EN271 Expatriation, Dispatriation, and Modern American Writing

Please note that this module will not be running in 2009-2010. 

EN271:  Expatriation, Dispatriation, and Modern American Writing

Daniel Katz

Description:

This module has several overlapping and complementary aims:  first, to examine the long tradition of American expatriate writing, while seeing this writing not as an escape from questions of American identity, but as a paradoxically privileged space for a dialectical encounter with them.  Thus, we will see how for James, Hawthorne, Stein, Eliot, and Baldwin, to list the most obvious examples, “Europe” becomes an indispensable space and conceptual construct, be it often a fantasmatic one, for the interrogation of any sort of “Americanness.” 

Second, the module will also examine writing which if not biographically “expatriate” nevertheless undertakes an explicit revaluation of the relationship between “American” and “European” from the perspective of a rejection of prevailing myths of historical, religious, or cultural separation and difference, especially as they inform American “exceptionalism” (Howe, Pynchon). 

Finally, the course will introduce some of the methodology and key issues of transatlantic studies, in an effort to think through how “area studies” and other forms of work on cultural appurtenance and specificity can be rearticulated along comparatist lines, in a movement of resistance to reified regionalist or nationalist ontologies.  In this connection, certain authors whose biographies test the question of what or who is or is not “American” (Carpentier, McKay) are deliberately included.

This module will build on recent critical work on cultural identity as performative construction rather than “endangered authenticity” (James Clifford, Judith Butler); language, identity, ethnicity, and dialect (Michael North, Steven Yao); exoticism, authenticity, and conspicuous leisure (Dean MacCannell); as well as recent explorations in transatlantic and transnational literary studies (Robert Crawford, Paul Giles, Wai Chee Dimock, Brent Edwards).  Among the module’s major concerns will be such issues and tropes as tourism and cultural capital; the relation of Eros to exoticism; local idiom and linguistic identity; diaspora and cultural palimpsest; and constructions of home and foreign.


Syllabus, 2008-2009

Term 1:

1.     (Introduction)  Constructing Americanness 
Presentation of the class and discussion of short excerpts from D. H. Lawrence, “The Spirit of Place,” in Studies in Classic American Literature, and R. W. Emerson, “The American Scholar” and “Self-Reliance,” among others. (week 1)

2.     The Guilty Abroad
Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Marble Faun (weeks 2-3)

3.    Cosmopolitans and Aliens 
Henry James, The Ambassadors (weeks 4-5)
“Occasional Paris,” “The Question of Our Speech,” short selections from The American Scene (week 7)
Claude McKay, Banjo (week 8)

4.    Why There’s No There There 
Gertrude Stein, Everybody’s Autobiography, “An American and France,”  selections from The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, selections from Paris France. (weeks 9-10)

Term 2:

1.  When Good Americans Die, They Go To Paris
Edith Wharton, The Custom of the Country (week 11)
Elaine Dundy, The Dud Avocado (week 12)
James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room, “Encounter on the Seine:  Black Meets Brown,” and other short texts (week 13)

2.  Colonial Imaginings and Demystified Origins
Susan Howe, The Birth-mark (week 14)
Alejo Carpentier, Baroque Concerto (week 15)

3.  Foreign Correspondence
Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow (weeks 17-18)

4.  Pilgrim in Reverse
T. S. Eliot, “Four Quartets” and “American Literature and the American Language” (week 19)

5.  Conspicuous Leisure and the Suburban Palimpsest  
John Ashbery and James Schuyler, A Nest of  Ninnies, selections from Reported Sightings (Ashbery). (week 20)
   

N. Hawthorne, The Marble Faun (Oxford World’s Classics, 2002)
H. James, The Ambassadors (Oxford World’s Classics, 1985)
C. McKay, Banjo: A Story Without a Plot (Harcourt, 1971)
G. Stein, Everybody’s Autobiography (Exact Change, 1993)
E. Wharton, The Custom of the Country (Penguin Classics, 2006)
E. Dundy, The Dud Avocado (New York Review of Books Classics, 2007)
J. Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room (Penguin Modern Classics, 2000)
S. Howe, The Birth-mark (Wesleyan UP, 1993)
A. Carpentier, Baroque Concerto (Andre Deutsch, 1991)
T. Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow (Vintage, 2007)
T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets (Faber, 2001)
J. Ashbery and J. Schuyler, A Nest of Ninnies (Paladin, 1987)
All other set texts will be available in photocopy.

Assessment:

100 % assessed:  Two 5,000 word essays (due week 3, term two, and week 3, term 3)

50% assessed, 50 % examined:  One 5,000 word essay (due week 3, term 2), and one 2-hour examination.

Henry James

Gertrude Stein      Picasso's portrait of Stein

Claude McKay

James Baldwin in Paris

Edith Wharton

Portrait of T. S. Eliot by Wyndham Lewis