UNDERSTANDING AMERICA, 2023-24

Results have been mixed in your 3rd assignment. As I expected, some you did well or very well (about 40% of those who turned in an assignment on time). Another 17% did ok, and they certainly have space for improvement. But I am concerned for that other 40% of you who scored barely enough to pass (if this had been a graded exam) and – especially – for those who would not have scored a pass grade (scores lower than 18). To this last group, I RECOMMEND TO NOT TAKE THE WRITTEN EXAM IN JANUARY. To those who barely passed (scores between 18 and 21), I recommend to WORK VERY HARD on their comprehension and writing skills if they would like to take this exam in January.

Unlike assignment n. 2, the Smith text was rather straightforward, and posed – in my view at least – no major comprehension problems. In this article, Smith studies the impact of the West, understood as a vacant continent beyond the frontier, on American culture (esp. literature and social thought), from the Puritans through the Founding Fathers in the 18th century. This is the TOPIC of the essay.

Smith ARGUES that up to the mid-18th century, America was focused on its colonial dimension: the British exploited it as a mercantile outlet of their Empire and were therefore focused on the eastern seabord colonies alone. But at the time of the Revolution, S. claims, the US West emerged as a key influence in the debate on the future of the new nation. Agrarianism emerged as opposed to mercantilism, beginning with B. Franklin, whose vision of an American continental empire based on the cultivation of the land was anticipated by several early 18th century intellectuals (such as Bishop Berkley), and then further promoted by intellectuals and politicians, from Jefferson, Freneau, and Hutchins in the late 18th century, up to the philosophers of the Manifest Destiny in the 19th.

As usual, you will receive individual feedback if you submitted your assignment by the deadline. You can use the two paragraphs above for comparison and guidance.

Happy New Year,

A. Carosso

Those who submitted their n.2 assignment on time (re. the Pierson essay) are receiving their feedbacks today. I’d like to summarize my assessment of your essays here, hoping this is useful to all.

P.’s essay was a CHALLENGING piece. Its TOPIC was quite straightforward (the evolution of of the notion of American nation state, taking its roots in certain ideas of Empire which were later superseded by a quest for a common shared history), but its ARGUMENT was more complex and required very careful reading and annotation of the text BEFORE anyone could write anything meaningful about it.

P.’s argument centered on the idea of America’s transition from a “civic nation” (rooted in the Founding Father’s 18th century vision of natural rights) to that of a “cultural nation” emerging after the Civil War and enshrined in a set of common cultural traits (a “cultural nation”), predicated on a RACIAL CONSENSUS (no-one pointed this out!!!). Within this framework, P. claimed that the “cultural nation” is no more in the face of globalizing trends.

Many of you failed to see the OVERALL DESIGN in the essay. Some grasped a few of these notions, but failed to fit them all together. Until you do that, there is no way that you can write a successful piece, simply because … you have nothing to write about! Unfortunately, some of you wrote about … nothing.

In the second part, you were required to IDENTIFY 3 texts from the course reader and discuss HOW these essays (one at a time) FIT WITH THE P.’s TEXT. Some of you faild to execute this second part. Most of you identified 3 appropriate texts, but FAILED to fit them within P.’s argument.

I’d also like to remind you all that the FIRST PART of your exam paper MUST answer TWO SIMPLE QUESTIONS (each in a SEPARATE PARAGRAPH): what is the text’s TOPIC? What is its ARGUMENT? (not everyone did that).

I have added a NUMERIC EVALUATION to you papers, so that you can better understand how it would have been rated if this had been an examination paper. This is what the numbers mean:

less than 18: FAIL: there are SERIOUS PROBLEMS with your paper, clearly deriving from poor understanding of the text and poor writing in English. A LOT OF WORK is required to bring your performance up to a minimum desiderd level. IF your score was less than 17, you need to make an appointment with me ASAP!!!!

18-21, BARELY sufficient, but WEAK AND PROBLEMATIC. Understanding of the text was largely insufficient and other relevant problems also emerged.

22-24, a PASS, but BELOW ANY DESIRED STANDARD FOR THIS CLASS. Issues remain with your understanding of the text and presentation of your points.

