Rationale American Dreams and Nightmares is a semester elective course for high school juniors and seniors.

It begins with a foundation in the language and methodology of the gothic. More than just a genre, the gothic is a literature of opposition. If the national story of the United States has been one of faith in progress and success and in opportunity for the individual, Gothic literature can tell the story of those who are rejected, oppressed, or who have failed (Crow 2). The bulk of the course consists of a series of paired texts meant to introduce students to important tensions, questions, and fears that faced America as an emerging nationand to help students see and analyze these issues in contemporary American culture. The pairings are meant to showcase American optimism, freedom, hope, and promise as well as American prejudice, exclusion, cruelty, and hypocrisy. Most units include one text from the first category (the dream) paired with a text that challenges or talks back to it (the nightmare). Additionally, each unit will include a selection of secondary resources (photos, film clips, legal documents, and critical essays) meant to provide historical context or contemporary parallels. American literature is often taught chronologically with the goal of exposing students to major movements: the Puritans, the Romantics, the Transcendentalists, the Realists, the Naturalists, the Modernists. While this approach is logical, it tends to obscure the urgency of conflict, debate, and dissent in American literature. Not only is this format unlikely to lead to real retention, it squanders an opportunity to engage students citizens of this nationin debates that are still happening today. Can America live up to the promise of its founding? How should we contain revolutionary ideas after revolutions end? To whom should liberty extend? What role will women, black people, and Indians play in the new nation? How can we control the wayward tendencies of man with a government that gives so much power to the individual? In her introduction to Revolution and the Word, Cathy Davidson writes: Nationalist history casts disagreement as anti-Americanas dissent from an assumed, if unarticulated, consensus rather than as an invaluable contribution to a process that is innately and definitionally democratic (18). Unpacking these ideas is a project well worth students time. What is this assumed consensus? What are the myths, stories, and ideals that drive our sense of what it means to be American? What challenges have been raised to the assumed consensus over the years, and where do we see these issues today? This is why I have chosen paired texts: to work conflict into the fundamental structure of the course. This structure serves dual and opposite functions. First, it simplifies: dream vs. nightmare, myth vs. reality, white vs. black, 19th century vs. 20th century, etc. The solidity and clarity of this framework help students new to the study of American literature grasp some of its intriguing oppositions. But the ultimate goal is to complicate categories, provoke curiosity about other texts and other tensions, and catapult students into further reading and exploration. Dividing

narratives into dream and nightmare is deliberately facetious, and an important part of our work in class will be to complicate a dichotomous view of the texts and their messages. I will work against a simplistic reading of the dream texts as wrong and the nightmare texts as right, or vice versa. These text pairings are meant to open up a view of American culture rather than narrow it, to inspire debate rather than shut it down. In other words, this course is American literature selected and compressed, ready to spring. I have had to restrain its potential energy in limiting the number of primary and secondary texts, in spite of the connections that proliferate in my brain (what about slave narratives? what about the mad housewife novels of the 70s? what about westerns?). This is not a survey course, nor is each unit meant to be an exhaustive examination of its central subject. My hope is that the text pairs will be interesting enough starting points that they will provoke a wide range of unplanned connections in class discussion, essays, and final projects. I have not been overly scrupulous about matching publication dates in my pairings, looking instead for texts that speak to each other on an important topicsometimes from the distance of a century, sometimes as contemporaries. We will certainly note and analyze the effect of different historical moments, but our main focus will be on the persistence of the tensions expressed by each pairing. Persistence, after all, is a primary feature of the gothic: the gothic tendency in American culture is organized around the imperative to repetition, the return of what is unsuccessfully repressed (Savoy 4). I have, however, made a point of including a number of texts written close to 1776 texts that take us back to the turbulent period before and after our Declaration of Independence. In doing so, I hope to get at the roots of many of our national myths. This period is often invoked with nostalgiait was, we insist, a more unified, idealistic, and virtuous time. But, as Davidson writes: Postrevolutionary America was not the tidy or unified world conjured up at historical theme parks, Fourth of July parades, or presidential inaugurations. Nor was it the egalitarian utopia sometimes attributed to our origins, especially by Constitutional fundamentalists attributing omniscience retrospectively to the Founding Fathers. On the contrary, postrevolutionary America exhibited divisiveness, counterrevolutionary military and mob actions, and disappointed expectationsas well as the strong communal desire for order, an end of violence, widespread prosperity, and the creation of a truly representative democracy. (12) The dream of the egalitarian utopia is important. We need uplifting and coherent national narratives to give shape to our individual and collective existence. But we should not blindly accept the stories and ideals that have risen to the cultural surface. I would like my students to ask two questions of the world around them (not just American literature, but college websites, makeup ads, presidential candidates, ballot measures, and everything else): Whats the official narrativewhat am I being explicitly led to think? and What or who has been repressed, glossed over, or left out?

Works Cited Crow, Charles. Introduction. American Gothic: An Anthology 1787-1916. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1999. 1-2. Davidson, Cathy. Introduction to the Expanded Edition. Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America. Expanded Edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. 3-56. Savoy, Eric. The Face of the Tenant: A Theory of American Gothic. American Gothic: New Interventions in a National Narrative. Ed. Robert Martin and Eric Savoy. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1998. 3-19.