The Sestercentennial Regards the Bicentennial
Agora Foundation Online Seminar Series -
The Sestercentennial Regards the Bicentennial
Sessions will be facilitated by Jordan Hoffman
Fifty years ago, to commemorate the American Bicentennial, some American novelists published works that consciously took stock of America 200 years after its founding. These works, from popular bestsellers to obscurer innovations, varied in length, tone and attitude. Now, during the American Sestercentennial, we revisit a few of these mid-1970s era works to ask questions about who we Americans were then, who we thought we were, and how we have changed since.
Over the Sestercentennial year we will read seven books in twelve intermittent seminars. (NB: An important work published in 1976, Alex Haley’s Roots, will not be included, despite its accolades. For some people, the discovery of Haley’s plagiarism — revealed only after the awarding of the Pulitzer Prize — presents an ethical problem. More practically, the text is too lengthy for the boundaries of this particular course.)
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Dates of Seminars and Novels To Read
All online sessions will take place primarily on Saturdays, 12:00-2:00PM Pacific Time
The series is open to all subscribers at no extra fee.
January 31 and February 21: The Bastard by John Jakes (1932-2023) — We begin with the first installment in historian-turned-fictionist John Jakes’s multi-novel family saga published in 1974 in anticipation of the American Bicentennial. The novel spawned a rollicking television series with an all-star cast including none-other than Tom Bosley of Happy Days fame as Benjamin Franklin and “starring Andrew Stevens as … THE BASTARD!”
March 21: Flight to Canada by Ishmael Reed (1938- )— Never afraid to grab an issue by the throat and shake it until all the literary hijinks fly out, Reed tackles American slavery in this witty, brazen send-up of the slave narrative.
April 25: 1876 by Gore Vidal (1925-2012) — A middle work from his multi-decade contemplation of the United States through a series of historical novels he dubbed his Narratives of Empire, Vidal chose to commemorate the Bicentennial with a look back to the fraught circumstances surrounding the presidential elections during our Centennial year.
May 23, May 31 (a Sunday), June 6 and June 13: The Public Burning by Robert Coover (1932-2024)— Coover’s complex yet comically acerbic account of the three days that culminated in the execution of the Rosenbergs for treason in 1953, The Public Burning was hailed by critics upon its release in 1977 as simultaneously “A major achievement of conscience and imagination” (The New Republic) and “Genuinely shocking” (Newsweek). The cast of characters include Betty Crocker, Richard Nixon and even Uncle Sam himself! (Due to both the length and complexity of this text we will cover it over four consecutive weekends, three Saturdays and one Sunday.)
August 22: The Franchiser by Stanley Elkin (1930-1995)— A laugh-out-loud, bittersweet exploration of American consumerism and lack of imagination, this novel was written by an author who remains one of our most accomplished yet under-appreciated novelists of the second half of the Twentieth Century.
September 19: Slapstick by Kurt Vonnegut (1922-2007)— His most autobiographical work, Vonnegut invokes the comic duo Oliver and Hardy in his depiction of an America mired in social isolation.
October 17 and November 14: October Light by John Gardner (1933-1982)— Our series culminates in this fascinating meditation on old-fashioned “Yankee” values and their place in contemporary (i.e, 1976, but arguably true today) multicultural America. This work by John Gardner (best known for Grendel) contains a novel-within-the-novel that serves as the object of Gardner’s disdain for the kind of fiction perpetrated by his contemporaries — like Coover and Vonnegut, for example — whom he believed cheapened the value of the novel and, thereby, humanity. October Light is a rewarding work by which to revisit the landscape of themes and tones of America the series will have sought to survey.