“Readings for Now” Seminar #3: Regarding the Difficult if Not Impossible Task of Talking about America Now

Texts for discussion (click to view):

Childish Gambino, This Is America. Released May 5, 2018

Abena Koomson performs "Let America Be America Again," by Langston Hughes. Poets in unexpected places. Published December 4, 2014

Emma Lazarus, “The New Colossus.” Written 1883

Richard Wright, Chapter V, Black Boy, 107-126. Originally published 1945

Alexis de Tocqueville, Selections from Democracy in America, trans. Henry Reeve:  Chapter II:  “Origin of the Anglo-Americas,” Pt. II, 53-64; Chapter III: “Social Condition of the Anglo-Americas,” 64-72; Chapter IV:  “The Principle of the Sovereignty of the People in America,” 73-75; 90-101; Chapter V:  “Necessity of Examining the Condition of the States Before that of the Union at Large,” Pt. II, 101-16; Chapter VI: “Judicial Power in the United States,” 116-24; Chapter VII:  “Political Jurisdiction in the United States,” 124-129. First published in English 1838

G.K. Chesterton, Selections from What I Saw in America:  “Some American Cities,” 63-79. First published 1922

Jean Baudrillard, “Utopia Achieved,” America, 75-105. First published 1989  

Hannah Arendt, “On Humanity in Dark Times: Thoughts about Lessing,” Men in Dark Times, 3-31. Originally published 1968

Hannah Arendt, Selection from “The Revolutionary Tradition and Its Lost Treasure,” On Revolution, 217-251. Originally published 1963

Hannah Arendt, “Truth and Politics,” Between Past and Future, 227-264. Originally published 1961

Hannah Arendt, “The Alliance between Mob and Capital,” The Origins of Totalitarianism, 147-157. Originally published 1951

Susan Sontag, “What’s Happening in America?” Partisan Review, Winter 1967

Theodor Adorno, Selections from Minima Moralia: Reflections on Damaged Life:  “Paysage,” 48; “Dwarf fruit,” 49-50; “The Health unto Death,” 58-60; “Diagnosis,” 123-124; “All the world’s not a stage,” 143-145; “Don’t exaggerate,” 233-235. First published in English 1951

Peter Sloterdijk, “The Exception: Anatomy of a Temptation, Americanology 2,” In the World Interior of Capital, 233-248. First published in English 2013

Giorgio Agamben, “A Brief History of the State of Exception,” State of Exception, 11-22. Originally published in English 2005

Jacques Derrida on American Attitude, e-flux conversations. Published 2016

Joyce Carol Oates, “‘Good News!’” It Occurs to Me That I Am America: New Stories and Art, ed., Jonathan Santlofer, 247-262. Published 2018

Marion Mainwaring, John Quincy Adams and Russia: A Sketch of Early Russian-American Relations as Recorded in the Paper of the Adams Family and Some of Their Contemporaries.  Published 1965