Absolute America

Professor Djelal Kadir

436N Burrowes

Phone/Fax 863-9629

E-mail: kadir@psu.edu

Office hours: M 11:15–12:15; T 11:00–12:00 and by appointment

This seminar traces the morphology of monologic discursive formations in America. It tracks literary and public discourse to its historic and cultural foundations. From its originary Ishmaelite fate (the ostracism to the ends of the earth for murder at the heart of the Vineland Sagas, Columbus's jail-bird crew, the Puritan divines as outcasts seeking redemption in flight from an irredeemable world) to its current crusader/jihadic obsession, America defines itself through emphatic disambiguations of history, language, and geography. Ahab-like, it pursues formative parameters that de-define complexity through reductively pragmatic expediencies.  The archival focus of the seminar ranges from Columbus's obsessive, post-apocalyptic New World and New Earth and New England's foundational Zionism in a New Canaan to the perennial avatars of those elemental myths instituted as official government policy and imperial imaginary. At a time when those cultural imaginaries are more controlling than ever through the hegemony of evangelical and fundamentalist neo-conservatism in a New World Order, it is important to re-examine the archive and its formative ideologies.

We shall examine whether the perennial anxiety that accompanies imperial hegemony in the New World might be a compensatory gesture for the originary Ishmaelite fate of castoffs relentlessly clamoring for re-integration into the mainline genealogical history as the chosen people. In the insistent regularity with which those serviceable simplicities of self-identity reify, essentialize, and globalize cultural pluralities into manageable objects of expropriation, appropriation, capital, and hegemony, might there be some explanation for the current discursive/ideological New World Order as "One World," with a shrill univocity steeped in absolutism and terror? Could this be a historic correlative of America’s perennial monadic syndrome? Could the current terror-inflected summons that stridently disallows any critique, deflection, difference, deviation, or divergence from the manic chase of other, equally aberrant jihadic monisms represent yet another episode in the anxious history of predictably recurrent exceptional events? Having imploded into the mirror reflection of its pursued object, U. S. American subject agency now appears to be living, yet again, as collective cultural self-reduction. In doing so, might it be enacting, once more, its regular oscillation between the primal errand of its Ishmaelite self-ostracism from the (Old) World, on the one hand, and the Ahab-like obsession of a furious quest as a rage for empire and a one-world new order, on the other?

The readings and deliberations of this seminar deal with the textual genesis, cultural contradictions, and discursive morphology of America's anxious absolutism in literary, historiographic, and auto-ethnographic constructs as literature and as public discourse. Each session of the seminar examines the textual symptoms of what history demonstrates to be a natural vector from monomyth to monomania. The readings include formative exempla and discursive subterfuge of these formations, hence the opening session that features a cosmic celebrant of self and a most subtle ironist of self-interrogation, along with the primal American figure of self-contradiction.

• The “prooftexts”* assigned for the last part of the seminar dramatize the fundamental problems that obtain in the cultural imaginary of the monologic––religious allegory in Melville, social parody in Twain, scientific obsession in da Cunha, political apocalyptic in Vargas Llosa, and imperial hegemony in the recently released Fuentes, whose prophetic novel La silla del águila, written before 9.11.2001 and set in the year 2020 has already been overtaken by reality.

• Each member of the seminar shall select one of these “prooftexts”* as cultural specimen to be examined throughout the semester in the light of the assigned readings and as the central focus of his/her term project, due in the final session of the term.

• Readings will be made available through a master file for each seminarian to make his/her own copies and return master copy to file as expeditiously as possible so that others may make their own copies. Hogging master copy will result in dire and shocking consequences. All materials, including “prooftexts,” except for the Fuentes novel, are available in English translation, but students whose comparatist linguistic repertory includes the original language of materials should work with the originals.

•• All bureaucratic caveats, institutional admonitions, programmatic injunctions, departmental notices, and parental exhortations for course work at this university apply. Grading outcomes will be based on performance in weekly sessions and on the final term paper, which can be written in English, Spanish, Portuguese, or French, though, for pragmatic reasons, it would be advisable, for those aspiring to compete in the academic market in the USA to get as much practice writing in English as possible.  In deference to our post-Babelic condition (and current Babylon), the primary working language of the seminar sessions is English.

WEEK I: PROLEPSES/ANALEPSES: CONSTRUCTING THE AMERICAN SELF AND SELF-INVERSIONS 

Walt Whitman, Democratic Vistas (1871) and “Prayer of Columbus” (ca. 1870); Jorge Luis Borges, “The Nothingness of Personality” (1922), “A Note on Walt Whitman” (1947), “Camden, 1892” (1965); Christopher Columbus, “Información de los Privilegios y Mercedes” (ca.1501).

WEEK II: THEODICY’S TIDES AND TITHES  

Christopher Columbus, from El libro de las profecias (1501); “Memorial de agravios” (ca.1501); “Memorial del Almirante sobre agravios que recibió” (ca.1501); Samuel Sewall, from Phenomena quaedem Apocalyptica (1697).

