Course : American Legends

Myths, legends, and folktales seem never to go out of style, constantly making comebacks (and not only in popular culture). Why the appeal? Besides pleasantly satisfying escapist tendencies or our need for sensational answers to our existential questions, and exercising our imagination, myths and legends have survived as the synecdoche for, and condensation of, the defining character of a nation or a culture. This course, through its detailed examination of American-born legends and myths created and disseminated from the 15th to the early 19th century will attempt to elucidate the defining traits of the nascent culture of the United States. Such knowledge can then be used in consequent evaluations of the North American literature and cultural phenomena. Following the theoretical approach of American Cultural Studies critic Stephen Greenblatt, who sees culture and text as interacting through the manipulation of communicational “codes,” the myths and legends will be examined both as literary (or oratory) statements and as negotiators of cultural norms. At the same time, those legends also serve as charter agents of a more shadowy kind, equally trafficking problematic concepts and rules that culture would otherwise refuse to acknowledge openly. Students will therefore be called upon to evaluate and comment both on the overt and clandestine—to the point of becoming deconstructed—meanings of the stories of, among others, Paul Bunyan, Johnny Appleseed, Calamity Jane, Pecos Bill, John Henry, Ragged Dick, La Llorona, and a number of texts about the First Peoples that show the influences of their persecuted cultures on their supplanters.