Called an “inalienable right” in the Declaration of Independence, “the pursuit of happiness” has long been a defining feature of what it means to be American. But what exactly that happiness is, how to successfully pursue it, and whether it can really form the basis for an emancipatory politics were questions for future generations to answer.

This course unearths how American authors of roughly the first century and a half of its existence grappled with those questions, even as students formulate answers of their own. Each text we read will wrestle in its own way with the variously cruel and transcendent pursuit of happiness, from utopian social experiments and demands for freedom to the pursuit of love, wealth, and fame. Major authors are likely to include the first Native American poet, Jane Johnston Schoolcraft, and widely-read authors like Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, Harriet Jacobs, Frederick Douglass, Pauline Hopkins, Edith Wharton, and Eugene O’Neill. Along the way we will consult recent theoretical meditations on the good life, optimism, and happiness by Judith Butler, Lauren Berlant, Saidiya Hartman, and Sarah Ahmed, and put those theories in conversation with texts from the course. Meanwhile, students will articulate and then revise their own conclusions on happiness and its discontents. They will ultimately gain a strong foundation in major American texts and authors of the long nineteenth century, and a rich theoretical vocabulary with which to analyze one of America’s defining principles. 

Major Requirement: Pre-1900, American Literature