American poets, from about 1950 to the present, attempt formally and thematically to engage ethics and politics?

What is meant when we say someone or something “sounds American”? Can a person sound like a certain gender, social class, sexuality, or race? How would we possibly define that sound? And what might it mean to think of a culture by the ways it sounds and listens, instead of how it looks or sees?