MA option
825Q4a ImagiNation: the Great American novel?
Autumn 2015
Where: Bramber House 243
When: Mondays 11-13
Tutor: Prof. Dr. Maria Roth-Lauret
Arts B 254 e-mail m.lauret@sussex.ac.uk
Office hours: Monday 2-3
Wednesday 11-12
Description of this module:
Nation and narration tend to go together, and nowhere is this more obvious and visible than
in American literature. ‘The Great American Novel’, after all, became something of a
shibboleth in the 20th century, for American writers and critics alike. Was it possible to
capture the essence, as well as the diversity, of the American nation in fiction? And if so, how
should this be done—in a novel of panoramic reach, such as John Dos Passos’ USA or Don De
Lillo’s Underworld, or in representation of America’s historico-political unconscious, such as
Toni Morrison’s Beloved or Jayne Anne Phillips’ Machine Dreams? Did it have to be about
American history in some way, or could a topic so ostensibly small as family life come to take
on the burden of representing the nation in imagination, as in Philip Roth’s American Pastoral
or Junot Díaz’ The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao?
How did multi-culturalism and globalisation define or challenge the coherence of a nation to
be captured in a Great American Novel? Who would be in a position to write such a thing, at
a time when American identity was becoming increasingly diverse? And did 9/11 change
everything?
This module is about big books with big ambitions. We look at representations of American
national identity to discover how American fiction of the 20 th and 21st centuries has
represented American-ness. The big novels we will be reading may also be great—but the
definition of ‘greatness’ will itself be part of our investigation, rather than a foregone
conclusion. This is why there is one ‘free’ week reserved in the schedule, for a Great American
Novel of your collective choosing. This is when we’ll be asking whether the Great American
Novel has to be established, long, a prizewinner, and written by a Great Author.
Is it possible for it to be short, very recent, or written by someone you’ve never heard of?
In other words: what are the limits of the Great American Novel as a phenomenon of
publishing, marketing, and institutionalisation? In light of these questions, we will therefore
certainly also consider issues of representativeness: of mainstream and margin, the local and
the cosmopolitan or global.
These themes will also come up in the criticism, theory and historiography that we shall be
drawing on to put our reading into critical perspective.
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What is expected of you:
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Attendance at all seminars, unless permission for absence has been obtained
beforehand
preparation for seminars, e.g. doing the required reading, with annotations and
notes to self,
active participation in seminar discussion; this module won’t work unless you are
prepared to express and debate your knowledge and your views, as well as those of
peers and critics
one presentation, prepared and presented together with a fellow student
one non-assessed essay, if you wish, which can be based on your presentation, of
2000 words. Deadline varies with your presentation.
Why presentations?
To be able to report on research and/or create an agenda for discussion is a really useful
skill to learn and to develop, especially so at graduate level, and on this module in particular.
We will be dealing with very long primary texts as well as some heavy-duty theory, and so
presentations will be a good way into the great American novels and the sometimes obtuse
theoretical and critical takes on it that we shall be reading. In the in-between theory weeks
they will help us focus not just on abstract ideas but also on how the theory might be put to
work on the literary reading we are doing.
A presentation, then, should be useful to the seminar group as whole, not just the person(s)
presenting. In the case of primary text weeks, presentations should be organised around
passages of the text that presenters choose for close reading and analysis. In the case of
theory weeks, presenters may choose to do the same or they may want to highlight other
issues (of context, or explication of terms and concepts, for example).
We shall identify who is presenting when in the first meeting, in order of preference if at all
possible.
Module programme from week to week:
Week 1 the Great American Novel: an exploratory discussion
We begin the seminar with introductions and with an exploratory discussion of the concept
of the Great American Novel and our own ideas about it so far. There is also some
housekeeping to do this session, regarding presentations and choice of texts later on in the
semester, as well as setting the agenda for next week.
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For some relief, we watch one of Cynthia Weber's short video films from the 'I Am an
American' series, as a way in to discussing American national identity.
Essential viewing:
‘I am an American’ videos on opendemocracy.net and SyD
Week 2 Nation and Narration in theory and the History of the Great American
Novel
What is the relation between nation and narration, or between national identities and literatures?
