Prerequisite: department approval
In the 18th century, St. John de Crѐvecoeur famously asked, “What then is the American, this new man?” This question still preoccupies and puzzles thoughtful Americans. In the first semester of this yearlong course, we examine works that address this concern in three movements. Before doing so, however, we begin with a contemporary novel by Douglas Clegg that disturbs and challenges preconceptions about what American fiction has become. Then, returning to the three movements, we explore “The Birth of an American Self,” by looking at how 19th-century writers (specifically Mark Twain and Henry David Thoreau), confronted by nature on a scale inconceivable to their European forebears and by a new social and political order that strained the limits of individual sovereignty, set out to define a new sense of self and develop forms of imaginative expression that grew from their unusual circumstances. In “The Fracturing of American Identity,” we investigate the way 20th-century writers—particularly in the Lost Generation (Ernest Hemingway and T.S. Eliot) and, later, the Beat Generation (Jack Kerouac)—focused on the decay and growing alienation of the individual, a reflection of what they had witnessed in the horrors of both world wars. Last, students ponder “The Death of the American Dream” by focusing on writers such as Mary McCarthy, Arthur Miller, and Toni Morrison, who questioned the veracity of the ideals that continue to be vital to our national ethos.