American Literature and American Foreign Policy – MA Seminar

In recent decades scholars of American literature have adopted the U.S. state’s foreign policy concepts and initiatives as lenses for understanding the country’s culture. This course introduces, studies, and questions these lenses, placing them in conversation with literary texts that query America’s presence in the world and imagine relations between America and foreign realms. How does American literature represent and reformulate major concepts and programs in foreign affairs such as the Monroe Doctrine, isolationism, containment, reconstruction, modernization, the War on Terror, humanitarian intervention, and human rights? Though our focus will lie on U.S. literature after 1945, our readings will span American history. Among the authors to be studied are Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Joan Didion, Pearl S. Buck, Jessica Hagedorn, John Hersey, Saul Bellow, Archibald MacLeish, T. Geronimo Johnson, John Okada, and Ben Fountain.

The question of how literature refracts and reformulates state-based foreign policies will function as a gateway to a host of broader issues we’ll consider. Some of these issues are literary-critical: for instance, how does literature represent state power? What imaginative strategies generate Americanness and foreignness and the relations between them? Some of the issues we’ll consider, however, are methodological: what scholarly and intellectual apparatuses are best equipped to help us think about American culture’s interactions with the wider world, beyond the confines of the nation-state? What exactly does it mean to read “transnationally”? What roles can we imagine for literature in relation to the state—is literature restricted only to reflecting or critiquing the politics of the world in which it is written? This is to say that we will be concerned with interrogating not only the primary literature we study but the dominant scholarly frames that have been used to study them.

Attention will be paid throughout the course to scholarly professionalization—that is, the activities necessary to thrive as an academic. To that end, we will practice presenting a conference-style paper and writing an abstract, as well as situating our literary-critical readings within secondary literature.

Evaluation Method: Seminar/Referat Paper (70%); In-Class Presentation (15%); Abstract (5%); Participation (10%)