What kind of cultural, political, social, ideological work does the Great American Novel perform, as a
concept and in its individual manifestations?
Read: Homi Bhabha, extract from Nation and Narration (London: Routledge 1990)
http://prelectur.stanford.edu/lecturers/bhabha/nation.html
DeForest, ‘The Great American Novel’ (1868) Study Direct
Kasia Boddy, ‘Lynne Tillman and the Great American Novel’ (by permission of
author)—Study Direct
Bring for discussion:
Your own ideas plus popular/journalistic articles and opinion pieces on the Great American
Novel you have found on the web or elsewhere
Recommended reading:
David Foster Wallce, ‘E Unibus Pluram’ SyD
Elaine Showalter on the Great American Novel (Guardian) SyD
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, ‘What is a Minor Literature?’ from Kafka: towards a minor
literature Transl. Dana Polan SyD
Week 3 Moby Dick : Certified Great American Novel
Presentation:
Not well received in its time, Herman Melville's Moby Dick has long since been regarded as a
Great American Novel, perhaps even the quintessentially Great American Novel that
DeForest called for in 1866. Reading it 'cold,' as we are doing, is nevertheless no easy task,
dazzled as we are likely to be by the sheer audacity of Melville's writing, which saturates
every single sentence with significance--but to what end or effect is left for us readers to
figure out. As a result, a whole critical industry has sprung up around Moby Dick, as some
critics have made study of this novel their life's work whilst others have let loose any
number of critical hypotheses on it and produced readings that range from the informed
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and insightful to the bizarre and outlandish. Pinning down what Moby Dick means then, or
even 'what it is really about' is as fraught an enterprise as Ahab's hunting of the whale itself.
What we'll be doing in this seminar is give account, first of all, of our reading experience-frustrations and all-- and then figure out how our own implicit critical approaches testify to
the fact that there is no such thing as reading this novel of great repute afresh, 'for the first
time' after all.
essential reading:
Herman Melville, Moby Dick (any edition)
Michael Berthold, 'Moby Dick and American Slave Narrative' The Massachusetts Review 35:
1 (1994) 135-48. SyD
recommended reading:
Kevin Hayes, The Cambridge Introduction to Moby Dick (2007)
Robert S. Levine, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Herman Melville (1998)
William V. Spanos, The Errant Art of Moby Dick (1995)
James Weldon Long, 'Plunging into the Atlantic: the oceanic order of Herman Melville's
Moby Dick' Atlantic Studies 8: 1 (March 2011) 69-92.
Sarah Thwaites, '"Mirror with a Memory:" Theories of Light and Preternatural negatives in
Herman Melville's Moby-Dick' European Journal of American Culture 32: 2 (2013) 121-36.
Sheila Post-Lauria, '"Philosophy in Whales...Poetry in Blubber:" Mixed Form in Moby Dick'
Nineteenth Century Literature 43: 3 (1990) 300-16. SyD
Paul Royster, 'Melville's Economy of Language' in Sacvan Bercovitch and Myra Jehlen eds.
Ideology and Classic American Literature (Cambridge, Campbridge UP: 1986) 313-36. SyD
Fred V. Bernard, 'The Question of Race in Moby Dick' The Massachusetts Review 43: 3
(2002) 384-404. SyD
Philip Armstrong, '" Leviathan is a Skein of Networks:" Translations of Nature and Culture in
Moby Dick' ELH 71: 4 (2004) 1039-63.SyD
Week 4 The American century: optimism and disillusionment
Presentation:
Dos Passos' USA is not widely being read anymore. No doubt this is partly because of its
massive size, but it must also be due to Dos Passos' work falling out of critical favour--out of
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step with his time, we might say-- from the 1960s onwards. Nevertheless, USA is just the
kind of attempt to catch 'the spirit of history and the American nation' that DeForest and
other proponents of the Great American Novel have called for, and it remains a phenomenal
achievement. Here, we read Dos Passos' gargantuan effort to capture the spirit of
modernity in relation to Walter Benjamin's seminal essay 'The Work of Art in the Age of
Mechanical Reproduction,' in the hope that Benjamin's take on the art(s) of modernity can
shed some light on Dos Passos' formal innovations and their motivation in the era of mass
media and particularly of film.
