AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM

In this course we probe the ideology of American “exceptionalism.” We treat the intellectual history of this idea as a transtemporal conversation among founding architects, contemporary agents, early critics, and visionary reformers, all concerned with what should be valued on the American continents and within American experience. We become cartographers of this conversation and interlocutors within it, as we explore how habits of conceiving truth, power, and the relationship of human beings to the natural world have controlled what counts as exceptional and what ordinary. Where should we direct our awe? Readings include works by Margaret Atwood, James Baldwin, Roland Barthes, Ralph Waldo Emerson, bell hooks, William James, Immanuel Kant, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Audre Lorde, Wallace Stevens, Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, Adrienne Rich, William Carlos Williams.