This course investigates the figure of the unremarkable character in 20th and 21^st-century U.S. letters. In contrast to the American Dreamer or the self-made individual, we will consider instead those personages that neither strive for conventional greatness nor achieve it. They are obscure, rather than successful, or aspirational. While their personal narratives might resist the standard narrative of American exceptionalism—the desire for greatness as it is conventionally understood—this resistance fails to register as such. In other words, they do not present themselves as in any way exceptional and the novels, poems, plays, and essays that describe them respond in kind.

What are we to make of this apparent banality? Through the study of poetry, prose, plays, short stories, and graphic novels we will seek to contextualize the American nothing in the U.S. and to understand its significance to various national narratives.