In this seminar we will be studying different approaches to imagining the cultures and literatures of the U.S. as part of a planetary sphere of interchange, discourse, and political relations. In part, we will be considering the rich theoretical discourse in contemporary American studies presently attending to different methods and models of conceiving U.S. literatures in global relation. At the same time, we will ground our theoretical inquiries in concrete consideration of several shorter literary texts: by authors—not all "American" in any immediately visible sense—including Joseph Conrad, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, Claude McKay, Zora Neale Hurston, William Faulkner, Gabriel García Márquez, Herman Melville, Frederick Douglass, Karen Yamashita, and Nahid Rachlin. The essence of this seminar is to combine broad consideration of contemporary globalist models for re-conceiving American literary studies with a suggestive range of primary textual instances: toward further research, curricular innovation, and our general discussion.

Though the comparative, transnational, and postnational models we draw on will be various, each week of the seminar is organized to emphasize a different spatial economy for re-mapping American literary studies: the first, transatlantic; the second, hemispheric; the third, multiply "Eastern" so as to encompass relations with both the Middle East and of the Pacific Rim. We are especially fortunate to have with us as guest seminar leaders during the second week two distinguished Americanist scholars: Robert S. Levine, Professor of English at the University of Maryland and the editor of the new Norton Anthology of American Literature, Volume B; and Caroline Levander, Director of the Humanities Research Center, founder of several digital Americas Archives, and Professor of English at Rice University. Each has written several books on U.S. literature, politics, and culture, and they have recently co-edited together Hemispheric American Studies (Rutgers UP 2007). Other prominent essayist we will consider include: Amy Kaplan, Wai Chee Dimock, Djelal Kadir, Donald Pease, John Carlos Rowe, José David Saldívar, Carolyn Porter, Martha Nussbaum, Arjun Appadurai, Mary Louise Pratt, Paul Gilroy, and Paul Giles.