What exactly do we mean when we say that something or someone is so Midwestern? Is that an insult, or a compliment, or something else? Is it a meaningful, helpful designation, or does it fall apart under close scrutiny?

In this upper-level literature seminar, we’ll read a number of texts (mostly novels and collections of poetry) written by Midwestern writers who in one way or another have a strong association with the region or some aspect of it. Over the course of the term, we’ll see what these texts have to teach us about Midwesternness while we study them the way you should study any good literature, with an eye for close-reading (the exact meaning of which we’ll work hard to understand as a group) and with the overarching goal of making ourselves stronger, more powerful, more incisive readers. My aim is to choose authors that represent a cross-section of Midwestern identity, in terms of both historical period (with an emphasis on twentieth-century works) and geography (from Michigan’s Upper Peninsula to the city of Chicago and the plains of Nebraska).

Ultimately, the class is based on one assumption and is built in pursuit of several questions, which we’ll cycle through again and again over our fifteen weeks together. The assumption: There’s value in studying a collection of texts that are associated (because of their content, because of their authors, or both) with one particular region. The questions: Is the Midwest real? (An admittedly odd and maybe deceptive question.) How and when is it helpful to think in terms of regionality and to assert that something or some attitude is Midwestern? And what is Midwesternness, anyway? Is it definable or discernable beyond the common cliché of Midwesternness that we see so often? (Though clichés can be meaningful subjects of study, too.) Can we identify common themes, literary techniques or cultural practices present across the spectrum of Midwestern texts we read, even when those texts seem otherwise disparate or unrelated? And to ask that question in a slightly different way: What might make the literature of the Midwest special, notable, complicated, meaningful, distinctive or peculiar? What about the Midwestern rural versus the Midwestern urban: Does look at and thinking about these sub-regions illuminate or obscure our understanding of the Midwest? And in what ways can a developing understanding of a place help us to develop our understanding of the literature of that place, or is it more than our study of the literature helps us to better understand the place?

Our class meetings will be largely based on the discussion, sharing, and in-class writing; come with an eagerness to make thoughts, to exchange them with others, to complicate and refine them, and, with the academic community that we’ll build together in class, to practice the work of intellectual exploration that can lead to deep reading and sophisticated critical writing. Attendance in these class meetings is not mandatory, though: Students will be able to choose a completely independent track, reading and writing largely on their own with no weekly participation in class; a track that involves attending our regular class meetings; or they may alternate learning modes as we move through the semester. Expect regular, weekly, credit/no-credit writing exercises as well as one long analytical essay to make up the bulk of your academic work over the course of the term.

One last thought: In a 1997 interview in The Atlantic, the great writer of the Midwest Charles Baxter described the Midwest as “all loveable and mysterious.” When pressed to explain more of what he meant by the mystery of the Midwest, Baxter went on: “Mystery can be found anywhere, but there is a quality in the Midwest having to do both with the blandness of the landscape and the ways in which people here don't always talk about what's on their minds. The combination of those two things creates an interesting field of vision for writers. It's simply not an area that gives up its secrets easily.” In our class, you’ll examine theories like these and develop others of your own, all of which we’ll explore and test together with the literature we read.

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