WEEK III:  ISRAEL AT LARGE: JEWISH INDIANS AND NATIONAL CONVERSION 

Diego Durán, from Historia de las Indias de Nueva España y Islas de la Tierra Firme (1576–1581; The History of the Indies of New Spain); Juan de Torquemada, from Monarquía indiana (1615); Increase Mather, A Dissertation Concerning the Future Conversion of the Jewish Nation (1695); Antonio Vieira, Historia do futuro (1697).

WEEK IV: GOD-SENT  

Gerónimo de Mendieta, from Historia Ecclesiastica Indiana (1596/7–1604); John Winthrop, “General Considerations for the Plantation in New England,” (1629) and “Modell of Christian Charity” (1630); John Cotton, “God’s Promise to His Plantation” (1630); “A Petition of W[illiam]. C[astell]. Exhibited to the High Court of Parliament” (1641); Cotton Mather, “Hermes Christianus,” and  “Nehemias Americanus,” Magnalia Christi Americana (1702);

WEEK V: DIVINE DESTINIES: HISTORY AS THEODICY

 Bartolomé de las Casas, Historia de las Indias (ca.1527; 1875; History of the Indies) Bk. 1, Chaps. XXXVII and XL; Bernal Díaz del Castillo, Historia verdadera de la conquista de la Nueva España (1568; 1632 History of the Conquest of New Spain) Chaps. 93 & 95; Diego de Landa, Relación de las Cosas de Yucatán (ca. 1561; 1864; Account of Things in Yucatán) Chaps. XV, XLI, LII; Manuel da Nóbrega, Dialogo sobre a conversão do gentio (1556–1557); Dialogue for the Conversion of the Indians); Cotton Mather, “A General Introduction,” Magnalia Christi Americana (1702).

WEEK VI: WONDER-WORKING PROVIDENCE

 Anne Bradstreet, “A Dialogue Between Old England and New” (1630); Roger Williams, from A Key into the Language of America (1643) and Letter “To the Town of Providence” (1654-55); Edward Johnson, from Wonder-Working Providence of Sion’s Saviour (1654); Michael Wigglesworth, “God’s Controversy with New England,” (1662); Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, “Loa” for the autosacramental El Divino Narciso (1690); Chretian Le Clercq, from Nouvelle Relation de la Gaspésie (1691); Philip Freneau, James Madison, and Hugh Henry Breckenridge, Inc., “The Rising Glory of America” (1775). 

WEEK VII: DANCING, DISSIDENCE, AND DEMONOLOGY 

Juan Rodríguez Freile, “Las brujerías de Juana García,” capítulo ix de El Carnero (1636–1638); From John Winthrop’s Journal (1630–1649, excerpts); “The Trial of Bernardo de Mendizabal [excerpt],” Records of the Spanish Inquisition, New Mexico (1664); Cotton Mather, Wonders of the Invisible World:The Tryals of Several Witches Lately Executed in new England(1692) [q.v. “Cotton Mather’s Wonders of the Invisible World” in William Carlos Williams, In the American Grain (1925).

WEEK VIII: AVATARS OF WONDERS IN THE VISIBLE WORLD  

Arthur Miller, The Crucible (1953); Maryse Condé, Moi, Titubá, Sorciere…Noire de Salem (1986; 1994, I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem).

WEEK IX: THE COURSE OF REDEMPTION AND DISCOURSE OF RIGHTEOUSNESS 

Jonathan Edwards, “Sermon One,” “Sermon Three,” and “Sermon Twenty,” in The History of Redemption (1739); Jonathan Edwards, “Paradise in America”; George Bush, “Appendix” to his The Life of Mohammed: Founder of the Religion of Islam, and of the Empire of the Saracens (1830;1854), pp 181–209; George Bush, The Millennium of he Apocalypse (1842), pp. 148–206; John F. Wilson, “Typology in Protestantism and Puritanism and in the Redemption Discourse”; Ernest Lee Tuveson, “Apocalyptic and History”; The National Security Strategy of the United States of America, September 2002.

WEEK X: COMMON EXCEPTIONS

 Thomas Paine, “Thoughts on the Present State of American Affairs,” from Common Sense (1776); Thomas Jefferson, Draft and final version of the Declaration of Independence from Autobiography 1743–1790; Toussaint L’Ouverture, Proclamations & Letters (1793–1799); Simón Bolivar, “The Jamaica Letter: Response from a South American to a Gentleman from This Island” (2 September 1815), “Letter to Baptis Irvine, Agent of the United States of America to Venezuela: Debating Neutral Rights” (20 August 1818).

WEEK XI: PROOFTEXTS*

Herman Melville, Moby Dick (1851).

WEEK XII: PROOFTEXTS

Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889).

WEEK XIII: PROOFTEXTS

Euclides da Cunha, Os Sertões (1902) & Mario Vargas Llosa, La guerra del fin del mundo (1981).

WEEK XIV: PROOFTEXTS

Carlos Fuentes, La silla del águila (2002/-3).

WEEK XV: TERM-PAPER PRESENTATIONS

*Any members of the seminar whose programmatic focus is other than literature may substitute a cogent corpus of contemporary public/political discourse in lieu of these literary texts.

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Page last modified on November 05, 2003.