essential reading:
John Dos Passos, The 42nd Parallel (vol. 1 of USA) any edition
Walter Benjamin, 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction' SyD
recommended reading:
Robert James Butler, 'The American Quest for Movement in Dos Passos' USA' Twentieth
Century Literature 30: 1 (1984) 80-99.SyD
Granville Hicks, 'The Politics of John Dos Passos' The Antioch Review 10: 1 (1950) 85-98. SyD
David Kadlec, 'Early Soviet Cinema and American Poetry' modernism/modernity 11: 2 (2004)
299-331. SyD
Michael Spindler, 'John Dos Passos and the Visual Arts' Journal of American Studies 15: 3
(1981) 391-405. SyD
Week 5 Dos Passos and History
Presentation:
In this second week of reading USA we consider a key element of the many critical
approaches one can take to the Great American Novel, and that is its relation to history and
historiography. In Diggins and Foley's essays we see two diametrically opposed positions as
regards Dos Passos' writing of history in USA, which enable us to see more clearly what the
four techniques Dos Passos employs (narrative; Camera Eye; Newsreel; Biography)
contribute to the novel's representation of American history in the first 30 years or so of the
20th century.
Is Dos Passos merely a chronicler, concerned with the ephemera of everyday life or does he,
on the contrary, succeed in illuminating the underlying tectonic shifts in the history of
capitalism and the nation? Does he represent, referring back to Homi Bhabha's phrase, the
nation in narration or --in DP'S own words-- 'the speech of the people', or does he instead
forge a counter-narrative that is in fundamental discord with the mood of the US in the
interwar period?
essential reading:
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John Dos Passos, USA (any edition)
John P. Diggins, 'Visions of Chaos and Visions of Order: John Dos Passos' USA' American
Literature 46: 3 (1974) 329-46. SyD
Barbara Foley, 'From USA to Ragtime: Notes on the Forms of Historical Consciousness in
Modern Fiction' American Literature 50: 1 (1978) 85-105. SyD
recommended reading:
Jon Smith, 'John Dos Passos, Anglo-Saxon' Modern Fiction Studies 44: 2 (1998) 282-305. SyD
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/modern_fiction_studies/v044/44.2smith.html
Barry Maine, 'USA: Dos Passos and the Rhetoric of History' South Atlantic Review 50: 1
(1985) 75-86. SyD
Alfred Kazin, 'John Dos Passos and His Invention of America' The Wilson Quarterly 9: 1
(1985) 154-66. SyD
Week 6 Imagining Slavery: race and the Great American Novel
Presentation:
These days, Beloved regularly features on lists of 'best novels' (of the 20th century, in
English, of the world, etc) but this was not evident when it appeared. The 1980s saw the
growth of African American criticism as well as fiction, and it is really thanks to this--the
development of a critical mass of readers, critics, and educators--that its reputation as now
also a Great American Novel (though perhaps a bit askew from the Moby Dicks and
Underworlds of this earth) has grown. Beloved does what the G.A.N. that DeForrest
identified, Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin could not do. In the latter, the
'unspeakable things' of slavery were left 'unspoken' (as the title of Morrison's essay that
we're reading alongside has it) whereas Beloved tries to imagine, and give voice to, a history
that has remained 'disremembered, and unaccounted for' until this time. That fiction can do
this, that it can revise American history so radically as to uproot it from its very centre, is
remarkable--and it is what makes it Great. It is also what won her the Nobel Prize for
Literature in 1993.
