Origins The Course Leadership		The National Imagination course

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The National Imagination Initiative - The Course

The pilot course, “Studies in the National Imagination,” has now passed its first decade of successful operation. Offered each spring semester as a team-taught course, with a rotation of faculty from three different areas of the department, the course typically involves some 45 students in the comparative exploration of what we have called the process of imagining the construction of national culture. To date, the course has included studies of Spain, Argentina, France, Germany, Japan, Israel and Imperial Rome. The variable content of the course changes with the rotation of colleagues and the refinement of particular themes and emphases that result with each new formulation of the faculty team.

The spirit of the course is collaborative. This is not the usual team-teaching model. Participating faculty members read the assigned texts for each part of the course and participate as group leaders for discussions of all class materials. Each member helps engage students in inquiry about the specificity of particular national experiences and also guides students in the comparative analysis of experiences and themes common across national borders. Some of these themes have included:

• “Performing the Nation” through the analysis of public rituals and ceremonies (The Japanese tea ceremony; The Argentine tango).
• The concept of the ‘Warrior Nation’ as understood in the mythic figures such as the samurai and the gaucho.
• “Gendering” the nation through artistic emblems, for example, the images of Marianne in France and “Uncle Sam” in the U.S.
• Patriarchal cultural practices that assign social values to expressions of masculinity and femininity, terms such as “mother tongue” and “fatherland,” linguistic clichés that embody social myths.
• Spatialized visions of cultural identity built around versions of a “Homeland.” These may include “Fatherland,” “France Profonde,” “Heimat,” “Patrie,” “Patria chica,” etc.

On one level, this emphasis on the national imagination derives from our scholarly and research interests. Over time, however, it has served as an organizing principle to bring students to interrogate the concept of the national community as the framework within which their own studies of language and literature take place. While promoting the idea of the nation as a positive expression of community, we also want students to appreciate what Andrew Higson has called “the limiting imagination of the national.” The objective of the National Imagination initiative is thus to engage students in critical and creative readings about what makes a community and how language has been understood in various cultures at various historical moments as a delineator of that community.

It should be noted that, while the focus of the course is most often on the written word, the languages that help shape culture, we have been led to see more and more that the power of the word is historically joined by the impact of images and sounds. To date, through the use of the internet course-management system, Blackboard, we have been able to integrate an immense amount of visual artifacts—photography, art reproduction, stamps and coins, motion pictures—not only as depicting the imagery associated with the national, but also as a way of engaging students in their own visual-culture research projects. As well, we have been able to make accessible through Blackboard a series of “audio flows” that enable students to analyze public speeches, songs and musical compositions such as national anthems. More than background illustrations to course themes, these visual and auditory artifacts have become part of the subject-matter of our investigations.

Course Road Map on the Active Learning pages