English Department
Doctoral Program in English and American Literary Studies
US-American Foundational Myths in/and
Popular Culture
Doctoral Workshop with Prof. Dr. Heike Paul
(Erlangen-Nürnberg)
University of Zurich, 18-19 April, 2013
This workshop will address the foundational mythology of the US as an imagined
community. We will briefly review the history of American studies as a discipline
and its peculiar investment in a particular set of ‘myths and symbols’ as defining
‘America’ and explaining (and legitimizing) ‘American exceptionalism’. These core
myths/symbols have been emplotted in narratives, visualized and memorialized in
iconic ways, and engrained in civil religious cultural practices and rituals. On the
basis of a discursive rather than normative definition of myth, we will explore the
relationship between myth, public memory, history, and ideology. The power of
myths derives from a seemingly paradoxical structure that involves both, longevity
and change, continuity and variation. Its tacit dimension is part of its power to
perform and to do its cultural work, so to speak. Whereas my talk on the previous
evening focuses on the founding fathers (and their recent comeback), the seminar
will be addressing another case study: the American West, the agrarian myth, and
the role of the frontier in a (trans)national imaginary by discussing a range of
materials ranging from Frederick Jackson Turner’s frontier-thesis to the recent TVseries Deadwood.
Thursday, 18 April (room PLH-102)
6.15 - 8 pm
Lecture: "Imagined Paternity: The Myth of the Founding Fathers
in American Culture, Past and Present"
Friday, 19 April (room PLH-102)
2 - 2.30 pm
2.30 - 3.30 pm
3.30 - 4.15 pm
4.30 - 5.15 pm
5.15 - 6 pm
Introduction: American Foundational Myths in/and Popular
Culture
American Studies & Myth Criticism: National, Subnational,
Transnational Perspectives
The American West as Foundational Myth: Agrarianism &
Expansionism (Turner, Nash Smith)
At the Frontier: Deadwood (Limerick, Kaplan)
Myth Criticism and American Exceptionalism reconsidered
(Pease)
Required Reading:
Turner, Frederick Jackson. “The Significance of the Frontier in American History.”
The Frontier in American History. New York: Henry Holt, 1921.
Limerick, Patricia Nelson. “The Adventures of the Frontier in the Twentieth
Century.” The Frontier in American Culture. Ed. James R. Grossman. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1994. 66-102.
Pease, Donald. “Introduction: The United States of Fantasy.” The New American
Exceptionalism. Minneapolis: U of Minneapolis P, 2009, 1-39, n215-22.
Additional Reading:
Smith, Henry Nash. “The Myth of the Garden and Turner’s Frontier Hypothesis.”
Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth. Cambridge: Harvard UP,
1950, 291-305.
Kaplan, Amy. “Manifest Domesticity.” The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S.
Culture. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2002, 23-50, n218-22.
All texts are available on OLAT (search for “Workshop Heike Paul”).