National Strangeness

& American Anger

a special lecture by 

J. Gerald Kennedy

 Apr. 19, 12:00pm, North Hall & Library (NL-117)

Author of Strange Nation: Literary Nationalism and Cultural Conflict in the Age of Poe, just released from Oxford University Press, Kennedy will discuss the invention of America as a national idea, from 1820-1850, as a way of understanding the culture of anger we presently inhabit. Looking at the clashes of antebellum culture--wrenching conflicts over slavery, Indian removal, and the limits of federal authority--Kennedy discusses an era when nearly all American authors felt coerced to produce “national” narratives and he looks at the way Poe vehemently opposed literary nationalism and the expansionist jingoism it generated. Differentiating nationalism from patriotism, Kennedy observes a weird gap between nationalist illusions and social realities, a set of unresolved problems that still torment the US political unconscious and continue to produce bizarre eruptions of American outrage.

J. Gerald Kennedy is Boyd Professor of English at Louisiana State University. He is the author of Poe, Death, and the Life of Writing (Yale, 1987) and Imagining Paris: Exile, Writing, and American Identity (Yale, 1994). The writing of Strange Nation was supported by fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities.