Semester:
Offered:
David F. Holland (Harvard Divinity School)
First-Year Seminar 60H 4 credits (spring term)
This seminar uses key literary works to explore some of the most difficult and demanding questions in the religious history of the United States: Does God have a special relationship with the United States? Is sin an individual responsibility or a social flaw? Why has American religion been so frequently concerned with sexuality? How has religion shaped racial identities and tensions? How does it inform domestic relationships? How do non-Christian immigrants find a place and a voice in a nation with deeply entrenched Christian traditions? To explore these and other areas of concern, we bore into the faith-inflected cultures of American history through the imagined narratives of some of its most celebrated writers, including the likes of Catharine Sedgwick, Harriet Wilson, Flannery O’Connor, James Baldwin, Rudolfo Anaya, Pearl Abraham, Ayad Akhtar, and Marilynne Robinson. I will offer mini-lectures to contextualize these works in their historical moment. We will read some scholarly work to sharpen our tools of analysis, but mostly we will read and talk about the novels themselves. The seminar aims to be both analytically rigorous and aesthetically rewarding.