25-27 FAIR, with some remaining weaknesses that need to be addressed

28-30 GOOD or VERY GOOD

Best wishes,

A.C.

Dear all,

a few notes and announcements re. our end-of-semester business.

PRESENTATIONS: thanks to all presenters for their excellent work on December 7th. It was very valuable to the whole class, I am sure.

ASSIGNMENT n. 2: I am currently reading the work that has been submitted and plan to send you feedback within the next few days

MOCK EXAM OF DEC. 15 at 2pm (Computer room n. 2, Aldo Moro, 2nd floor). It will focus on WEEK 3 from our course reader and materials. Make sure you bring your own copy of the course reader to class, since the assignment for the mock exam will be drawn from the course reader (there will be no printouts available from me). Exam is administered on MOODLE.

FINAL PARTY. And don’t forget about our closing party at 4pm on the same day (room will be announced in a later post next week). Please join also if you will not be taking the mock exam!!! – PARTY WILL TAKE PLACE IN ALDO MORO ROOM 2 (2nd floor), starting at 4 pm.

Best wishes,

A. Carosso

Thank you.

A.C.

Assignment n. 2 will be due for feedback no later than Nov 30th. It is now available on the course MOODLE PAGE . After Nov 30th, please email your assignment (no feedback).

If you have not yet accessed Moodle, you will need to register first. Make sure you familiarize yourselves with the platform.

A.C.

For our final week of new readings, we turn to the American myths of Multiculturalism and Transnationalism, a concept that has surfaced, with changing fortunes, over the last 30-40 years in the American debate, superseding the Melting Pot vision.

To know where the debate stands, we begin with Inglis’s 2-page definition of the concept and the much wider debate it points to. Glazer’s “The Multicultural Explosion” reviews the impact of the concept in the 1980s and 1990s.

Right-wing historian Samuel Huntington provides a powerful critique of American Multiculturalism in this 1993 essay “The Clash of Civilizations”, which well documents how America’s post-9/11 anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant rhetoric began to take root well before 9/11.

And Shelley Fisher Fishkin’s essay on “The Transnational Turn in American Studies” points to the way in which the Multiculturalist debate in the US has evolved in the 21st century.

We also read our last work of fiction, J. Diaz’s Drown. Being a collection of (interrelated) short stories, this can easily be read in small instalments. An essay from Hanna, Vargas and Saldivar’s Junot Diaz and the Decolonial Imagination helps place Diaz’ fiction into perspective.

A.C.

This week we explore the myth of the American Century.

In our reading package, we tackle the topic at hand via H. Luce‘s seminal formuation of “The American Century” in 1941, and A. Brinkley‘s commentary, providing crucial background and context on the concept. These are followed by D. Ellwood’s essay on the origins and ramifications of America’s global hegemony in the second half of the 20th century. B. Edward’s “After the American Century” studies the circular nature of Americanization, as American products and phenomena are stripped of their associations with the United States and recast in very different forms in the digital 21st century.

Prof. David Ellwood (Johns Hopkins, Bologna) will lecture for the class at 4.30 pm on Thursday on “America’s Soft Power,” one of America’s leading forms of commercial, political and cultural imperialism in the American Century and beyond.

We also finish reading Roth’s Call it Sleep.

Chasing the Ghost of the Lung Block (2022)
a documentary by Stefano GABBIANI, Stefano MORELLO e Maria Ilaria TONELLI

This week’s topic, The Melting Pot, helps us make sense of America’s key myth of nation making: the “nation of immigrants” myth, romantically inscribed in the poem that opens this week’s readings, Emma Lazarus’ “The New Colossus” (1883).

Lazarus’ myth of America’s “open arms” is challenged the classic of immigration literature we also read this wwek, Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep (1934), focusing on the Jewish immigration.

Some important essays help us make sense of it all:

Heike Paul‘s excerpt from her long “The Melting Pot” chapter addresses several responses to that myth, originating in Crevecoeur, and further developed in the last 200’ years, in places such as Zangwill’s 1908 play to the rich debate in late 19th and early 20th century America.

