Suspicious Minds: American Literature and the Paranoid Imagination

Catalog description

Why is so much of the American canon founded on suspicion? This course investigates a tradition of American cultural production that finds in paranoia novel ways of imagining history as well as life today. Texts encompass a broad range of genres from the nineteenth century to the present moment, including gothic fiction, satire, speculative fiction, political thrillers, and science fiction. Authors and filmmakers include Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Henry James, Alfred Hitchcock, Philip K. Dick, Thomas Pynchon, Hannah Arendt, Ishmael Reed, Joan Didion, Colson Whitehead, Paul Thomas Anderson, Jordan Peele, Kathleen Belew, and Boots Riley, among others. We will use these thinkers to investigate the forms of solidarity conspiracy offers, the enduring problem of skepticism in American thought, the narrativization of history, the importance of secrecy in the construction of identity, and our fear of and desire for plots.