The American Dream / Delusion
COURSE DESCRIPTION:
From its improbable inception and radical re-envisioning, America has always been more than just a nation-state committed to a modern, democratic vision of self-determination and self-governance. America, moreover, is an idea – an unrealised idea, but a grand idea nevertheless. In truth, nothing embodies this idea more earnestly, more optimistically, more painfully than the American Dream. In more ways than one, the Dream represents the history of the new-fangled body politic, ceaselessly and ambitiously responsive to the ever-evolving, ever-failing, ever-hopeful needs of its citizens and immigrants and refugees. From the first Pilgrims’ search of a Puritan utopia, to the Founding Fathers’ promulgation of a free republic, the common class aspiration for upward mobility, the perennial group struggle for social equality, and to the general expectation of home ownership and quality living, the protean Dream has been variously adapted for majestic ends and mundane goals alike. In this unit, we will explore the socio-economic and socio-psychological dimensions – and repercussions – of the Dream (at times, Delusion) through the lens of American literature. We shall begin our survey with a review of the intellectual and political history of American class mobility, followed by a close consideration of Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1961 commencement address (“The American Dream”) at Lincoln University. Next, we will delve into the promises, the romances, the ironies, and the costs (both visible and invisible) of that troubled construct in Herman Melville’s celebrated short story “Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street” (1853) and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s quintessential American classic The Great Gatsby (1925). Given the prominence of the American Dream as the paramount cultural export of the West in the long twentieth century, the study of these texts will prove invaluable to our understanding of, and reflections on, the contemporary world.
READING TEXTS:
Cullen, Jim. “Dream of the Good Life (II): Upward Mobility.” The American Dream: A Short History of an Idea That Shaped a Nation. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. 59-102.
Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby. London: Penguin Books, 1990.
King, Jr., Martin Luther. “The American Dream.” A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr. Ed. James Melvin Washington. New York: HarperCollins, 1986. 208-16.
Melville, Herman. “Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street.” The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction. Ed. Richard Bausch and R. V. Cassill. 7th ed. New York and London: W. W. Norton and Company, 2006. 1085-1111.