The various segments of a radio broadcast entitled “The Melting Pot” (2018) focus on the history of America’s assimilationist myth and its fate in the 21st century. The program is available here. Please make sure you llisten to ALL segments on this page, in order.

Glazer and Moynihan‘s influential book from the early 1960s (Beyond the Melting Pot) assesses how assimilation and ethnic identity remain very much in balance in America’s metropolises. Werner Sollors‘ “A World Somewhere Else” provides some crucial critical background on Call it Sleep.

Enjoy!

An Oscar-nominated documentary narrated by Samuel L. Jackson, I AM NOT YOUR NEGRO explores the continued peril America faces from institutionalized racism. In 1979, James Baldwin wrote a letter to his literary agent describing his next project, Remember This House. The book was to be a revolutionary, personal account of the lives and successive assassinations of three of his close friends–Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. At the time of Baldwin’s death in 1987, he left behind only thirty completed pages of his manuscript. Now, in his incendiary new documentary, master filmmaker Raoul Peck envisions the book James Baldwin never finished. The result is a radical, up-to-the-minute examination of race in America, using Baldwin’s original words and flood of rich archival material. I AM NOT YOUR NEGRO is a journey into black history that connects the past of the Civil Rights movement to the present of #BlackLivesMatter. It is a film that questions black representation in Hollywood and beyond. And, ultimately, by confronting the deeper connections between the lives and assassination of these three leaders, Baldwin and Peck have produced a work that challenges the very definition of what America stands for.

Full trasncript is HERE.

A good synopsis of the film can be found here.

For those who have read My Antonia, this additional reading package might prove useful.

Best wishes,

A. Carosso

Readings for week 6 focus on how America’s myth of “equality and justice for all” has often fallen short of its promise. This week we study how racial segregation, and its enabling  myth of “white supremacy”, have shaped the nation’s history throughout the centuries.

We open with an excerpt from Michelle Alexander‘s award-winning study The New Jim Crow (2010), providing essential background on the history and practice racial segregation in the US in the 19th and 20th centuries.

We then look at the relationship bewteen RACE and CITIZENSHIP in America. First we approach two historically founding texts – Frederick Douglass‘ ante-bellum denunciation of African Americans’ exclusion for citizenship in “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July” (1855) and a crucial excerpt from W.E.B. DuBois‘ seminal The Souls of Black Folk (1903) (do not forget to look up both authors online).

Historian George Lipsitz, in “The Possessive Investment in Whiteness”, discusses  how being white in America has always produced distinct economic and cultural advantages (because this is another long essay, only the first few pages are mandatory – see calendar for details; however, needless to say, the WHOLE essay is illuminating). Nobel prize recipient Toni Morrison‘s “Making America White Again,” sees Trumpism as yet another iteration of America’s possessive investment in whiteness.

In “My Dungeon Shook” (from The Fire Next Time, 1963, a key text of the Civil Right Movement period) James Baldwin, another key African-American author, analyzes what it means to grow up black in a white-suprematist society in a letter he writes to his nephew.

Baldwin’s epistolary style is the template for this week’s main book, Ta-Nehisi Coates‘ Between the World and Me, published in 2015, where the author, following Baldwin, argues that Americans have built an empire on the idea of “race,” a falsehood that falls most heavily on the bodies of black women and men.  

Raoul Peck’s Baldwin-inspired film I Am not your Negro (2016) provides further insights.

Course Reader, part 2, is now available on MOODLE.

A.C.

This week’s American founding “myth” is that of NATION itself.

We begin with Hector Saint John De Crevecoeur‘s seminal essay “What is an American?” (1782), laying out the EXCEPTIONALISM of American identities. We then turn to how AMERICA declared itself a nation in the 1776 Declaration of Independence and to how president Lincoln, 87 years later, recommitted the natoin to that founding vision after the ravages of the Civil War in his seminal Gettysburg Address.

Jennifer Ratner-Rosengarten‘s long (but essential) essay discusses how the Declaration was the product of the unique reception of European Enlightenment in the New World.

