This seminar will use the US
presidential election as a critical lens to think more fundamentally
about core myths of US culture—myths that are organized around
individualism, agency, choice, social mobility, race, class, gender,
etc. Put differently, we will use the seminar to practice a
particular methodological move: Rather than viewing elections as only
a recurring political event, we will read them as also constituting a
cultural ritual that serves to negotiate a broad range of social
meanings, questions, anxieties, and tensions, many of which are
grouped around a particular, dominant model of personhood. To trace
these meanings, we will read and analyze ‘election texts’ from a
broad variety of media. While some of the dynamics we are after will
be more easily spotted in fictional texts, we will also use
nonfiction material to explore how the underlying cultural issues
surface in the context of the ‘real’ quadrennial presidential
election.