3 Credits 
MWF 12:55-1:45pm - Mr. Graber
(Cross-listed with ENGL 365-AX/565-AX - Fulfills Cultural Diversity General Education Requirement)

What is America? It may seem like a simple question but take a look at the motto on an American coin and watch the complications proliferate: E Pluribus Unum; out of many, one. So is there one America or are there many, and if there were such a thing as a unified American character, where would we look for it? Although we often speak as if American identity simply exists, it has always been a topic of rich debates—involving literature, high art, and pop culture as much as politics—that have also inspired a diverse range of cultural scholarship. Beginning with the revolutionary period, this course will follow the contesting voices of these debates as they played out through the Civil War era and “the American century” to resound finally in our own time of increasing globalization. As we hear Frederick Douglass talk back to Thomas Jefferson, and Toni Morrison reconsider Huckleberry Finn, students will also be introduced to interdisciplinary studies of American culture that have developed around the questions, quandaries, and quagmires of American identity.

The course will familiarize students with three major cultural themes that have both informed cultural debates over American identity and also drawn the interest of generations of American studies scholars: “Declaring Independence,” “Liberating Slaves,” and “Crossing Borders.” Within these thematic parameters we will be exploring key works of American literature, visual art, political expression, cinema, and scholarship. Rather than seeking to identify a single core American spirit that can stand for all time, we will be discussing the diversity of voices and approaches that have contributed to more than two centuries of intense conversation about national identity in the United States, as we map the historical terrain that has motivated the long and possibly quixotic quest for “the American mind.”

Literature:
Robert N. Bellah, et al, Habits of the Heart, 3rd Edition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007)
Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men (New York: Vintage, 2007)
Toni Morrison, Beloved (New York: Vintage, 2004)