America Inside Out: Foreign Perspectives on the United States

George Blaustein Freshman Seminar 46g – Harvard College/GSAS: 28739

Fall 2010-2011 – Thursdays, 2-5, Barker Center 218

Course Description The United States has long kindled the imagination or the ire of foreign artists, novelists, sociologists, revolutionaries, and cultural critics. As land of opportunity or cultural wasteland, technological vanguard or pastoral state of nature, “America” has been defined as much from without as from within. “America” and “Americanism” have also been important to the endeavor of non-American peoples to articulate their own cultural distinctiveness. This seminar explores foreign perspectives of the United States—prose, poetry, visual arts, and film from many regions, illuminating hitherto unseen dimensions of American culture and the impact of America abroad. Though course material spans the familiar and the obscure, no prior expertise is necessary, and all texts are in English or English translation. There are two broad units, “Land of the Free” and “Land of the Future.” Linking both is an understanding of America as quintessentially modern, though that modernity takes various forms: political, psychological, cultural, and aesthetic. The first unit examines the central paradox of 19th-century American political life: the flowering of a radical, anti-imperial revolutionary tradition alongside old and new forms of servitude and imperialism. Slavery attracted voluminous foreign commentary, and a preoccupation with American freedom and unfreedom persisted well beyond the Civil War. The second unit focuses on America as the 20th-century archetype of modernity. American industrial capitalism (unhindered by a strong regulatory state or a powerful labor movement) lent itself to both critique and admiration from outside observers. The image of America was also central to modernist experimentation in literature, music and art. We conclude with rich literary representations of the United States. This seminar introduces students to research in the humanities at Harvard. Students are encouraged to discover previously unknown, neglected, or untranslated material, and to approach American culture and society from these new angles. Informed by the historical materials examined throughout the semester, students may also consider contemporary foreign commentary on the United States in the realms of politics, diplomacy, literature, and the arts.

Required Texts Available at the Coop (additional material, marked with an asterisk in the schedule, will be

available on the course website): Ama Ata Aidoo, Dilemma of a Ghost (Longman, 1995 [1967]) Gustave de Beaumont, Marie; Or, Slavery in the United States, trans. Barbara Chapman (Johns Hopkins

University Press, 1998 [1835]) Ilya Ilf and Evgeny Petrov, Ilf and Petrov’s American Road Trip: The 1935 Travelogue of Two Soviet Writers

(Princeton Architectural Press, 2006) Franz Kafka, Amerika: The Man Who Disappeared, trans. Michael Hofmann (New Directions, 2004) Vladimir Nabokov, The Annotated Lolita (Vintage, 1991 [1955]) Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (W.W. Norton & Co., 2008 [1905])

George Blaustein, “America Inside Out: Foreign Perspectives on the United States” 

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Course Requirements & Assignments

Preparation and participation: careful reading of and reflection on course material, formulation of arguments in advance of class, active listening and regular contributions of your own ideas to class discussion. In general, laptops will not be permitted in the classroom. Responses: By the evening before class, students will contribute brief responses to each week’s readings on the course website. These need not be formal, but they should be thoughtful. You might point to a passage that you found particularly odd, amusing, objectionable, difficult or otherwise remarkable; you might introduce a few questions (if not answers) for the class to discuss; you might embark on a parody or other creative endeavor. Papers: Students will write three papers:

• A short analytical paper (3-4pp.) on a particular aspect or passage of one of the texts on the syllabus due on Friday, October 1 at 5pm.

• A slightly longer paper (5pp.) on an item of your own choice or discovery: a piece of fiction, a travelogue, journalism or any other form. Your paper will introduce this source to an unfamiliar reader, and discuss either what it reveals about American culture and history, or what it illuminates about its own author or place of origin. Due Friday, October 22 at 5pm.

• The final paper (10-12pp.) can take various forms. It might elaborate or expand the second paper, drawing on further research and engagement with scholarship; or it might analyze a change in foreign commentary over time from a region of the student’s own choosing; or it might explore several perspectives on a single major event in American history; or it might trace the career of an American author/text/image abroad; or it might analyze a particular theme or genre element across several literary works. I will work with students individually to help them select their topics. Due Friday, December 10 at 5pm.

Please be familiar with the Handbook for Students policies on plagiarism, double-submission, etc. (See http://isites.harvard.edu/icb/icb.do?keyword=k69286) While students are encouraged to share ideas and discoveries with one another, collaboration on papers and projects is not allowed unless otherwise noted. All papers must be typed and double-spaced. Presentation: Toward the end of the semester students will give ten-minute presentations based on their (in-progress) final projects.

George Blaustein, “America Inside Out: Foreign Perspectives on the United States” 

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Schedule

September 2. Introduction

UNIT I. Land of the Free

The first unit considers foreign commentary on freedom, slavery and imperialism in the nineteenth century. We begin with Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America and Harriet Martineau Society in America, two influential approaches to the “America-book.” We turn then to Marie, a novel about slavery and interracial marriage written by Tocqueville’s travelling partner, Gustave de Beaumont, alongside Charles Dickens’s influential denunciations of American slavery and Karl Marx’s commentary on the American Civil War. The legacy of slavery persists beyond emancipation, and we will discuss the writings of Edward Wilmot Blyden, the Liberian statesman and early visionary of pan-Africanism, as well as a 1967 play by the Ghanaian author Ama Ata Aidoo that centers on a marriage between an African man and an African-American woman. The unit’s final two weeks are devoted to the related phenomena of “Americanization” and “anti-Americanism.”

