AML 5027 Fall 2023 Jaffe

The course explores intersections of the global dimensions of American literature, its representations of itself in the larger world, focusing on post-1945 fiction. The troubles with the term American are familiar. It isn’t just a sobriquet for one country, the USA, but also designates various pluralities, two contiguous continents and various proximate lands. A hemisphere, half the world brain, the word designates a force-field of reception–a form of quasi-nationalism abstracted into a semi-formed aesthetic. Here, I very much am thinking of a course with “hemispheric” and “geo-spheric” orientations. The three key words of this seminar might be understood as three distinct conceptual problems. What I have in mind for the title is less a special patriotic container–and even less a market for some worthy literary objects in an age of US-American hegemony. We’ll read some excellent and frequently discussed novels of this period–including probably Kafka, Nabokov, Highsmith, Pynchon, Baldwin, Yamashita, Adichie, Cole, DeWitt, significant recent essays in Post-’45 theory and criticism–and try to theorize for ourselves the belated sense of need for methodological orientations for a kind of mobile or wayward literature “in a plastic and assimilable age” (to borrow from Vilém Flusser, the Czech-Brazilian theorist).