How does religion inform the American novel? How were religious beliefs incorporated in American novels in different periods? In what ways do our novels explore or critique the cultural work of religion in America?
How does the history of a country play a role in the development of the novel as literary form? To what extent have specific historical events or circumstances informed the American novel? Do different novels challenge prevailing views of history or create new historical narratives?
- To what extent does the United States’ history of slavery impact these novels? Does slavery haunt the American novel in particular ways?
- Can literature be used as a way to record American history “objectively”?
What goes into creating or depicting an identity or nationality in the form of the novel? Is nationality a stable category in American novels? Does a literature based on nationality make sense? How could we plot the “American” novel on different axes?
How do American places, spaces, and landscapes affect the novel? To what extent does place inform and shape different novels?
How do writing styles and genres impact the form and structure of the novel? What different experiments and innovations do Gothic, realist, and speculative novels take with the form of the novel?
- What makes a work of literature Gothic? How do the imagination and the supernatural function in Gothic novels?
How do we define a fake or a fraud in literature? In terms of narration, does the sincerity of a first-person narrator exempt them from being a fraud? Is fiction a form of fraud?
- What do stories of fraudulent identities tell us about American culture and its values and anxieties? About the concept of “identity”?
- How do fake and fraudulent characters operate in the different novels? What are their different roles and how are we as readers intended to view them?
Keep adding additional questions in the comments! These questions (or variations on them) will help inform our final project in the course.