Finally, Applebaum looks at the “Idea of America”, i.e. that of a nation founded upon equality for all, is now in a deep state of crisis.

(We will use the Pierson essay in week 6)

A.C

WHAT: Your 1st assignment is a 5-600 word REVIEW ESSAY (doc or docx file), outlining TOPIC, ARGUMENT and ARTICULATION of W. Cronon’s “The Trouble With Wilderness” (course reader, part 1).

I must correct an error I made in class: review essay (90 minutes during the exam), is 5-600 words, not 300 – the latter refers to the first part of the exam as indicated in class. Sorry for giving you false hope …

WHEN: This review paper is due by Oct. 27th (if you would like to receive my feedback), or no later than one week before your written exam. (Please understand: there will be no feedback if delivered after Oct 27th) – ASSIGNMENT MUST BE UPLOADED TO THE COURSE MOODLE PAGE, at https://elearning.unito.it/lingue/course/view.php?id=2116
(Exception is ONLY for those who do not yet have Moodle access)

While preparing your paper, please follow these simple guidelines:

1. First, “reverse engineer your text”, i.e. try to work out the original outline the author worked out before writing the essay (use bullet points, ex. 1; 2a; 2b; 2c; 3; 4a; 4b; etc.). This is your ARTICULATION.
2. Then, identify TOPIC and ARGUMENT
3. Finally, write your REVIEW ESSAY, in the form of a NARRATIVE, according to the conventions of academic writing, i.e..
   1. Your text must be organized in PARAGRAPHS, with each paragraph elaborating one discrete unit of thought.
   2. Each paragraph needs to flow smooothlessly into the next, meaning that you need to be very carefyul to established EXPLICIT TRANSITIONS from one par to the next.
   3. Each paragraph must bear EXPLICIT REFERENCE to the source text being discussed (in forms such as “AUTHOR argues that …”, etc.)
   4. Text must focus (in this order) on TOPIC, ARGUMENT, ARTICULATION of argument. Key texts cited (author, title, date) must be meaningfully referred to (not just as a mere list).
   5. Paper must include a FULL HEADING, with all necessary personal, course, date and paper length details

Best,

A. C.

Our key term this week is SELF-RELIANCE (aka American INDIVIDUALISM).

In order to explore it, we return to Emerson and Thoreau, this time explicitly celebrating SELF-RELIANCE both as ethical and political tool; we then tackle Walt Whitman, a contemporary of those two and the great American poet of the 19th century. His masterpiece, Leaves of Grass, is an anthem to American individualism.

Bellah’s assessment of American self-reliance helps put it into perspective.

We then turn to the they way in which American Individualism has shaped its myth of personal and economic success. In the 18th century, Benjamin Franklin lay the anecdotal foundations of America’s obsession with success in his pamphlet “The Way to Wealth”. President Hoover‘s pre-WWII discussion of the “American System” placed individualism right at its core, more or less at the same time when a German philosopher, Max Weber, famously declared the “protestant [or “work”] ethic” as rising out of the Calvinist view of individual election and eternal salvation.

For those reading My Antonia, the novel provides ample exemplification of the connection between the Western myth and that of Individualism.

A.C

1. Henry N. Smith‘s “Preface” from his Virgin Land (1950) locates the birth of the Western myth in the American 18th century, when two contrasting visions of America – America as mercantile nation vs. America as agricultural paradise – competed, with the latter prevailing, in the writings of key visionary authors of the late 18th century such as M. Wigglesworth, P. Freneau, B. Franklin, and T. Jefferson.

2. F.J. Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier …”. This is the founding text of America’s Frontier Myth. Turner argues that the Frontier turns the European settler into a true American. Make sure you do not miss the useful editorial introduction.

3-4. G.D. Nash‘s “The West as Frontier” provides a reading of Turner, emphasizing the nostalgia element in his “frontier thesis”. This text is supplemented by a short excerpt on the same topic, from Bruno Cartosio‘s essay “Raccontare l’Ovest” (in Italian, I am afraid, but you can feed it into google translate and get decent results).

