In this course, we will use Sophocles’ Oedipus the King and  Freud’s Totem and Taboo as keys to understanding specific aspects of certain American novels. Using these texts as paradigms, we'll investigate  the unconscious roots of the conspiratorial imagination. In conjunction with this social and psychological argument, we’ll also develop a more Sophoclean vision of a conspiracies emerging in the very structure of causality and circumstance against the happiness of given individuals.

 We shall begin our investigation of the American novel with a reading Typee as a mediation, by Melville, upon the taboo as a social dynamic encountered during his stay in the Marquesas.  We'll look to Melville, Freud, Sophocles and others and examine the nature of taboos and the roles that they play in structuring societal consciousness and mores. What, for instance, is behind the impetus to gang up on members of a community who deviate from a community's codes--or to withdraw from those who are morally or socially unclean? How might we apply such analyses of "primitive" societies back onto the supposedly modern perspective of Melville's narrator? We shall further pursue such questions in our reading of The Scarlet Letter by considering Hester Prynne's ostracism as an adulteress in terms of a politics of persecution, revulsion and repression that is directed, finally, against the unacceptable desires of the community itself.

 What is the relation of the taboo structure of societal consciousness to an out and out conspiracy? How do communities spontaneously organize and come together, often viciously, against offenders of community morals if not merely against the weak, the marginal and the different? To what extent do such social dynamics at work in the mob scenes of Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn actually condone transgressions of the community's moral standards as the possibility of diversion or entertainment? Beyond the limits of its own laws, is Mark Twain's society a conspiracy waiting to happen? We will take up these questions in more deadly earnest when we consider Ellison's treatment, in The Invisible Man, of similar dynamics at work within the administrative structures of institutions. We will look at both novels' treatments of race relations in these terms.
 

 How exactly does a novel's presentation of such social dynamics become tragic? Taking our cue from Aristotle's definition of tragedy in his Poetics (which, itself, is a reflection of Oedipus the King), we shall consider the tragic structures of circumstance in Wharton's Ethan Frome.  Is it intrinsic to such tragic visions that the characters of those who suffer become standards by which we measure plain bad luck? In such a case, the social circumstances that lead to the undoing of Ethan Frome may be subordinate to the fact of his brief hopes and long suffering. Here we shall look at the Sophoclean nature of Wharton's plot and consider the extent to which the texts of both Sophocles and Wharton structure the circumstances of their narratives in ways that resist the more Freudian examination of social dynamics detailed above. From here we shall move on to Oedipa Maas of Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49. Here we shall investigate how Pynchon twists the plot structure of Sophocles' Oedipus story ironically to the extent that it becomes parody of paranoia.

 Can we survive despite the recalcitrance and reaction of social forces?  People's positions as members of a society or culture may still allow them to create a life despite the fact that the circumstances stacked against them are social in nature. Here we will look to Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, and Hong-Kingston's Tripmaster Monkey and consider the manner in which members of a community can work within the culture and experience of their community, and appeal to the moral and aesthetic values and possibilities of their community to generate the possibilities of self-expression mutual fulfillment.  We shall also consider the ways that the community can be diminished by the claims of the individual.

Melville: Typee; Hawthorne: The Scarlet Letter; Mark Twain: Huckleberry Finn; Wharton: Ethan Frome; Steinbeck: The Grapes of Wrath; Hurston: Their Eyes Were Watching God; Ellison: The Invisible Man; Pynchon: The Crying of Lot 49; Hong Kingston: Tripmaster Monkey
 

 Sophocles: Oedipus the King; Aristotle: Poetics; Freud: Totem and Taboo