Map, Jasper Johns (1961) https://www.moma.org/collection/works/79372

The American “I am” is, and has always been, a complex and contingent statement. Working across genres to consider multiple moments and occasions for the construction and publication of American life stories, we will first engage with specific writers, texts, places, and historical contexts. By closely examining how these writers formulate their definition of and claim to (or refusal of) American identity through the telling of a life story, we will develop practices of attention, analysis, and argumentation. We will seek to contextualize these narratives historically, to consider multiple disciplinary approaches to the life story as a form, and to pose critical questions: how do we define “American” literature, and why/in what contexts would these definitions matter? What are the recurring narrative tropes of American life stories? How do writers adapt and critique these tropes? In what ways do race, gender, and other social categories inflect these adaptations and critiques?

O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath—
America will be!

Langston Hughes, “Let America Be America Again” (1935)