LIT-255 Reconstituting the Constitution
This course explores the “Constitutional Moment” as a broad sociocultural formation in the decades just before and after the turn of the nineteenth century, and as a recurring American phenomenon thereafter. We will begin by analyzing the founding documents as rhetorical performances, reading the aspirations and anxieties they express in relation to those legible in contemporaneous literary texts. Then we’ll turn to political, literary, and cinematic works across subsequent American generations that figuratively re-stage the founding moment even as they radically re-frame its stakes and stakeholders. Likely authors: A. Hamilton, T. Jefferson, W. Irving, H.D. Thoreau, F. Douglass, E.C. Stanton, W. Whitman, A. Lincoln, G. Stein, R. Ellison, G. Lucas, L.M. Miranda.
Other
Credits
1
Notes
(History)