essential reading:
Toni Morrison, Beloved (1987)
Toni Morrison, 'Unspeakable Things, Unspoken' Atlantic Monthly 28: 2 (1989) 1-34. SyD
Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992)
Peter Nicholls, ‘The Belated Postmodern: History, Phantoms,and Toni Morrison’ in Sue Vice
ed. Psychoanalytic Criticism: a Reader(1996) SyD (via library link)
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recommended reading:
Linden Peach, Toni Morrison (2012)
Linda Krumholz, The Ghosts of Slavery (1992) SyD
Naomi Mandel, "I Made the Ink: Identity, Complicity, 60 Million, and More" (2002) SyD
Martha Cutter, "The Story Must Go on and on: the Fantastic, Narration and Intertextuality in
Beloved" (2000) SyD
Barbara Schapiro, "The Bonds of Love and the Boundaries of Self in Beloved" (1991) SyD
Caroline Rody, "Toni Morrison's Beloved: History, Rememory, and a Clamor for a Kiss"
(1995) SyD
Cynthia C. Hamilton, "Revisions, Rememories and Exorcisms: Toni Morrison and the Slave
Narrative" (1996) SyD
Kimberley Chabot Davis, "Postmodern Blackness: Toni Morrison's Beloved and the End of
History" (1998) SyD
Week 7 Research week
You may want to use this week to write an unassessed essay of 2000 words, if you feel you
could do with a practice-run for your term paper. Or you could use it to have a rest, or to get
a head-start on reading for the second half.
Week 8 Gender and the Great American Novel 1
Presentation:
Housekeeping is what you might call a 'little Great American Novel,' in the sense that it
doesn't wear its ambition on its sleeve, nor does it have the encyclopaedic reach and
volume that Dos Passos and Melville evidently found necessary in their projects of writing
the nation.
Robinson's gender has a lot to do with this, it would seem, on the side of both literary
production and reception: women may be less likely to paint the large canvas of USA
national identity and/or history and more prone to focus on the smaller scale of the
domestic sphere, and critics may be more predisposed to recognise only the large and
ambitious work as a Great American Novel, rather than the smaller canvas worked by
Robinson.
MAY BE, maybe not. These are issues for discussion, obviously, as is the question whether
Robinson merely re-writes the 19th C American novel of 'lighting out for the territory' (in
Huck Finn's words) on female terms, or whether the very act of such a revision also enables
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us to see, and to read, American literary history in a new light, thus radically revising notions
of nation and canonicity.
Essential reading:
Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping (1980)
Geyh, ‘Burning down the House? Domestic Space and Feminine Subjectivity in
Housekeeping’, Contemporary Literature 34: 1 (1993) 103-22. Study Direct
Ryan, ‘Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping: The subversive Narrative and the New American
Eve’ South Atlantic Review 56: 1 (1991) 79-86. Study Direct
Schaub, ‘An Interview with Marilynne Robinson’ Study Direct
Recommended reading:
Bohannan, Heather 'Quest-tioning Tradition: spiritual Trnsformation Images in Women's
Narratives and Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson' (1992) JStor.
Champagne, Rosaria 'Women's history and housekeeping: memory, representation and
reinscription' (2010) Women's Studies: an Interdisciplinary Journal 20: 3-4 321-9.
Galehouse, Maggie ' Their Own Private Idaho: transience in Marilynne Robinson's
Housekeeping' (2000) JStor.
Voss, Anne E. 'Portrait of Marilynne Robinson' (1992) JStor.
Ravits, Martha 'Extending the American Range: Marilynne Robisnon's Housekeeping' (1989)
JStor.
Robinson, Marilynne 'Surrendering Wilderness' (1998) JStor.
Mallon, Anne-Marie 'Sojourning Women: Homelessness and Transcendence in
Housekeeping' Critique 30: 2 (1989) 95-105.
Week 9 Gender and the Great American Novel 2
Presentation:
Where Toni Morrison wrote a Great American Novel with Beloved by radically revising
American history and Marilynne Robinson perhaps did so, by re-writing American literary
history and exposing its masculinist assumptions, Jayne Anne Phillips' Machine Dreams
might perhaps come into the category of 'Great American Novels we've never heard of', or
'a Great American Novel that hasn't been recognised as such yet.
Taking on the trauma of Vietnam, but also a family history of three generations spanning
most of the twentieth century, Phillips' novel in its multi-perspectival narration asks who
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'owns' the story of Vietnam, or indeed the memory of it and the history of it; how does war
affect those not directly participating in it; how are the losses of youth, violence, and
everyday familial neglect passed on to subsequent generations, and finally, also: what is the
relation of America as a nation to the narration of the Vietnam war, and the Second World
War before it?
