The American Novel On the Road

3 units

This course studies representations of mobility, travel, and transportation in the American novel over the course of the 20th century and into the 21st. Our readings may include such texts as As I Lay Dying (1930) by William Faulkner, On the Road (1957) by Jack Kerouac, Play It as It Lays (1970) by Joan Didion, Parable of the Sower (1993) by Octavia Butler, Tropic of Orange (1997) by Karen Tei Yamashita, The Road (2006) by Cormac McCarthy, Nevada (2013) by Imogen Binnie, The Underground Railroad (2016) by Colson Whitehead, Sing, Unburied, Sing (2017) by Jesmyn Ward, and Lost Children Archive (2019) by Valeria Luiselli. We will explore how realist, modernist, and postmodernist novels depict the changing shape of the American landscape and its culture through representations of transportation. Our analysis of novels will be supplemented with the study of historical documents, such as selections from Green Books (1936-1956; guidebooks for African-American travelers), as well as other historical and cultural events, from the Federal Highway Act of 1956 to the concept of the family vacation and road trip to early imaginings of the World Wide Web as an information superhighway. We will study how novels depict characters who are mobile as well as those who lack mobility -- who are stranded or fixed in one place or time -- and the way the texts reflect on the government's intervention in developing and maintaining infrastructures like the interstate system, within the context of conflicts such as the World Wars, the Cold War, and globalization. Through discussions, close readings, work with primary source documents, and attention to American culture's shifting aesthetic sensibilities, this course provides students with an understanding of how the American novel evolved over the 20th century in response to an ever-increasing reliance upon roadways. This course fulfills the Writing Intensive requirement for both the Master of Liberal Arts and the Master of Arts in American Culture Studies programs.