Discrepant Awareness Alex Fleck

Lately I’ve been obsessing over the idea of teaching a course, a really specific one with very little practical application. That goes without saying.
It’s the kind of course that you only get to teach once you’re embedded in a faculty long enough to make ridiculous demands of your program.

I want to call it “Mythic America: North American Self-Consciousness in Literature and Popular Media”

It would treat those texts that personify American ideals in all of their cosmic significance. The syllabus includes the following lectures…
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: The Great Mississippi
Moby Dick: American Mockery, Epic, Tragedy
“The Age of Anxiety”: It’s in the Title
On the Road: The Epic Journey Reimagined
The Catcher in the Rye: Being Young and Upset
Patton: War and Justice in the American Psyche I
Apocalypse Now: War and Justice in the American Psyche II
The Outlaw Josey Wales: The Wound of the War in the Western
Blood Meridian: (De)Mythologizing the West
Away We Go: The Young, Hip Fertility Goddess
The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet: The Hopeful Millennial Ellipse
There are still a lot of blanks to fill in, but that’s a nice start…

All of this came out of my recent reading list. For some reason, I’ve just been looking at a lot of work that pertains to ideas of America.
What fascinates me most about these works is that unlike most national mythologies—developed out of naturalistic religions or precivilizational folk belief—these American myths evolved while the young country and its culture was anything but primitive. America started with baggage.
They also developed in tandem with the modern political and social mindset, and came to fruition amid a crowd of antagonistic idealisms, promulgated from the start by relatively advanced forms of media. That’s unprecedented in any other nation’s conception of itself, and it’s probably the reason why even the purest personifications of dearly held American ideals are either soaked in irony or not worth observing.
That’s kind of a paradox in itself. And that’s what makes it so interesting.