Essential Reading:
Jayne Anne Phillips, Machine Dreams (1984) (any edition)
Joanna Price, "Remembering Vietnam: Subjectivity and Mourning in American Realist
Writing’ Journal of American Studies 27: 1 (1993) 173-86. SyD
Brian Jarvis, ‘How Dirty is Jayne Anne Phillips?’ Yearbook of English Studies 31 (2001) 192204. SyD
Recommended reading:
Sarah Robertson, "an Interview with Jayne Anne Philips" European Journal of American
Culture (2001) 20: 1
68-77.
Gaskins and Gaskins, "Middle-Class Townie: Jayne Anne Phillips and the Appalachian
Experience" Appalachian Journal 19: 3 (1992) SyD
Maureen Ran, "The Other Side of Grief: American Women Writers and the Vietnam War"
Critique 36: 1 (1194) SyD
James Grove, "To State the Problem Correctly: Facing the Black Tickets in Jayne Anne
Phillips' Machine Dreams" Moravian Journal of Literature and Film [yes, really!] 1: 2 (2010)
JStor.
Richard Godden, "No End to the Work? Jayne Anne Phillips and the Exquisite Corpse of
Southern Labour" Journal of American Studies 36: 2 (2002) SyD
Michael Clark, "Remembering Vietnam" Cultural Critique 3 (1986) SyD
Thomas Douglass, "Interview with Jayne Anne Phillips" Appalachian Journal 21: 2 (1994) SyD
Week 10 The Great American Novel: your choice
This is your slot, and you decided you wanted to read …
Presentation:
essential reading:
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Recommended reading:
Week 11 The Politics of Fiction
Presentation:
Beginning to read Don DeLillo's magisterial Big American Novel, widely acknowledged to be a Great
American Novel as well, is a great pleasure but can also feel intimidating. DeLillo has, throughout his
oeuvre, engaged with the salient social and political issues of his country and his time, and
Underworld probably epitomises this imaginative connection between nation and narration. In order
to prepare for our discussion of it next week, we look at some critical articles on Underworld by
Steven Mexal and Molly Wallace, but principally we study an equally magisterial theorisation of
literature and politics, or rather the politics of imaginative literature, by Fredric Jameson, preeminent Marxist theorist now largely known for his work on postmodernism (as part of --what he
calls--'the logic of Late Capitalism'). This is challenging reading and difficult thought, but it will help
us to 'place' Underworld and to recognize its cultural ambition as well as -possibly (this is a matter
for discussion)- achievement.
Essential reading:
Fredric Jameson, ‘On Interpretation: Literature as a Socially Symbolic Act’ SyD
James Annesley, ‘”Thigh Bone Connected to Hip Bone”: Don DeLillo’s Underworld and the
Fictions of Globalization’ Amerikastudien 47: 1 (2002) 85-95. SyD
Molly Wallace, ‘”Venerated Emblems”: De Lillo’s Underworld and the history-commodity’
Critique 42: 4 (2001) 367-84. Study Direct
Stephen J. Mexal, ‘Spectacularspectacular!: Underworld and the Production of Terror’
Studies in the Novel 36: 3 (2004) 318-36. Study Direct
Week 12 Encyclopaedic: the Great American Novel revisited
Presentation:
Discussion of Underworld in its entirety and --hopefully--in some depth will at the same time give us
the opportunity to look back to the beginning of this module, when we were trying to define The
Great American Novel. One of the features identified then was the encyclopaedic character of Great
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American Novles: they tend to be large and they want to do a lot, encompass the US in some way in
their geographical and thematic spread. USA, of course, did this quite literally, but De Lillo's novel
similarly ranges far and wide and appears to have similar ambitions in terms of sketching a Zeitgeist
(which so often is determined by the state of economic as well as cultural production) as Melville
and Dos Passos had. This suggests that, perhaps, in spite of the relativism of postmodernity some
American writers are still willing, and able (though this will be part of our questioning) to make
grand pronouncements about the state of the nation--and of literature, in so doing.
Essential reading:
Don DeLillo, Underworld
Don DeLillo, ‘The Power of History’ SyD
Maria Roth-Lauret
September 2015
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