Course Description:
This course sits at the intersection of political theory and American literary history. Our goal is to familiarize ourselves with key concepts in political philosophy (e.g. sovereignty, citizenship, deliberation, dissent, revolution) and to track their involvement in competing definitions of U.S. democracy through works of fiction, poems, and polemics. What are the institutional and aesthetic forms of U.S. democracy? What does democratic writing look like? We will seek answers to these questions in manifold and often antagonistic realms: Whitman’s egalitarian verse vs. Melville’s tale of political paranoia, peace-loving crowds in Monterey Pop vs. alienated masses in DeLillo, freedom vs. slavery, localism vs. empire, deliberation vs. revolution. These conflicting fronts will structure our weekly discussions. Even though our focus falls mostly on American literature, the course welcomes and will be enriched by local, comparatist, and interdisciplinary perspectives.