This course explores a curious feature of post-World War II American literature: in a nation with a culturally powerful right wing, most of what counts as serious literature is written by authors who identify as liberal or left and is read by critics with similar political affiliations. As a result, the cultural and intellectual habits of many Americans are invisible in literary studies, and debates within the discipline devolve into factional disputes within a liberal-left consensus.

This course has two aims.  First, drawing on the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu and the work of sociologically minded critics like John Guillory, we will explore the institutional conditions that led to the literary field’s leftward turn in the 1960s.  We will discuss the “canon wars” that turn inspired in the 1980s and 1990s, as conservatives and liberals battled over the kinds of texts that should be taught to university students. As writers and critics in an English department, we will try to understand how our politics and attitudes are shaped by the institutions we inhabit. To what extent is literary leftism a manifestation of belonging to what Pierre Bourdieu calls “a dominated segment of a dominant class”?

Second, we will explore what happened to the conservative literary imagination after World War II.  We will read established writers like Saul Bellow who embraced (or were perceived to embrace) conservative political positions, as well as the work of popular writers like Ayn Rand who appeal to the American right. We will trace the contours of American conservative thought and culture, identify its internal contradictions, and explore its appeal.

Primary Texts:

Ayn Rand – Atlas Shrugged (excerpts)

Whittaker Chambers – Witness (excerpts)

Flannery O’Connor – A Good Man is Hard to Find

Robert Heinlein – Starship Troopers

Walker Percy – The Moviegoer

Saul Bellow – Mr. Sammler’s Planet

Tom Wolfe – Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers

Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins – Left Behind: A Novel of the Earth’s Last Days

Philip Roth – The Human Stain

Marilynne Robinson – Gilead