Welcome to Our Class!

Nam June Paik, Electronic Superhighway: Continental U.S., Alaska, Hawaii (1995)

If you've taken the first half of this course or are familiar with early US* literature in general one thing you might've noticed is that it doesn't really sound all that American. Sure, it's written by Americans and about America, but literature doesn't resoundingly emerge in the US until the early 19th century and even then it's largely beholden to British aesthetics and written in British parlance. Moreover, 19th century writers in the US found themselves woefully behind the example of their British peers: Romanticism, for example, is inaugurated in 1798 with Coleridge and Wordsworth's first edition of Lyrical Ballads, but it takes thirty years for its influence to become evident in the work of Emerson and Poe, and doesn't fully hit its stride — through Whitman, Dickinson, Melville, Crane, et al. — until at least fifty years later.

In the transition from the 19th century the 20th, however American authors find their own unique voice. There are are early glimpses of this in the ambitious experiments in language found in Whitman's Leaves of Grass and Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Hemingway offers this unmitigated praise: "All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn. American writing comes from that. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since.") and by the turn of the century America's authors are at the forefront of Modernism, with the groundbreaking work of Stein and Lindsay leading the way for iconic work by Anderson, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Williams, Moore, Frost, Sandburg, and more between the First and Second World Wars. Moreover, we see America move beyond the hegemony of straight, white male authors to embrace its central melting pot ideology, both during the heyday of Modernism and through its evolution into Postmodernism. Our reading list aims to reflect this complex evolution, offering up canonical texts alongside modern classics from a diverse array of authors representing the breadth of our national experience, and our goal this semester will be to trace that change from beginning to end. 

I'm excited about the work we'll be doing and I hope you will be as well.

* The official name of this course somewhat problematically replicates a common error — one that we'll continue to make throughout the semester for want of a more streamlined adjective. Properly speaking, we are studying US literature of the 20th and 21st centuries and so that's why I've changed the name slightly; "American" literature would encompass the Americas as a whole, or at the very least our North American neighbors Canada and Mexico.**

** [ yes, the footnote has a footnote ] Interestingly in choosing Valeria Luiselli — who was born in Mexico, first moved to the US at the age of 2, attended college in Mexico, and has lived in the US since — I'm pushing even harder against these questions of nomenclature.