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ENGLISH LITERATURE (L14)  (Dept. Info)Arts & Sciences  (Policies)FL2017
L14 E Lit 508Seminar: It Did Happen Here: Authoritarianism & Its Enemies in Modern American Lit, History & Theory3.0 Units
Description:American literary study has not shouted from the rooftops about authoritarianism. In the U.S. context, largely resistant to the fascist temptation of the 1930s, Orwellian and other anti-totalitarian allegories have been for high schoolers; Hitler, Mussolini, and company enter as distant topics only in discussions of the Pound Era, the Frankfurt School, and some Foucauldian biopolitics; and the assumed enemy of most varieties of radical interpretation has been the naive liberal rather than the Stalinist apparatchik or Nazi collaborator. Despite the relative indifference of academic criticism, however, a significant vein of 20th- and 21st-century American writing indeed grapples with authoritarianism's causes and consequences and imagines what might unfold if it found a foothold here. This seminar aims to introduce students to three main lines in this vein: historical narratives from Richard Hofstadter's classic essay "The Paranoid Style in American Politics" (1964) to Nancy Isenberg's Trumpsplaining book "White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America" (2016); theoretical accounts from Hannah Arendt's first American publication, "The Origins of Totalitarianism" (1951), to Vaughn Rasberry's "Race and the Totalitarian Century" (2016); and creative dystopian fictions from Sinclair Lewis's "It Can't Happen Here" (1935)--the inspiration for the class title--to Gary Shteyngart's tragically hilarious "Super Sad True Love Story" (2010). These readings will help us tackle a number of pressing questions about responsible literary study, not to mention informed citizenship, after November 2016. What will become of canons and syllabi of American exceptionalism--of the left as well as of the right--amid an international wave of reactionary neo-nationalism? What does the unexpected emergence of an influential, explicitly anti-intellectual alt-right in the U.S. mean for the willfully progressive projects of feminist criticism, disability studies, critical race studies, and queer theory? Should "paranoid reading" now mount a principled comeback?
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Instruction Type:Classroom instruction Grade Options:CPA Fees:
Course Type:HomeSame As:N/AFrequency:None / History
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