God's Own Country Religion in American Culture and Literature

German students are often puzzled by the permeating religiosity in American society: the phrase -God Bless America” is omnipresent in political speeches, self-supporting churches are full every Sunday, and televangelists are revered like pop-stars. Cultural studies shows that biblical rhetoric colors the discourse of works ranging from the early Puritan journals to John Steinbeck’s novel The Grapes of Wrath or Martin Luther King’s – and Barack Obama’s – speeches. Furthermore, those same German students are irritated by the Americans’ sense of exceptionalism, the secularized belief that Americans are a -chosen people”; the Puritans’ New World -pact with God” which made them the creators of a model -city upon a hill” [that sounds like Siegen, but the Puritans’ metaphor arises from the biblical Jerusalem!] has developed into the Americans’ self-proclaimed role as the world leader of democracy. The same -pact with God” is the source of the legendary -American Dream,” a theme required for the -Zentralabitur” but which is seldom (at school) brought into close connection with religion. In fact, the very often critical literature reflecting the American Dream frequently presents it more as arising from a Faustian -pact with the devil” than from a contract with God! I am still planning the works to be read this semester, but we will deal with religion in socio-historical terms, as well as in censorious, approbatory, and even satirical fiction. The tensions between Protestantism and Catholicism, which are rooted in the various immigrant groups, have to a certain extent been displaced in the twenty-first century into the triangle of Christian / Jewish / Muslim as international developments resonate in America’s heartland. The seven parts of the seminar will be as follows: (1) the Puritan Covenant - but with whom? (2) rise of the self-made man and the American Dream - but what about the Others? (3) the American Dream fractures - can Modernism salvage it? (4) new realizations of religious archetypes - sympathetic protest? (5) Muslim/Buddhist/Hindu/Sikh - inclusion in the Covenant? (6) postmodernist film - cinematic resurrection of Christ figures (7) the Covenant reloaded - recent political speeches and the televangelists All of the reading material will be included in the semester reader. Since you will not know whether you are accepted for the seminar until the end of September, you do not need to read anything before the semester begins. But for your information, the works will include these, usually as digestible excerpts: I. Mayflower Compact and jeremiad texts; A Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson; poem by Anne Bradstreet; poem by Margaret Atwood, -Half-Hanged Mary-; Nathaniel Hawthorne, -Young Goodman Brown- (beginning); Arthur Miller, The Crucible (act I + film); Native oral texts II. Benjamin Franklin, Autobiography; Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin; appendix to Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass; Irish Catholic and Jewish immigrant short stories; 19th century implications of Hispanic legend of -La Llorona-; Ghost Dance songs/Chief Seattle's speech/Zikala-Sa, Impressions of an Indian Childhood III. T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land (part I); William Faulkner, introduction of -Hightower- in Light in August; Sinclair Lewis, Elmer Gantry; Langston Hughes, -Goodbye Christ- (poem); John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath; Nathanael West, Miss Lonelyhearts (we will read this striking novella in its entirety; but please do not attempt it without my -reader's guide-!); William Faulkner, Nobel Prize speech; T.S. Eliot, excerpt from Four Quartets IV. Tennessee Williams, Portrait of a Madonna (whole one-act play); Key Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest + film; the figure of Claude in the musical Hair; Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon + African archetypes from Julie Dash's film Daughters in the Dust V. selection of texts by contemporary Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu American authors; media coverage of the recent shooting in a Sikh temple in Wisconsin VI. clips from The Matrix, the Alien series, The Green Mile, etc. VI. speeches by Martin Luther King, Ronald Reagan, Barack Obama and clips from televangelist broadcasts Anglistik - Sprachpraxis Universität Siegen WiSe 2012/13 Ph.D. Waegner Cathy Ph.D