5. R. Slotkin. Postulates that the American Myth lies not only in the borrowing of European cultural visions, but in the establishment of a “fatal opposition” betwen Europe and America, rooted in the American colonists’ “emotional title to the land […] charged with passionate and aspiring violence“.

6. Philip Gura‘s “Nature Writing” provides crucial critical context on Thoreau’s A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. The Germick essay is less useful (and quite obscure), and therefore NO LONGER PART of the course syllabus.

And we finish up Thoreau’s A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers.

Enjoy!

A.C.

If you liked Into the Wild and wish to know more, read on.

Sean Penn’s Into The Wild (2007) is based on a book bearing the same title and written by Jon Krakauer in 1996. That book was the expanded version of an original story entitled “Death of an Innocent” that Krakauer published on Outside Magazine, and that you can READ HERE.

When the movie came out, a lot of interest rose around the Chris McCandless story. And many people took trips to Alaska’s Denali National Park following up on Chris’ tracks. Several lost their lives in the process. Another interesting story, also from Outside Magazine, LINKED HERE, on the “McCandless obsession”, addresses this popular phenomenon.

Details on trekking the Stampede Path can be FOUND HERE. And, just in case you are interested, this page maps the exact location of the Magic Bus (which was removed a few yeas back to discourage people from looking for it – and possibly losing their lives in the process).

Into the Wild addresses a key question in this class: Is a Transcendentalist approach to nature (i.e. nature as a place separate from society) POSSIBLE? Or is wilderness, as William Cronon has argued, a myth, an idea on which Americans project their desires?

Into the Wild is also a movie about books and reading. For starters, it is structured like a book, in the biographical genre, revolving around a sequence of successive “chapters”. Moreover, Chris’ fascination for the wilderness derives from an existential longing which he feeds on books, which appear prominently in the film, and include: Jack London’s White Fang and The Call of the Wild, H.D. Thoreau’s Walden, or Life in the Woods, as well as works by Russian authors (Gogol, Tolstoy, Pasternak).

Just to clarify, all the texts quoted here are for your interest only.

A.C.

In the American imagination, NATURE has transitioned over the centuries from visions of forbidding wilderness (as represented in the writings of early Puritan settler William Bradford) to uplifting pastoral sublime (as appearing in the writings – two centuries later – of Thomas Jefferson, R.W. Emerson, and H. D. Thoreau), to last remaining retreat from civilization (Kunstler, Into the Wild).

Today, nature is obviously at the center of heated cultural and political debates over what to do to revert the damage that mankind has caused over the last two and a half centuries (for lack of time, our readings do not cover this part of the debate, which however is highly informed by the culture that we study this week).

The *R.F. Nash, *Leo Marx and *William Cronon essays provide crucial intellectual insight into the conflicting visions of the American founding myth of Wilderness.

It is with this trajectory in mind that I invite you to read this week’s texts.

This week we are also reading (and discussing in class) The first half of H.D. Thoureau’s A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. Two essays in the course reader will provide the necessary critical background to better grasp this book.

A.C.

As I explain in the introduction, this course requires intensive reading and individual study PRIOR to our weekly meetings. Students are expected to READ the assigned course materials BEFORE EACH SESSION.

Each week I will be posting a short description of these materials to better help you navigate the course topics and the way in which the course materials address those topics.

In week one, we open with H. Paul’s, “American Exceptionalism”, arguing that America’s founding myth is its Exceptionalism, which is this week’s main topic. Paul’s “American Studies Scholarship” describes American Studies as an academic discipline and the way in which American Studies also was founded on Exceptionalist premises.

Winthrop’s “A Modell of Christian Charity” is the founding text of American Exceptionalism, and Brooks locates American Exceptionalism in its Exodus myth.

Becovitch’s essay discusses the Puritan context of America’s Exceptionalism and its myth-making role in “a process whereby a community could constitute itself by publication [and] declare itself a nation by verbal fiat”.

Finally, Caesar discusses how Exceptionalism in America transcends its Puritain roots, and the various connotations of the term.  

If you would like to know more about the history of the Puritan colonies in New England in the 17th century (which you should!!), read this: https://historyofmassachusetts.org/the-great-puritan-migration/

A.C.