Dr. Joseph Murphy Spring 2009 Elective
Main Street in American Fiction and Film
In the US, the words “Main Street” conjure an image of the idealized small town: the grocer’s, the soda fountain, the doctor’s office, the bank, the insurance agency, the public park, and a choice of churches, flanked by blocks of clapboard or brick homes with tidy front lawns. This image is far from the reality of most Americans, who live in cities or suburbs, but Main Street retains its imaginative hold nationally and internationally as a symbol of the American dream.
Main Street emerged as a subject in American literature and (later) film during the late- nineteenth and twentieth centuries when small-town life was giving way to the expansion of cities, suburbs, and consumer culture. Writers and filmmakers who put Main Street on the cultural map were themselves often exiles from small towns, working in cities. For them, Main Street became an object of both rebellion and nostalgia—a place to escape from, a place to get back to. Their works represent a variety of Main Streets laid across the American continent, each an imperfect experiment in ideals. Their characters are idiosyncratic yet typical of the historical pressures (political, economic, racial) and ultimate questions (of identity, death, belief) that stir the apparent serenity of the
American small town. Moreover, the formal challenge of telling Main Street’s stories has sparked innovation in fiction and film during the modern and postmodern periods. To tour these imagined Main Streets is to enter a region that is familiar in its outlines but unsettling in its details.
Required readings: Sarah Orne Jewett, The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896); Mark Twain, “The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg” (1899); Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio (1919); John Steinbeck, Cannery Row (1945); John Updike, Olinger Stories (1964);
and Toni Morrison, Sula (1973). Likely films: It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), High Noon (1952), To Kill a Mockingbird (1962), American Graffiti (1973), Blue Velvet (1986), and Pleasantville (1998). Requirements will include midterm and final exams, a group presentation, and journals.