September 9. In principle and in practice

* Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (1835), selections: Author’s Introduction; Part I,Ch.4, “The Principle of the Sovereignty of the People”; Part II, Ch.7, “The Majority in the United States is All-Powerful and the Consequences of that”; Part II, Ch10, “A Few Remarks on the Present-Day State and the Probable Future of the Three Races Which Live in the Territory of the United States”;

* Harriett Martineau, Society in America (1837), selections.

September 16. Slavery, American morals, and the Civil War

Gustave de Beaumont, Marie; Or, Slavery in the United States (1835). * Karl Marx, On America and the Civil War, selections (80pp.).

Supplementary Reading * Charles Dickens, American Notes (1842), ch. 1, “Going Away,” ch. 17, “Slavery” (35pp.);

September 23. Beyond Emancipation

* Edward Wilmot Blyden, selected writings (1856-1900); Ama Ata Aidoo, Dilemma of a Ghost (Longman African Classics, 1967) [drama]; * Lin Shu, “Translator’s Notes to Uncle Tom’s Cabin” (1901), and Zou Taufen, “Alabama: Reds and

Blacks” (1935), in Land Without Ghosts, pp. 77-80 and 151-158.

September 30. Americanization and Imperialism

* W.T. Stead, The Americanization of the World (1902), selections (140pp).

W.T. Stead was a British editor, sensational journalist, radical reformer, and spiritualist (though he died on the Titanic, Widener library owns the books he purportedly dictated posthumously via séance). The Americanization of the World marks an early and intriguing use of the term “Americanization.”

Three Views of Coney Island * José Martí, "Two Views of Coney Island" (1881 & 1883); * Maxim Gorky, "The Realm of Boredom" (1906); * Federico Garcia Lorca, "Landscape of the Vomiting Crowd (Twilight at Coney Island)," from Poet in

New York (1940, posthumous);

George Blaustein, “America Inside Out: Foreign Perspectives on the United States” 

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FIRST PAPER DUE FRIDAY, OCTOBER 1, 5PM

October 7. Anti-Americanism

* Thomas Carlyle, “Shooting Niagara—And After?” (1867), (55pp.); * Sayyid Qutb, “The America That I Have Seen: In the Scale of Human Values” (1951).

UNIT II. Land of the Future

The second unit explores America as the site of impending modernity in the 20th century. We begin with Max Weber’s influential diagnosis of the United States, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, alongside Carl Jung’s unusual take on ethnicity in America. We then consider the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci’s essay on “Americanism and Fordism,” paired with a satirical Soviet travelogue from 1935. Finally, we take up the problem of American culture or culturelessness, with a look at various receptions of American music in the twentieth century (including deadpan Finnish film from 1989), and at particularly rich novels.

October 14. “Americanitis”

Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905). * C.G. Jung, “Your Negroid and Indian Behavior,” Forum 83, no. 4 (April 1930): 193-200.

Supplementary Reading Herbert Spencer, “The Gospel of Relaxation” [on “American Nervousness”], Popular Science Monthly

(January 1883).

October 21. Fordism, and Actual Fords

* Antonio Gramsci, “Americanism and Fordism,” from An Antonio Gramsci Reader (New York: Schocken, 1988), 275-300;

Evgeny Petrov and Ilya Ilf, Ilf and Petrov’s American Road Trip: The 1935 Travelogue of Two Soviet Writers (Princeton Architectural Press, 2006).

SECOND PAPER DUE FRIDAY, OCTOBER 22, 5PM

October 28. Amerikanismus

Franz Kafka, Amerika (1927)

Supplementary visual sources Envisioning America: Prints, Drawings, and Photographs by George Grosz and His Contemporaries, 1915-

1933 (Cambridge, MA: Busch-Reisinger Museum, 1990).

November 4. Mass Culture and American Music

* Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception,” in Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002).

* Theodor Adorno, “Farewell to Jazz” (1933) & “On Jazz” (1936)

Supplementary Reading * Simone de Beauvoir, America Day By Day (1947), selections. Hugues Panassié, Le jazz hot (1936), chs. 1-3, ch. 6, ch. 9 (total 80pp.);

George Blaustein, “America Inside Out: Foreign Perspectives on the United States” 

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SECOND PAPER DUE MONDAY, NOVEMBER 8, 5PM FILM SCREENING, Tuesday, November 9: Aki Kaurismäki, Leningrad Cowboys Go America (1989).

November 10 OR 12 (Rescheduled class): Modernism in an Occupied Territory

Wolfgang Koeppen, Pigeons on the Grass (1951).

This novel of the American military occupation of Germany after World War II was much influenced by American literary modernism, especially William Faulkner and John Dos Passos, and took its title from Gertrude Stein’s “pigeons on the grass alas.”

November 18. TBD

Students will meet with me individually this week to discuss their final projects.

November 25. Thanksgiving (Holiday)

December 2. Road Trips

Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (1950). Robert Frank, The Americans, introduction by Jack Kerouac (1957)

Final Paper due Friday, December 10 at 5pm